Back Into the Future

Science fiction stories so emphasize the technology of some proposed future that we tend to overlook the sameness of the societies they use as backdrops.  Emperors, warlords, crafty aristocrats, plutocratic merchant lords, perfidious or mealy-mouthed senators and their ilk populate the page, with the protagonist usually seeking some high-tech way to restore justice by putting himself in charge.  A galactic legislative body of some type may be present, but it is just a front for the machinations of the small group of villains at the heart of the story. Common people are just there to provide a colorful backdrop; the main characters are disconnected from the ordinary, and form a kind of planetary or galactic royal court.  The tale really constitutes a  high-tech medieval romance set in some galaxy far, far away or in some future dystopia.  But perhaps the sci-fi authors are on to something.

And Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post may have caught a glimpse of it recently in a column about the rising disparity between rich and poor in America.  It’s a good read for the statistics; he lays them out well, but you’ve seen them many times.  The key thing he noted is similar to a phenomenon noted by David Ignatius in a column about the Davos Conference. The very rich are gradually disconnecting from reliance on the economy and rights of any one nation.  They are beginning to form their own floating international society, with less and less personal investment in seeking the good of their original native land.  We’ve seen the smaller-scale prototype of this floating world for years now in the way corporations move from town to town and state to state seeking the best subsidy the local governments will offer.

Now it’s becoming the norm at the international level.   David Rothkopf, in his new book, Power, Inc., describes a war going on between multi-national corporations and traditional nation-states.  In his telling, it is like the prehistoric era when Homo sapiens came along and gradually eliminated the Neanderthals; only this time, the nation-states are the Neanderthals and the corporations are the Homo sapiens. But it’s the nation-states who have a built-in mission to care about the “whole person” of their citizens; the new international corporate society sees only customers and labor supplies.   The very rich are the emperors and merchant princes of the new society, already able to overwhelm all but the largest nations with their sheer economic power. For example, Exxon’s gross annual revenue now exceeds the GDP of Sweden.  We see the results of that each day with headlines such as this morning’s reports about rising oil supplies in America combined with rising prices.

Meyerson’s point was that unregulated capitalism gives rise only to the prosperity of a few, not the prosperity of the many.  One consequence is that in America, the "light on the hill" for democracy and the least regulated of the major capitalist countries, indices of social mobility have now plunged below those for Europe. And the large multi-national corporations, and their elite leadership, are rapidly moving beyond caring about regulation by individual nations; there’s always an unregulated market somewhere else.  International regulation of corporate behavior is drastically needed, but at best it is in its infancy.  Unless international bodies like the G-20 accelerate their oversight, the world of the sci-fi writers already looms.

Naked to Mine Enemies

Shakespeare’s lament about the fate of the elderly Cardinal Wolsey, “If I had served my God as I have served my King, He would not in my old age have left me naked to mine enemies”,  seems to leap to mind when reading the applied mythology of Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post.  Economic conservatives like Samuelson have long sought to enlist the aid of the young in their defense against sharing the funding of the country with those old geezers on Social Security. So in his attack this morning on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the Washington Post, he has reached into his mythological quiver to haul out the stale accusation that the ACA “expands the undesirable inter-generational transfer from [younger workers] to their wealthier elders.”  Mythology is valuable when it contains moral truth, but Samuelson’s does not.  You can tell I was irked by it.
Here are some facts from the U.S. Census:
 

One grain of truth in Samuelson’s argument is that those in one age bracket, those under 25, actually make less than the average retiree.  That bracket of course includes part-time working students, entry-level workers, etc.  The other grain is that during the currently receding recession, the average income of those over 65 has remained constant with inflation, because of pension cost of living increases, while the average income of employed people of all ages has declined.  The undesirable transfer of wealth that Samuelson deplores is thus that elders are treading water, and not sinking further. 

Samuelson seems not to recall that 60 years ago, half of those age 65 or above had incomes below the poverty level; today only 20 percent do, and that’s the “transfer of wealth” he worries about.  It’s also worthy of note that the official poverty level these days is a household income of about $19,000.  Since those over 65 include a significant number of women living alone, the fact that the median income for women over 65 is at $15,282 indicates even treading water is not that easy. The male over 65, at a median income of $25,877, is not exactly bursting with wealth either.  So in my mother’s East Texas vernacular, any “transfer” from young to old constitutes “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  That’s juggling between two bills, neither of which you can fully cover. Only, other alternatives, like stimulating the economy, non-employer based health care coverage, etc., he’s not willing to consider.  Until he’s ready for all, including the really wealthy, to pitch in, he should not be pitting “have-not’s” against each other.

TANSTAAFL?

One of the mild joys of life is learning new acronyms.  From PDQ to HOMES (a mnemonic for the Great Lakes) to LOL, we get a momentary flash of pleasure at meeting new strange groupings of apparently random letters.  In fact, beginning with their first exposure in Economics 101, economists seem actually to derive a lifetime of enjoyment from having learned TANSTAAFL, “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.”  Anyone who’s ever served as a volunteer at a soup kitchen knows better of course, though the economist will smile wisely and say that the lunch was “bought and paid for” by homelessness and the virtuous feeling of the volunteer.  But such disparate costs and values received seem to operate under some system of supply and demand other than that taught in economics class. 

That’s hard for economists to deal with.  In many ways they resemble a sort of intellectual accountant; benefits in one column must balance with costs in another, and anything not in accord with the system gets thrown out as irrelevant.  That’s the “determinism” part of “economic determinism.”

It turns out that evolutionary biologists are caught up in the same conundrum as the economists.  An interesting article by Jonah Lehrer in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker, "Kin and Kind" examines the current battle (there’s always at least one going on) among the biologists over the evolution and origins of altruism. Until recently, the biologists have been using a kind of mathematics that assumes altruism is a result of kinship; one ant or bee, or human, behaves altruistically towards another to the extent they are part of a “kinship group”, and the degree of altruism depends on the closeness of kin. Like the economists’ supply and demand econometrics, everything is neatly accounted for without the fuss and bother of explaining why someone would do something altruistic simply because they felt it was the right thing to do, in other words, altruistically. Charles Darwin had been unable to explain altruism, and regarded it as a fundamental paradox, but the biologists thought they had solved the problem with their mathematics.

The leader of the “sociobiology” revolution of the 1960’s that elevated kinship mathematics to a kind of biological theology was E. O. Wilson, who as a result became a sort of demigod in the trade.  Now, 40 years later, Wilson has seen the error of his previous views and seeks their downfall. He is aided in that effort by mathematicians, who see flaws in the basic workings of the kinship mathematics.  To shorten the tale, Wilson, based on his life-long studies and observations, now believes altruism is a part of human nature that is not the result of kinship groups, but instead produces them.  Human nature is balanced in a kind of dynamic tension between selfishness and altruism.  Moreover, Wilson proposes that altruism is an “emergent” trait (the wave of the future?) that aids “group selection”, a proposal that orthodox biologists find difficult to accept. In Wilson’s words, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups.  Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”  And he provides a lot of evidence and reasoning to prove it.

Which should strike terror to the heart of orthodox economists or economic conservatives. For if Wilson is right, then the rational (read “selfish”) man assumption at the heart (or lack thereof) of economic theory is missing some terms in his equations, and is denying his own nature.  The “invisible hand” of the unregulated free market may someday result in its destruction. Society might be better off with the wealthy acting like Warren Buffett and welcoming a higher tax.  And the meek may indeed inherit the earth.

Where's the Love?

You remember the line; “love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  That was the closer for the movie,”Love Story”, and a whole generation sighed.  But does that then mean that “never having to say you’re sorry” reflects how full of love you are for the rest of humanity?  Sadly, if that be true, then some of our politicians are a lot like Jud, in "OKLAHOMA!", who “loved everybody, only he never showed it.”

Some politicians these days just hate the words, “I’m sorry”; it’s particularly a problem when the subject is foreign policy.  I’d like to think it’s because they really love everybody but have trouble showing it.  After all, it would be kind of miserable to be led by mean-spirited types who were filled with hate and arrogance toward anyone who disagreed with them and just spoiling for a fight.  Sort of like the Godfather standing in for Uncle Sam. Surely they’re not like that! You know, to bring in another Hollywood type, they’re just big hearted Fonzies, who stutter at words like “love” and “sorry”, and gushy stuff like that, but really mean well despite that.  That would mean we could understand them simply as people who  never grew up past their teenage years; remember, those years when you’re really unsure that you’re big enough to deal with the world around you, but want to hide that uncertainty by acting like the baddest dude on the block.  Unfortunately, everyone else recognizes that, too.

Once you’re an adult, of course, you grow past that.  It’s what’s called acquiring judgment and experience.  You learn that just because a person disagrees with you, that doesn’t automatically make him, or her, an enemy.   It may even dawn on you that people tend to act the way you act toward them; hostility begets hostility, civility engenders civility, and cooperation can lead to cooperation.  And in the multi-power world of the 21^st century, cooperation is what we need a lot more of.  That’s why we need adults managing foreign policy, not just glowering teenagers.  So, let’s hope those politicians can act grown up and start showin’ the Love.

A Place for Everyone - Part Three

Joel Klein included a notion in his Washington Post column of March 5 about education , that he termed “child-centered funding.”  He added “to ensure that money follows children, not schools.”  From his context Klein probably just meant the currently fashionable push for Charter Schools, which I don’t particularly care for, because too often they’re just a way of avoiding spending attention and money on the needs of existing public schools. But that nebulous notion “child-centered funding”  also contains the possibility of a course of action that would  in fact constitute a major revolution in public school funding – which unfortunately means it would be difficult to accomplish, however worthy.  Embedded in Klein’s language is the possibility of a concept that has long been an “impossible dream” of mine – to move the basis of public school funding from the local property tax to the state income tax.  The state would then allocate funding to school districts state-wide proportional to their student populations.  Funding would follow students.  In theory, the move could be tax neutral; the increase in income tax would be accompanied by a corresponding decrease in local property tax, which in most states is a part of the state income tax reporting anyway.

So, what’s the problem in doing that?  The good news is that the shift would allocate more of the state-wide tax base to the crowded, underperforming schools in urban districts with meager property tax bases and lots of students.  The bad news is that the shift couldn’t be done and remain tax neutral without diverting funding from wealthy suburban districts that are used to providing students education with all the bells and whistles.  The solution to that of course is to increase funding statewide through more tax revenue, providing better funding to the cities and the same funding they’ve already got to the suburbs.  It would also provide revenue from residents who don’t incur property tax.  Perhaps it could be made more palatable by calling it an education tax, rather than simply income tax.

The point is this: our education system discriminates from its beginning through the nature of its funding.  Wealthy citizens live in prosperous areas with strong tax bases for education, while the poor live in areas with no substantial funding.  In our current society, that is a recipe for ensuring the rich get richer while the poor struggle to survive, and blaming that on the willful ignorance of the poor.  If we want the knowledge society that’s needed for us all to prosper, then paying for it shouldn’t depend on real estate values in the child’s neighborhood.  Education should be based on the desire to learn, not “location, location, location.”

The Power of Language

The editorial page of the Washington Post this morning has two interesting columns about language and politics.  Michael Gerson writes defending the role of the Presidential speech writer, noting that only Lincoln had no need of one and edited his own speech writers’ language to make it sing.  Gerson notes astutely, as always, that the value of rhetoric is that  “history is not shaped or moved by mediocre words.”  Yet Gerson is not always right on that.

Charles Lane writes about how sick he is of the overuse of the word, “war”, in politics.  Everything these days is a war by someone on something.  He notes that the goal of politicians is to fire up their base by getting them to think of others with differing views as enemies, but that this has an increasingly corrosive effect on the whole society, widening our differences and making us less able to work together in a common cause.  He’s right about that; I’ve started deleting without reading fund raising emails from political causes I support because of the constant vitriol they contain.

War wasn’t always that pejorative a word.  I recall fondly a little book from the 1960’s I really enjoyed, titled, “The Report from Iron Mountain on the Feasibility and Desirability of a Permanent Peace.”  It was a satirical functionalist analysis of the productive uses of war from an anonymous author, supposedly but not really leaked from the Iron Mountain think tank on the Hudson River, and noted things like the use of war to keep troublesome young people off the streets, stimulate medical technology innovation, reduce industrial unemployment, etc.  It concluded that permanent peace was neither feasible nor desirable, and suggested that military war be replaced with things like a war on poverty.  The analysis was almost, but not quite, persuasive, but the final suggestion was a good one.

It’s that Mark of Cain dogging us again.  We like the stimulation, the adrenaline rush that comes when the word “war” is used.  War empowers us.  And politicians, and speech writers, know that.  They use the word prolifically to manipulate our attitudes.  The important thing to remember is that war can either divide us or unite us; a declared “War on Religion” divides us, while a “War on Poverty” can unite us.  If we could get that adrenaline rush from a war on ill health or poverty or poor education, the world would be a far better place.  It’s time to tell the politicians to start waging the right wars, or we’ll stop listening to their rhetoric.

A Place for Everyone - Part Two

A column by Joel Klein in the Washington Post lamented the woes of the American educational system, and the failure of political candidates to address them (he’s right about that.)  After the usual laundry list of inadequacies in the system and envious comparisons with countries like Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore and South Korea, Klein proposes a three-item agenda: accelerate common standards, professionalize teaching, and promote school choice and innovation.  All three are worthy goals; the fact that these goals are limited and to some extent contradictory he does not note.

No offense is intended to Klein, who is an excellent writer,  but he, like so many others, seems unaware that the U.S. public education system is in fact dealing as well as could be expected, as they say in the intensive care ward, with four avalanches it is almost, but not quite, buried under.  Its lamented demise is, as Twain would say, premature. The first avalanche is mobility, which has in the last 100 years included migrations from countryside to city, from south to north and back again, from east to west, and individual movements all over at the rate of 25 percent per year.  When I was studying organizational sociology, a classic paper in that discipline reported how the practices of teachers in their classrooms were of little concern to higher levels of government because teachers taught to local standards of performance and that was good enough.  The fifth grade in Darien Connecticut and Tupelo Mississippi could be vastly different and no one cared; each addressed the needs and standards of their own community.  That world is no more, and its disappearance has produced the outcry for national standards, though without the recognition of the continued requirement to support local   culture and needs.  Tupelo and Darien still differ in their ways as much as Emmendingen and Selestat.

The second avalanche is the population explosion. 100 years ago, America was still primarily rural; now it is 85 percent urban.  It had a total population of about 78 million; now that is 313 million as of 2012, with 459 million projected as of the year 2050.  25 percent of the population consists of school age children.  Meanwhile, because of school consolidations related to the urbanization, the number of public schools has actually declined from 248,000 down to 108,000.  On average then, though averages are always suspect, the typical school is dealing with over 8 times as many students as it had a century before.  Some of the large high schools now are larger than small college campuses. When I was in high school 60 years ago, in a prosperous school district in the south, maximum class size was limited by rule to 25; in most public schools nowadays, that would be the impossible dream. While the official average class size in America today is about 16, that includes special education and other naturally small classes not a part of the general education classroom.  General education classes are an average nationally of about 25 students, the maximum class at my school 60 years ago. 

It should be noted that the comparable number in Japan is 33 students per class, but that Japan compensates by a much longer school year. Our American heritage from rural days is a long summer school break for farm work, a cultural lag we can ill afford. Affluent Americans fill their children’s summers with mental “enrichment” activities that promote a steady progress from year to year, but among the poor, the long summer break creates an annual “step back” in learning which some educators believe cumulatively accounts for the observed gap in high school between attainment levels of affluent and poor students.

The third avalanche is the democratization/diversity explosion.  That high school of mine was lily-white in the days before desegregation, no Hispanics or Asian heritage students attended, and the most exotic students to us were a few Jewish students whose families had fled the Holocaust. Any urban school these days is a rainbow by comparison.  That has produced teaching challenges as language and cultural differences create a loosening and transformation of the “literary canon”, the base of common reading taught and assumed to be known, that creates a common classroom culture within which learning can progress.  Add to that the mainstreaming of the developmentally challenged and the 21^st century classroom bears little resemblance, even if held in an open field, with those of fifty years ago.

And then came the fourth avalanche, the technological revolution of the 20^th century, beginning with electric lights, automobiles and airplanes and ending with cell phones and iPods and genetic engineering.  In 1900, the typical rural age for completing school was the eighth grade; then it was back to full time work on the farm.  Today, even farm work requires far more education than that.  The realm of technology that must both be used and be taught in the modern class is a universe away from that of our grandfathers.

In the face of all this, chaos and disaster could be, and frequently are, predicted. So how has American education fared?  A century ago, 85 percent of American adults were literate; today 99+ percent are.  A century ago, barely 50 percent had completed the eighth grade; today, over 85 percent have completed high school and 56 percent have at least some college.  We could do better. As a whole, students in the United States lag the best Asian and European nations in international mathematics and science tests. However, US Asians scored comparably to Asian nations and white Americans scored comparably to the best European nations. Although some racial minorities generally score lower than whites in the US, they score as well as whites in European nations. Hispanic Americans have scores comparable to students in Austria and Sweden, while African Americans are comparable to Norway and Ukraine. While American grade level attainment overall slightly lags the international rate, it includes a highly diverse and heterogeneous student population far beyond that dealt with in most other nations.   And that is the key.  In Emmendingen, the children are “sorted”; classrooms are much neater and more manageable that way, and skills can be taught at levels that are clearly superior.  But in France, and America, the classroom includes everyone.

As a response to the avalanches I’ve mentioned, the American public education system has set itself the democratic task of educating not just socioeconomic or ethnic elites, but a whole people in chaotic times.  And it has done, and continues to do, that well.  Its goal is instilling learning, of course.  But beyond that, its goal is to enable the continuance of an American dream since the foundation of the republic, that each child “could grow up to be President.”  Thomas Jefferson recognized that public education is a key to maintaining liberty, but it is more than just the learning instilled.  It is the sense of shared opportunity that is developed in a common classroom that enables we the people to work together for the betterment of all.

A Place for Everyone - Part One

In the classical age, unemployment was not necessarily the same issue it is for us.  Anyone who has noted the details in the Christian New Testament is aware that the Apostle Paul was both a lawyer and a tentmaker, a double skill that came in handy wherever demand for either skill was running low.  It was fairly commonplace at that time to be trained in both technical and industrial skills, somewhat like being both an electrical engineer and a skilled auto mechanic simultaneously.  In our highly technical age, of course, twin occupations are hard to come by; the knowledge base for each requires your full attention. And that has implications for the structure of the whole society.

That thought came to mind when “reading and comparing” two articles on education and employment this past week. Because the topic is complex, I’m dividing my post into two, with discussion of the second article in a subsequent post.   In the first article, in the New York Times, about differences in employment in a French and a German town just across the border from each other, the Times was delving into why two towns only about twenty miles apart were so vastly different in their economies. The German town of Emmendingen has an unemployment rate of 3 percent, while unemployment in Selestat, twenty miles away in Alsace is at 8 percent. The Times, and apparently Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, credit “the German System” for reducing hourly labor costs in Germany 11 percent below those of France, though many French are not buying that, since it involves things like no minimum wage, more reliance on part-time labor, less worker benefits, etc.; some French mutter,  “we had the German system in 1945 – no thanks!”  Another comment was that, “Germans live to work, while the French work to live.”  It made one remember Germany’s efforts to reform Greece, and wonder how far away the French Debt Crisis is.

But a major thrust of the article had to do with differences in the educational systems of the two countries.  France’s system is much like that of the U.S., with focus all through K-12 on a common track leading toward college.  In Germany, students are “sharply divided” at age 16 between the college bound and those destined for a highly developed apprentice system in industry.  As a consequence, German workers are highly skilled, aware of their place in the scheme of things and accepting of the labor conditions of “the German System.”  It is tempting to admire such an approach until one reflects about the low social mobility implicit in it.  Having one’s future laid out at sixteen is not all that appealing.  “Made in Germany” is not an export mark attractive on all goods, particularly when they involve the education of one’s children.

Wo die Zitronen blühn

“Do you know that land, where the lemons blossom?”  Goethe was thinking of Italy when he wrote that line, but it could well have been Greece, for there especially the orange groves blossom across the countryside and lemon is an ingredient in every dish.  Greece has always “had its attractions”, as an Austrian EU Commissioner commented this week in Brussels. He added that he accepted no responsibility for Greece’s current straits because he and the other commissioners were only seeking to stimulate the Greek economy.  He suggested that perhaps Greece could help itself by promoting more year round tourism. It is hard doing that of course in the presence of Molotov cocktails and riot police, already part of the product of his industrious efforts.  To those can be added the over 20 percent unemployment rate and the general frustration and rage that set off the cocktails.

Northern Europeans have always enjoyed Hellas, the bright land, as a respite from cold winters and culturally enforced industriousness.  They enjoy its beauty, its history, its bright sunshine and deep shade, its propensity to lie back and do things on “Greek Time”, its mildly exotic costumes and cuisine, and of course its bargains.  So when Greece joined the Euro party and the party became a way of life just not a part of their traditional culture, their willingness to throw restraint overboard to keep attending the balls (a restrained Greek? – get serious!) made the whole country a real bargain for a leveraged buyout by European banks.  That’s what appears from afar to be happening now.  The same article that quoted the EU Commissioner reported that a flood of officials would now descend on Athens from Brussels to find productive ways to lay off more people, cut benefits and otherwise dismember Greece to make it more efficient.  Perhaps in the process they can pick up a Parthenon or two.

In America, current slang for that is vulture capitalism.  Some of our politicians also are experts at it (some would claim we invented it.)  And like EU Commissioners and other leveraged buyout experts they disclaim any responsibility for unfortunate consequences; it was bad choices by the Greeks that created their economic crisis – just as bankers in the U.S. maintain that the misery of a foreclosed mortgage is solely the fault of the homeowner who succumbed to the lure of 0% down payment and easy credit offers.

Before any real solution to the Greek debt crisis can be reached, some genuine acceptance of mutual responsibility must occur.  Yes, Greece got itself into this mess, and yes, the EU community from Commissioners to bankers greatly facilitated the process.  Public recognition of responsibility is not just a sorely needed act of grace; it is a sine qua non for resolution and healing to begin.