Ph.D. Octopus

A recent blurb in Sports Illustrated referred to two Major Leaguers untainted by steroids, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, who may be bound for the Hall of Fame.

I never liked Glavine, because I remember him mostly as a member of the Atlanta Braves, the team I hated most in my Montreal Expos’ NL East. But I knew he was a great player: an excellent pitcher, a fine hitter (for a pitcher) and solid defensive player. And he had a hockey background.

I always like Frank Thomas. “The Big Hurt” had been a football player at Auburn. He was big before baseball players were big. He was big before the steroid era. Indeed, he came out in favour of drug testing as early as 1995, and he volunteered to be interviewed for the Mitchell Report in 2007, the only active player to do so.

The thrust of the SI blurb was that both Thomas and Glavine were not only great, but were also untainted by steroids. I’m going to assume that is true. Either way, there is no question that Thomas and Glavine should be first ballot Hall of Famers. Yet I wonder how much of their induction will be due to their “drug-free “status? And will lesser players who were also drug-free be given undue deference because of it?

Story one: “The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low, newly disclosed tax data show.”

Story two: “An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.”

If you all have not been reading Bob Samuels blog posts at el Post de Huffington, go do it now. Samuels is a high-up in the AFT (American Federation of Teachers, for our Canadian friends, our biggest teacher’s union) and his latest is a superb analysis of why tuition is rising so high at American universities. The common justification, of course, is that student tuition is rising because the cost of education is so high. College administrators often claim that each student actually costs the university more than they bring in.

As Samuels points out, this claim is based on the false assumption that you can simply add up the operating costs of a university, divide it by the number of undergrads, and then get the cost per student from that. If that cost is more than the amount the student pays in tuition, the argument normally goes, then that difference is being subsidized either by the tax-payer (at a public school) or donations (at a private school). The need to fill that gap justifies both tuition hikes and the use of school funds in risky hedge-fund style investments.

The whole thing never smelled right to me, and Samuels does the math to show that it can’t possibly be the case that most students actually get their tuition’s worth (which now rises above 50,000 per student at a place like NYU) in the classroom. Needless to say, much of a student’s tuition goes towards things they will never use. Instead a fraction of it goes towards the expenses of the actual classroom (essential costs like the salary of the instructor, costs of the room, etc…)

So where does the money go? Samuels argues that it largely goes towards graduate education and prestigious professors who barely teach (along with parasitic administrators and millionaire college presidents). These don’t play much of a role in students’ lives, but are all designed to enhance the prestige of the university.

The key point is Samuel’s’ conclusion: “Therefore, what students are purchasing is not an education or a credential; rather, students are buying prestige and reputation.”

Thus an NYU undergrad isn’t getting their money back in the classroom, since their being taught by some poorly paid adjunct or TA. Rather their money is going to pay the salary of Thomas Nagel or Nouriel Roubini, who in turn boosts the reputation of NYU, which then raises the value of the diploma that the student receives. Students are paying, then, to be associated with a school. They are branding themselves, in a sense; attaching themselves to a school that supposedly inspires confidence.

Isn’t it all the perfect educational philosophy for our economy? Nothing is solid or concrete. Rather all relies on the illusion that there is some value to what you’ve purchased. What if everyone just decided tomorrow that an NYU or a Harvard diploma was useless? Well you’d be fucked, since you didn’t even get a better education in the first place. At least the community college graduate isn’t $200,000 in the hole.  It’s all a confidence game, maintained by our belief that an NYU diploma will continue to be valuable in the future.

Second, talk about “stripping of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.” Functionally, what are prestigious professors but paid spokesmen, selling their reputation in order to increase the amount a school can charge for tuition? Just like people want to buy Pepsi cause Britney Spears endorsed it, so you want to go to Princeton because Paul Krugman is there. And you’ve only barely got a better shot at being taught by Krugman at Princeton than you do at meeting Britney Spears if you buy Pepsi.

Finally, this just lays bare the class element of higher education. One can hardly justify paying the big bucks to go to an elite private school based on educational excellence. Its not like you learn spanish 10 times better at Harvard then at UMass, but it costs you 10 times as much. You’re paying for the diploma which is your ticket into the elite. There is barely even the illusion that our elites are more educated- they just ponied up more money when they were 18 then everyone else did.

(I’m aware of my own role as a parasite in this, by the way, living off the fat of poor indebted students. No need to point it out…)

So count me as unimpressed by this long awaited bombshell about our governor David Paterson from the New York Times.

There have been rumors for weeks that the Times was planning some big exposé, and supposedly it was going to be some Spitzer-esque sexual scandal that was going to bring down Paterson.

Instead, the article is an attack on the personal life of one his aides, not Paterson himself. Now the guy definitely sounds like a bit of a creep. He’s been accused by ex-lovers (but never charged) with domestic abuse. And when he was a teenager he was arrested for dealing cocaine. I’m not that concerned with the drug stuff, though the domestic violence stuff is bad. But he has never been charged, much less proven guilty, and there is conflicting evidence about whether he did anything violent or was simply in a heated argument.

Is it supposed to reflect poorly on Paterson that he hired someone like this? If so, I don’t buy it. Was Paterson supposed to fire him because of unsubstantiated rumors? Because the aide did dumb, but nonviolent, shit when he was 16? And if its just an attack on the aide, it seems insanely disproportionate for the paper of note, with tens of millions of readers, to dedicate a lengthy front page article to unproven allegations about someone whom no one has ever heard of.

It’s absurd enough that we judge a politician’s private life so closely, but are the private lives of their aides fair game now? Policy should matter, not what one of their hundreds of aides does on the weekend. And as the Times admits, Paterson, in his role as policy maker, has been strongly supportive of programs aimed at curbing domestic violence.

It’s also hard not to see an undercurrent of racial politics at play here as well. Johnson, the aide, is not only black, but the Times makes a point of describing in detail his bulky build. It sure seems like the Times (and/or their sources in Albany) do not think a big black man, who came out of poverty, and once made some mistakes dealing drugs, should be in a position of power. The whole article stinks with the vibe that Johnson’s real crime is stepping out of his place.

None of this is meant to downplay domestic violence which is obviously very serious. But so are poverty and torture and corruption and war and a million other things that elites are responsible for. The world would be better off if the Times spent all that time investigating some of those things rather then the unproven allegations against a minor figure who makes up the governor’s schedule.

Worse, this stuff fuels the intense personalization of American politics, where we’re all encouraged to think about candidates in terms of their own personal characteristics and virtues. You know, as in “people want to have a beer with George Bush”, “John McCain is a maverick.” In the process, of course, we ignore the deeper political issues that they stand for, and social groups on whose behalf they will rule, turning serious debates about who will rule society into popularity contests between the well-managed public relation teams of elite politicians.

This is an issue that’s been gnawing at me for a while, but it took a recent New Yorker article about the Chicago School of Economics to give it shape. I’ve been struck at the intellectual rigidity of those who call themselves economic libertarians, or laissez-faire types, or advocates of the free markets, or fiscal conservatives, or whatever you want to call them. People who think that government intervention in the economy is the equivalent of eating innocent babies. I’m talking about smart people, even smart economists, who refuse to change their views in the face of overwhelming evidence that the free market ideology has been something of a colossal failure.

I first noticed this when I saw the outlier to this trend, Richard Posner. The former lover of Milton Friedman has become a Keynesian. He has come to realize that government intervention is the economy can be useful, even necessary. But Posner’s conversion is really part of something broader, something he identified as “the intellectual decline of conservatism.” In this post of May 10, 2009, he wrote (sorry for the long quote):

By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.

Of course, as Posner notes, much of this intellectual decline has to do with fundamentalism of the religious right, the forces opposed to gay rights and abortion, as well as the failure of neoconservative foreign policy initiatives, the insane “denial of global warming,” and other policies which “are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings.” The embrace of anti-intellectual leaders like Joe the Plumber and Sara Palin represents the apotheosis of this idiocy.

Yet the economic issue, because it is more intellectually serious, is in some ways more interesting. And so Posner writes:

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives’ bête noire.

This interests me especially as a historian, and I see an interesting parallel with the ideological collapse of communism. Not long after the Russian Revolution of 1917, intellectual opponents of the Soviet Union emerged, and many were on the left. From anarchists like Emma Goldman to Trotsykites like Iriving Howe who opposed Stalin, there were no shortage of thinkers who looked at the practical realities of the USSR and saw much to criticize. By 1956, when Kruschev repudiated Stalin’s crimes, even his most vocal supporters had to recognize the truth. And the reality of prosperity in America, and in western Europe, as imperfect as it may have been, and the poverty in the Eastern Bloc, and Communist China, led many intellectuals rightward, some all the way, like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and company, but others only slightly, to an embrace of a Keynesian welfare state.

As Tony Judt’s article (which we’ve referenced before on this blog and probably will again) shows, the past few decades, in western Europe and to a lesser extent in America has seen the triumph of a moderate version of social democracy, or at least of the success of the welfare state initiatives. From FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society and introduction of Medicare, these programs have not been smashing successes, but they have not been utter failures either, in fact they’ve mostly made the world a better place.

And so most moderate intellectuals, even those on the left, have given up on the dream of a socialist utopia, in favour of a more modest, dare I say pragmatic, welfare state, attempting to limit the worst ills of capitalism but allow for its strengths, to create a society that protects individual rights but also the broader welfare of the community.

Posner has jumped ship precisely because he is a pragmatist. He looked at the evidence, and saw the absolute embrace of the free market as a failure. He has come to recognize this embrace of the free market not as a theory, but as an ideology, something rigid and inflexible, something that doesn’t respond to the evidence. For all there is to criticize about Barack Obama, I am sympathetic to his resistance to “ideology” for this reason. Yes, I would prefer if he more profoundly supported the welfare state. But I respect at least his rhetorical willingness to examine the evidence and see what works best.

In 1963, Sir Karl Popper wrote a famous essay called “Science as Falsification.” He wrote that “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” He criticized Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian economics on the ground that they were not falsifiable. Their advocates found evidence in every result, even ones that seemed to blatantly contradict these “theories.” The Marxist revolution never happened, so Marxists tweaked the theory, rather than abandon it. They forced a strange fit of theory and fact, rather than simply form a new theory. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, on the other hand, is a valid theory, because it is testable, the results came in, proving it right. If different results has come in, the theory would have been proven wrong.

There is much of value in Marx (and some, maybe a little bit, in Freud). But in my view, history and experimentation have mostly proven these theories wrong. Which is why today they exist mostly as ideologies. Notions of the perfection of the free market, that it leads to the best possible outcomes, exist the same way.

And yet, I have detected an extreme hubris on the economic right. A belief that the free market has never really been tried, that government is the problem, etc. etc. The denial is incredible. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, economic conservative refuse to embrace government healthcare, financial reforms to limit the power of banks, etc. Just let the market do it’s thing and everything will be all right.

Economic libertarianism and laisszes-faire policy can be a political or moral preference, but at this point, the evidence suggests that it is not a workable theory. It does not accurately describe the way the economy functions, or at least not the way the economy functions best. Many (most?) on the left have abandoned Marxism, Communism, and even socialism, in favour of a more moderate embrace of a welfare state in a capitalist world. It’s time for free market ideologues to abandon their ideology as well, and head left-ward.

I was tooling around last night and found this. Its a company that’s sole purpose is to provide scabs to an employer whose workers are on strike.

And here is the screen which advertises their “references,” companies that have used their services. All the winners there: Aramark, Boeing, General Dynamics, a disturbing amount of hospitals…

Think of it as a handy guide to companies you should never, ever frequent.

I wonder about these guys though. At what point will they make union busting so successful that they themselves will be out of a job since there are no more unions left to bust. Surely their services would be in demand more if more unions felts confident enough to strike. Its like a weird fucked up version of the old Marxist maxim about the capitalist who will sell you the rope to hang himself. But this time both the capitalist and the worker ends up hanging.

If they were smart, they would join up with Jackson Lewis, and all the other anti-union lawfirms, and lobby for EFCA. Then they would have strikes to bust and innocent people to intimidate for years to come.

I’m not normally a fan of The Atlantic. Other than Ta-Nehisi Coates, their political writers all bore or annoy me. In almost every way I think Harper’s is better. But there was an excellent article this month about the psychological and cultural effects of long-term unemployment (short version: we’re all going to become bitter hollow shells of humans). In the process of explaining the pending destruction of all our psychological and cultural well-being, the author has a short diversion in which he profiles our generation and points out that:

“Self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work”

As a teacher assistant at an elite private university, let me say yes. Yes it does.

The author claims that the emphasis modern parents place on self-esteem has counter-intuitively retarded the ability of us twenty somethings to deal with adversity and stress. “There’s an element of entitlement” he quotes an expert as saying, “they expect people to figure things out for them.” And since we’re raised to think how great we are, we’re especially unprepared for unemployment and insecurity.

Which is why all you parents out there should take a lesson from the 17th century Puritans. Children are clearly sinful demon-beasts who need to be reduced to states of total obedience, everyday reminded of their complete depravity. As President Wadsworth of Harvard said of infants, “Their Hearts naturally, are a meer nest, root, fountain of Sin, and wickedness; an evil Treasure from whence proceed evil things.” I assume that’s why they poop so much.

If your kids know you love them, then what incentive do they have to work hard when you hire them out at age 8 to the cordwainer three towns over?

Point is, dear reader, maybe if you had spent less time being told how special you were and being bought ice cream even though you struck out at tee-ball, and more time in an unheated room memorizing Leviticus and being reminded that it was because you misbehaved in church that God sent that smallpox which killed your sister, maybe you’d have that job at Google now. Seriously

Chris Farley was born on February 15, 1964 and died on December 18, 1997. In honour of his birthday, I’d like to share this poem I wrote about him. To help you understand the poem, and appreciate the comedic genius that was Chris Farley, I’m also posting the famous sketch “Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker” from Saturday Night Live. Enjoy and remember. R.I.P. Chris Farley.

“Chris Farley”
By David Weinfeld

“Son of a bitch!” He screamed.
So fell fat man Farley
face-first through the table but still able
to spring sprightly like a man built lightly,
Twinkle-toed, like the Babe Ruth of old,
A three hundred pound big Irish kid.

We all knew he would die

like Belushi before him: blow, booze and bitches.
We laughed. And laughed. He sweated, leaking loneliness.
“La-Dee-Frickin-Da,” he’d say and we’d laugh some more.
“Bill Shakespeare,” he called the old Bard, a bard himself,
a first class clown who could keep comics cackling.
He had a sidekick, but let’s call a Spade a spade:
a smarmy man, more made, more mature, more measured,

except when big Chris entered the room.
Then even he could not keep his cool.

Chris turned chaos to craft.
And they laughed. And we laughed.
He was fat, and sweaty.

And so we laughed as he suffered inside.
Christopher was thirty-three when he died

in a van down by the river.

Dear all,

In honour of the recent Canadian 90210 day (February 9, 2010, because put day first, then month) and Valentine’s Day, here’s a classic clip of Emily Valentine singing “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” It features all of the major cast members this era of Beverly Hills 90210. I have to admit I teared up a bit when I saw Scott Scanlon. In any case, enjoy, and Happy Valentine’s Day.

Love,

Weiner

As loathe as I am to support the creeping threat of Canadian Cultural Imperialism, I strongly recommend Heartland, the new album by Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy.

Pallett, who is from Toronto, and has worked on albums by Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire is a strange duck. Apparently he is a classically trained violinist. Pallett used to record under the moniker Final Fantasy, which supposedly really was a straight-up nod to the video game.

This album takes a leap of faith, it is true. It is hard not to describe it without making it sound like something you should hate. It’s experimental. Its brainy and perhaps a bit affected. I bet people in Williamsburg like it. But whenever the weird for weird’s sake seems to be building up, whenever the pretentiousness seems to get too high, whenever the precocity becomes annoying, Pallet hits you with a passage of remarkable simplicity and beauty (even, perhaps, elegance) that makes you not only forgive all that, but even be a bit grateful for it.

Highly recommended. This is an acoustic version of one of my favorite songs on the album. Notice he performs it using just a loop pedal and his violin.