Benevolent Advertising (7 Dec 2010)

Ezra Klein posted recently about the advertising industry that struck me as wrong in several ways. First, Klein cites an anecdote from Ken Auletta's Googled to make the point that advertising is sort of a scam:

Auletta talks with Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. Karmazin is aghast at Google's campaign to measure the effectiveness of advertising by tallying clicks...: "You don't want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you're selling mystique." It's more evidence that the greatest advertising campaign of all time was for...advertising.

Klein assumes that if something can't be measured, it can't possibly exist -- an empiricist fallacy that sees only scams in every invocation of the ineffable. I'm prone to that fallacy too, since so often the pseudo-ineffable is invoked to discourage investigation into class privilege. It's used by conservatives as a smoke screen to protect the inequities of the status quo. Nevertheless it is arrogantly short-sighted of us, not to mention a sad comment on the hegemony of capitalist modes of instrumental reason, to assume that we have figured out how to measure everything that should count as real. What Karamazin is saying, whether he knows it or not, is that measurement can be a way of reducing the real to what it can capture. It commoditizes "what works," since what is real is only that which is mechanically repeatable through proven procedures rather than the messy complexity, the irresolvable causality, of actual social and human experience. Not all of the effects of advertising can be quantified, not all of them are direct, not all of them are intentional, not all of them desired by the marketers or the businesses whose products are being touted. Advertising establishes a cultural discourse, and promulgates an entire value system, not about specific products alone, but about how value is conferred in consumer society, legitimizing certain forms of recognition and notoriety and delegitimizing others -- it helps convey the idea that identity coheres at the level of goods, and that things that aren't for sale aren't "real," for instance. In other words it promotes the empiricist fallacy, not its own mystique, as Klein argues. It helps to suppress the sort of analysis on the level of signs that must work by intuition, inference, and induction -- the analysis that could constitute the basis of resistance to consumerism.

After dismissing advertising as a giant con, he wants to congratulate the ad industry for supporting the dissemination of information.

The advertising industry was benevolently inefficient. It enabled pretty much every mass information medium we've ever had. Newspapers and radio and television and the Internet (Google, Facebook, etc.) are all brought to you by the advertising industry. There's perhaps no single sector that has done as much to advance human knowledge as the people who sell you soap and cars and soda.

Obviously, what this misses is that ads support only certain kinds of media that correspond with the receptive consumer mind-set they are intended to instill. Not all commercial media is entirely tainted by the patrons paying the bills, but certainly plenty of information has been suppressed because it hasn't suited advertisers, couldn't bring eyeballs to ads, and plenty more information has been distorted to suit advertisers, to attract them. Many a magazine story, for instance, is consciously intended to be ad bait, and on television I imagine that mode of thinking is even more prevalent. So advancing human knowledge? I guess I'll take the education "sector" over marketers.

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.

The meaning of human capital and the future of the humanities (28 March 2010)

Is college just for the credential, or do people actually learn anything? What improves the college graduates "human capital": what they learned in class or the mere fact of the diploma? Considering the policy of lax grading, just getting in to the "elite" schools seems to function as proof that a student deserve a permanent competitive advantage in the labor market. But that would seem to make the entire edifice of secondary education a big charade, and the professors who are involved with it clearly aren't that cynical or in such colossal bad faith. And motivated students seem to appreciate learning for its own sake, whether or not that helps them gain an economic footing in society. But if we learn for the sake of fulfilling our human potential, but the economy denies us a way of making that fulfillment socially meaningful, we become drop-outs of a different sort, free-loading off society pursuing our own esoterica while contributing nothing. Or the alternative is that we are being trained into a condition of inevitable frustration, "overqualified" for whatever socially necessary but soul-crushingly dull tasks fall our way.

So what is the deal with higher education under capitalism? Is it a consumer good (entertainment for students) or a raw material of production (inchoate knowledge transmitted and transformed into human capital to be applied practically in the economy at large)? Is it a mandatory furlough period to ease job market pressures? A way to stock individuals with useful modes of information processing and a diverse base of more or less random learning that may or may not yield surprising ideas for innovation? A period during which the critical networking skills for the "social factory" are honed? Is it a way of sorting workers into their various destinies based on their ability to figure out the game of capitalism (how to acquire status that can masquerade as hard capital) and master its strategy (figure out who is worth knowing and how to manipulate them into helping you)?

Mark Thoma linked to this post by Frances Woolley, which questions whether human capital is a myth, and highlights what is at stake.

For example, if what is taught at universities actually makes people more productive, then simply taking university courses should be enough increase earnings. In fact, to get much of a payoff from university education, you have to finish your degree (the “sheepskin effect” ). One reason education pays is that completing a degree “signals” your ability, determination, competence and general stick-with-it-ness.
Perhaps we should think of human capital as a fairy tale, a reassuring bedside story. But the power of fairy tales is that they reflect certain elemental truths about the human condition. People who teach economics may find it deeply comforting to think that their pay is justified by their high levels of human capital.
But human capital is more than a comforting story – it is a myth that shapes our understanding of the world and thus public policy. Ontario’s government is urging universities to increase retention rates, so everyone who starts university completes a degree. If the human capital theory is true, then this is sound policy: more students completing university means more human capital means a more productive economy. If, however, the value of university education is as a signal of ability, then one of the most important things that universities do is fail students. Unless some students fail, the ability to complete a university degree confers no special distinction on the graduate.
Whether or not human capital theory is true determines the best response to the demographic challenges ... If education makes people more productive, then more education can increase the productivity of our economy – possibly enough so that fewer workers are able to support the large number of pensioners. If, however, education is basically about sorting workers – if people are getting more and more degrees in hope of eventually capturing that one elusive stable professional job with benefits – then the best way of responding to the demographic crisis is to scale back post-secondary education. Doing so would effectively increase the size of the working age population substantially, easing demographic problems.

Scaling back education is hard to accept from that utopian point of view that it enriches human potential independent of its social benefits -- it helps people live richer lives. Thoma's autobiographical anecdote in his response to Woolley is a pretty good example of that. He defends education for its own sake rather than for productivity, and concludes: "I believe education is the key to a better future and I will not give up trying to increase access to as many people as possible. I don't care at all if it dilutes the signal to employers, they'll just have to figure out some other way to cull the herd."

That echoes a point Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization:

Productivity ... expresses perhaps more than any other idea the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus denigrates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals -- in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need -- the more productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.

But, he argues, historical conditions are so improved by productivity that individuals can begin to see the way back to their own needs, afforded enough leisure to conceive strategies for ending "the subjugation of man to his labor." Education begins to push in two contradictory directions, honing productivity while teaching people not to waste that productivity on meaningless work and channel it instead into their own potential.

At its heart, Eros and Civilization celebrates education for its own sake and not as preparation to reproduce the existing social order. When you strip away the Freudian claptrap, Marcuse's argument is basically that we misapprehend the needs of the system for our own wants and needs. In other words, we become convinced that we need to go to college to get a job rather than to learn, that the job market will reveal to us what we should do with our lives and our time. This he calls "surplus repression," as it directs us toward alienated labor (working for somebody else and not on something that we are personally invested in) that is not really necessary any longer for survival (at least in developed nations -- whether we are obligated to perpetuate capitalism in the West so its benefits can trickle down and liberate the poorer countries is a different question). Marcuse: "The elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate not labor but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." That is basically what's at stake in defining the purpose of higher education: either it is worker training and sorting, supported by capital and carried out for its benefit, or it is a refuge from that organizing logic, a place where one learns what it can mean to be a human. (Hence, the humanities.)

Teaching the textbook controversy (13 March 2010)

Steve Benen links to a NYT article about curriculum changes at Texas high school social studies classes. Here's the lede:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

I am somewhat apathetic. It's not as though the curriculum anywhere is objective and unbiased; the more neutral it claims to be, the more perniciously hidden the ideology is in practice. So with the situation in Texas, the bias (admittedly ridiculous) has been made more overt and easier to teach against if you a subversive teacher and are so inclined. This would have the laudable effect of illustrating for students how the can't automatically trust official-looking books and must learn to read everything critically. And in those districts where the books are taught straight, well, what were those students going to learn in institutions anyway? High school is not about disseminating truth; it's about indoctrination in the abiding mores of a community, as well as training people to be meek workers in the hierarchical systems they will encounter throughout life.

You can't blame the Christians for wanting to Christianize the school systems they control. Once you accept that school are for ideological indoctrination, then it becomes a matter of who has the power to use the institutions to suit their aims. "Truth" is simply a tactical ruse to gain power for your ideology. The Texas Christians are right in thinking that a counter-ideology has been taught in schools, and are simply implementing the logic of power by wanting to substitute theirs for it. (It's like what Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit and um, um...) But they are merely relativizing what they probably hold as absolutely true by introducing it into the welter of democratic politics. One lesson people can take away from the school-board conflict is that Christian ideology is open to a vote, and that Christianity must build consensus in the same Machiavellian ways as politicians.

These efforts to control textbooks as though that will ensure control over the kids who pretend to read them and teachers who pretend to teach them seem sort of desperate, as though the books were to blame for the waning popularity and unreality of some of their views. To paraphrase Thomas Merton (and also a rebel princess from some movie), the more they tighten their ideological grip, the more students will slip through their fingers. I mean, they are dealing with people who say things like this:

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Yes. And historians -- man, they have historical explanations for everything. And mathematicians, all they ever talk about is math. Where is the Scripture?

I suppose I am skeptical that people take textbooks as some sort of gospel, but that may be because I have always had autodidactic tendencies and figured that what was in textbooks was pabulum for indifferent students and fodder for rebellion for anyone else who was engaged.

The ideological takeover is a classic enhance-the-contradictions moment; it's so blatant an effort that it makes the underlying problems self-evident. The heavy-handed efforts to safeguard hegemony exposes how frail it has become. This sort of inanity should prompt sane people to withdrawal from the system altogether if they can, or at least put in place local forms of resistance to the tyranny. It calls the phony objectivity of schools to everyone's attention, including those who ordinarily wouldn't give a shit.

Anyway, some of these proposals don't strike me as all that outrageous.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

The double-talk about capitalism is pretty dumb, but kids should be taught about the sort of neoliberalism that has actually shaped policy for the past few decades. They should understand Hayek's idea about the market as a system for conveying information. They should understand Friedman's conflation of liberty with economic freedom of choice. At that point you can constructively critique these ideas, or reject them as part of institutional learning. If teachers were suddenly mandated to teach Frankfurt school theory in high schools, then those ideas would truly be dead.

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.

Fear of Amish (13 Feb 2009)

I grew up about an hour northwest of Philadelphia, in what was then considered the country by my citified relatives. For much of my childhood, I was terrified of the Amish, in the same way kids might be afraid of monsters under the bed or spiders. Dour bearded men in black presiding in judgment over the way of life I took for granted -- it was very confusing, utterly incomprehensible that one would volunteer for that life, and it seemed to me that the Amish should be forced for humanitarian reasons to get themselves on the grid. (I was eight.) The idea that I might wake up in a somber world without electricity and forced to worship a god who ostensibly hated progress kept me awake at night; I actually slept for a while with a small transistor radio on underneath my pillow to reassure myself that technology still existed. (This proved costly in batteries.) I even refused to see the movie Witness because it had Amish people in it.

I have since mastered my fears. With their apparent pursuit of communitarian ideals and commitment to an unpublicized life, I wonder whether they are living the life I sometimes sound as though I profess as an ideal. Rather than be sucked into accelerated, stressful and unfulfilling modern life by communications technology and its attendant ideology of convenience; rather than overwhelm themselves with the abundance of ultimately meaningless choices offered by consumerism, they choose a self-imposed isolation that strengthens the importance of interpersonal relations. Rather than adopt the contemporary preoccupation with identity fashioning, they accept traditional, religiously derived roles. That last one is really the sticking point -- no matter how appealing it might seem to extradite myself from consumerism, I wouldn't ever wish myself Amish.

Nevertheless, they serve as a provocative foil, as this fascinating post from Kevin Kelly (via Kottke) demonstrates. He details the various ways the Amish innovate on their own terms, which I hope to god doesn't launch an Amishpunk design craze along the lines of steampunk. What interested me was not so much the Amish's "hacking" skills, as Kelly calls them, but their deliberate attitude toward technology, and the possibility for a different, more conscious way of integrating it, their example suggests. "In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology," Kelly notes, "the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal." Kelly explains how the Amish are not ignorant or even entirely apart from mainstream society -- some have power generators, autos, refrigeration, etc. Kelly suggests they are simply 50 years behind us, by choice. (That's what Manhattan snobs say about my Queens neighborhood.) Instead, the Amish interact with technology with an entirely different set of ideological precepts. "Amish practices are ultimately driven by religious belief: the technological, environmental, social, and cultural consequences are secondary. They often don't have logical reasons for their policies." That bit about the illogicality of the Amish is something my childhood self would have readily seconded, but now I'm not so sure. The point is that their logic is different from the teleological positions that our culture espouses; they don't assume like we do that the development of technology equals social progress. Some technological developments are potentially immiserating and ripe for abuse, creating untenable and exploitative social relations, or worsening such relations that already adhere.

So the Amish adopt a kind of negative dialectic: "In contemporary society our default is set to say yes to new things, and in Old Order Amish societies the default is set to no. When new things come around, the Amish automatically start by refusing them." This extremely conservative impulse appears at the same time wildly radical, a testament to how habitual is our affirmation of change under capitalism. This affirmative reflex makes inanities like the fashion cycle and planned stylistic obsolescence possible, and it also leads to "early adopters" being regarded as gurus instead of dupes.

Because Amish communities are so tight-knit and patriarchal, change can rejected by a kind of moral brute force, in the name of preserving their way of life, or in less euphemistic terms, their tight-knit patriarchal system.

When cars first appeared at the turn of last century the Amish noticed that drivers would leave the community to go shopping or sight-seeing in other towns, instead of shopping local and visiting friends, family or the sick on Sundays. Therefore the ban on unbridled mobility was aimed to make it hard to travel far, and to keep energy focused in the local community. Some parishes did this with more strictness than others.
A similar communal motivation lies behind the Old Order Amish practice of living without electricity. The Amish noticed that when their homes were electrified with wires from a generator in town, they became more tied to the rhythms, policies and concerns of the town. Amish religious belief is founded on the principle that they should remain 'in the world, not of it" and so they should remain separate in as many ways possible. Being tied to electricity tied them into the world, so they surrendered its benefits in order to stay outside the world.

The Amish also famously don't want to call attention to themselves; we of course respond by being fascinated by them, and deploying caricatures of them across documentaries, films and scripted TV shows. What makes the Amish compelling to us is probably the promise of escape they represent, and the way they demonstrate the possibility of unified resistance. But that resistance is grounded in a world view that precludes most of what we recognize as freedom. For the Amish, it's obviously different, since despite their fabled Rumspringa, most Amish youths choose to remain within Amish communities. (They are not forced to join, as I assumed as a kid.) But it's also as though we regard the Amish's minding their own business in our midst as a kind of affront. They may have the right to their weird Luddite religion and their kooky Puritan costumes, but they don't have the right to be ignored.

We are moving in the direction of less and less privacy, and our ideology is shaping itself to rebrand surveillance as sharing. Self-broadcasting is becoming more and more customary, and for some it is almost mandatory (as when you are forced to get a Facebook page to be invited to things and so on). The Amish regard communications technology as corrosive to communication.

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, "If I had a TV, I'd watch it." What could be simpler?

Basically, the ideology guiding the Amish appears to have nothing to do with the knee-jerk individualism, which we tout as an end in itself. An ethic of inconvenience is adopted to inhibit the development of strictly personal goals, and the tools of modern identity formation (media, branded consumer goods, etc.) are apparently kept out of their communities. Here's how Kelly sums it up:

their manner of slow adoption is instructive.
* 1) They are selective. They know how to say "no" and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
* 2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
* 3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
* 4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

He then argues that we need to learn to become better at relinquishing bad technology as a group, though we are good at it at the individual level. I think that's backward. We adopt technology because it seems to thrust us ahead of the group, and then adopt new technology to try to remain ahead of the pack. We generally prefer technology that makes our lives more convenient, in other words, requiring less face-to-face human interaction. What the Amish reveal to us is that technological development in capitalist society is about achieving exploitable disharmonies, situations where asymmetrical information reigns, opportunities for creative destruction. That is why we don't pause to assess the effects technology has on society until after the fact; the effects on society are by-products to its real purposes, to create competitive advantages and to accelerate our capability to process information. In Amish society, where the relevant economic unit is the community rather than the individual, there is not asymmetry in adoption; in our atomistic society, adoption is necessarily asymmetrical among individuals all striving for an edge.

Priests and jesters (17 Oct 2007)

Hopefully the title of this entry doesn't have you expecting an exegesis of Marillion lyrics or something; instead I wanted to revisit the point I was trying to make in the previous entry about education and try to illuminate it with a concept from an essay by Leszek Kolakowski. In his essay "The Priest and the Jester," Kolakowski posits two eternally warring approaches to philosophy, which in his view has yet to shake its theological roots and is always taking up eschatological questions.

The antagonism between a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes seems incurable, as incurable as that which exists between conservatism and radicalism in all aspect s of human life. This is the antagonism between the priest and the jester, and in almost every epoch the philosophy of the priest and the philosophy of the jester are the two most general forms of intellectual culture. The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of the final and the obvious as acknowledged by and contained in tradition. The jester is he who moves in good society without belonging to it, and treats it with impertinence; he who doubts all that appears self-evident. He could not do this if he belonged to good society; he would then be at best a salon scandalmonger. The jester must stand outside good society and observe it from the sidelines in order to unveil the nonobvious behind the obvious, the nonfinal behind the final; yet he must frequent society to know what it holds sacred.

In the previous post, I was trying to argue that everyday life tends to make jesters of us all, while cultural institutions tend to try to instill us the reverence of the priest and the complacency that comes with believing moral questions have been settled -- in Venezuela, in favor of the "new man." But the "new man" himself was supposed to be a jester; his demeanor was precisely something that can't be taught, an attitude that self-consciousness and second-handedness destroys.

When I was a college teacher, this dilemma was palpable to me, but I didn't have this vocabulary to describe it. I could tell that some other English dept. professors clearly took inherited standards seriously and saw these traditions as self-justifying, worth preserving simply because others had saw fit to do the same. These priestly professors would teach appreciation classes and pass off subjective judgments on poetry, etc., without a blush or a moment's hesitation -- to them, that's why you got credentialed, so that others would have to take your opinion as gospel, so you could essentially say whether various works of art rock, rot, or rule. Others, the teaching assistants especially, wanted to challenge the students to contest everything and reject all hierarchies and make it all up for themselves, as though they weren't in the classroom to learn from someone else. These instructors wanted to dismantle all authority, particularly their own, and affirm the students' voice. I would sort of ricochet back and forth between those poles, with an ad hoc pedagogy and a faithlessness in the whole process. Inevitably, one may have to become a priest to become entrenched in academia; one must professionalize and buy into one's own bullshit, or in other words, have the dignity to take one's own career seriously. And as a by-product of that, you might so piss off some students with your righteousness that they'll develop their own jester-like qualities and fulfill their subversive potential.

Ideological education (16 Oct 2007)

Last week, in an issue that went out of its way to demonize Che Guevara, the Economist ridiculed the recent efforts by the Venezuelan government to reshape its public education system in accordance to Marxist theory.

the aim of the new education plan is “the formation of the new man”.
That phrase was coined by Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the early years of the Cuban revolution. His “new man” would be motivated by moral rather than material incentives. Cuba's communist government has pursued this chimera in vain for decades. Now its Venezuelan ally is embarking on the quest. “The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished,” says the president. “New values must be created, and that can only be done through education.”

All public educational programs are ideological in nature; it's state-sponsored training in how to be the kind of docile citizen it expects. (Hence, phys ed classes.) So there's no sense in criticizing Chavez for making the attempt. But it is strange to see an educational program that seems plausible only as a marginal, oppositional, and subversive pedagogy enacted by fringe radical instructors rolled out as a top-down national initiative. The agenda outlined in the Economist article -- "children will be taught that capitalism is 'a form of world domination' associated with imperialism," " 'a critical attitude towards any attempt at internal or external aggression,' " "the need to replace capitalist with socialist “hegemony”, by taking over those institutions that transmit the values of society" -- are all things that back in the day many of my fellow Freshman Composition teachers used to fantasize about bringing to our classrooms under the innocuous guise of teaching critical thinking. And I wouldn't repudiate any of these goals now. But critical thought is primarily a matter of challenging official doctrines and resisting to whatever degree is possible indoctrination of any sort, including that administered by your leftist literature teachers. When the state dictates some new hegemony, it remains hegemonic; it's still the institutional culture, which itself carries with it the traits that we idealistically hope education will take the edge off of -- conformity, superficiality, suspicion, hierarchical discipline, rigidity, etc.

The instinctual response to institutional culture often seems to be skepticism, so it's hard to imagine indoctrination working. Hegemony is never complete enough to eliminate the space for the viewpoints you are trying to eradicate. Indoctrination is much more effective when it operates indirectly, outside of institutional culture, or in what is perceived by participants as interstitial to it -- the talk at the water cooler, what your hippie teacher gets away with saying, the shared jokes between individuals about bureaucratic rules as they carry them out, the things the police condone. True hegemony is achieved when these spaces too are reiterating the dominant culture, as they seem to in capitalist society, where individualism and consumerism are played out as pseudo rebellions rather than conformist posturing, mouthing a party line. Sociologists -- Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefervre -- have theorized this interstitial space as "everyday life," and much is made of how it subverts the official version of how things are that makes it into recorded history -- the speeches of leaders, survey results, economic data, that sort of thing. If the state seeks to leverage everyday life to its advantage, though, it needs to be subtle and circumspect about it, figure out ways to present oppression and restriction as advances in freedom. Platitudes and maxims about the "new man" are probably not enough to create this impression. The best kind of education is that which engenders beliefs that it can't explicitly pursue as goals, education that works despite itself to create students who are curious, self-motivated, and sufficiently critical.

Returns to education (18 May 2007)

Tyler Cowen's NYT column yesterday pertains to some of the same issues about education raised in my previous post. He cites recent work by economists Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz about the return to education and its role in generating income inequality and argues that variations in the supply of highly skilled (educated) workers explains trends in the income inequality gap.

Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more.
The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America’s Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high.
Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder.

This paints a somewhat different picture than what Posner was painting, because the ultimate intention behind the argument is different. Though it's not explicitly mentioned, Cowen's argument suggests that higher education supplies the skills in a straightforward way -- you learn things you need to know in class via texts and teachers and so on. Posner suggests that the content of education is arbitrary and college merely certifies skills that more or less pre-exist a student's being admitted. That places him in the camp with the "pessimists" that Cowen acknowledges, who believe "that only so many individuals are educable at a high level. If that were the case, current levels of inequality might be here to stay." Whether the pessimists' belief in the existence of the intractably stupid precedes their concern that the state not subsidize education is an open question. The beliefs probably mutually reinforce each other.

Cowen seems more interested in a different point: "Nonetheless it will, sooner or later, become increasingly difficult to deliver the gains from college — not to mention postgraduate study — to the entire population. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate. So even if inequality declines today, it may well intensify in the future." He seems less interested in halting education subsidies than stifling the argument about income inequality, which appears as inevitable.

I find myself still wondering whether the gains from higher education stem from its amplifying preexisting advantages in social capital (which the "pessimists" suggest is a product not of an unfair society but of different natural abilities -- sorry, blame God) rather than the quality of what one learns in the classroom. I'd like to see the skills that are so important to the new economy delineated somewhere -- maybe I should do some actual research on this point, but usually economists are content to point to skills-biased technological change and keep the skills themselves in the black box. (Part of my inquisitiveness is personal mystification: I'm not sure I can spell out exactly what I learned from college, and I would not at all feel comfortable claiming it justified any of its effects on my income.) I also wonder if there is anything useful the state can do to prevent education from being the means of perpetuating class privilege.

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.