DIYU v. the skepticism of the commons

My Salon post about the DIYU book got noticed, the author sent me a copy, I reviewed it, and lately I've following the progress of the book through blogville in a not at all creepy or stalkerish way.

In this post, Rortybomb (aka. Mike Konczal) seems to be arguing that "free" educational resources aren't free enough. Until they're rammed down the throat of every man, woman, and child, they will serve only to exacerbate the power inequalities between people.

Okay, that's a grossly distorted characterization of his argument. Read the whole thing. But I think he overstates his case, and offers little in the way of solutions.

Two obvious points come to mind. First, open source textbooks aren't genomic data. They're written in one or more human readable languages, with pictures and whatnot. They're much easier to digest than ATGCCAGTCTCAGATTACATCGATCAAGAABAGTCCC.* Second, even if a piece of data is useful only to a handful of genetics PhDs, that's a far broader access than if it were only useful to the subset of PhDs who happen to work for a specific biotech company.

Which leads to broader point 2b: the only thing that happens when you open source something (like a textbook, or a video lecture) is that certain restrictions that would allow for monopolizing/rent-seeking/whatever-the-cool-kids-in-econ-call-it behavior. Open sourcing isn't magic pixie dust that will usher in the hippie singularity, but I'm not understanding how opening education resources can do anything to make learning less democratic. Really, it's like objecting to a public library in a town where not everyone can read.

I believe the conclusion Rortybomb is drawing from that is that some structure will still be needed to guide the students through the material, to make it accessible. That's true, but it seems like a trivial point. Do people really think that in a DIYU model, five year olds would be handed an iPhone loaded with a hodgepodge of textbooks, reference material, and video, and told to come back when they're ready to enter the job market? Judging by some of the arguments, it seems that way.

The takeaway line seems to confirm this:

Will a self-directed educational goal primarily benefit those with stable homes and the time and capital to cultivate this? Is "DIY U" accessible according to need? This is the framework I think of as I read and explore this work.

So, even under the worst-case scenario, we end up with an education that is nearly as stratified and inaccessible as the one we have today?

I often cite the statistic that, in America, the least academically successful quarter of the children from the wealthiest quarter of families are slightly more likely to graduate from college than the most academically talented quarter of the children from the poorest quarter of families. We also live in the country with the greatest disparity between the performances of the financially best and worst-off students.

The college education we offer now is too expensive, too inflexible, and doesn't fail gracefully when confronted with students whose lives are full of the disruptions and distractions caused by poverty. Some DIY U critics write as though they skipped over the entire Part I of the book -- the part that explains how the system got so screwed up in the first place -- then apply absurd standards of perfection to proposed open education systems.

How will the poor access DIY U? How do they access education now?

Where will the money come from to create all these free textbooks and course materials? Maybe from the tiny sliver of the billions of dollars that students are now paying for overpriced textbooks. It doesn't all have to go back into beer money.

But what will they read them on? Probably an iPad-like device that now costs about as much as a semester worth of books, and will be radically cheaper and more useful in five years.

How will teachers get paid at DIY U? They'll be paid for services rendered, I suppose. Relieved of much of the burden of delivering prepared lectures, creating course materials, and administering tests to assess student progress, they'll have more time to do the sort of one-on-one coaching on areas where the students need the most help. There will always be structures designed to connect those who want to teach with those who want to learn. An educated citizenry is a clear public good, and much of today's education spending is wasted. If this radical transformation requires a bit of government spending or some money from students to get the incentives right, I think it will happen.

I do worry that the open education movement might inadvertently reduce the size of what you might call "the academic class." But given that the demand for education currently outstrips the supply, I'm betting that there will be jobs aplenty for the foreseeable future.

* I'm pretty sure that string is in my genetic makeup somewhere, and that it will kill me before I turn fifty. The 'B' has me especially worried.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

During World War I and World War II, Great Britain was threatened with extinction. Enemies hounded its shores, its people lived in a state of material deprivation, and the nation mourned daily the loss of friends and family who died on the front lines.

Under such conditions, what would you imagine happened to the health and life expectancy of the non-combat population?

A) Health and life expectancy worsened.

B) Health and life expectancy improved.

Obviously, we would expect the answer to be A, but since that would be unsurprising and uninteresting, the answer is of course B. According to the excellent new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger*, the British society of that era had several characteristics that led to greater health and longer lives (with lower crime rates, too):

• Full employment.
• An erosion of class distinctions and class consciousness.
• Greater social cohesion.
• Narrowed income inequality, caused by a fall in middle class wages and a rise in working class wages.

Some of you, having read this far, may be asking themselves, "Are the authors saying that we should have more wars?" or "Are the authors advocating Communism?"

Yes. Yes they are. That is exactly what the authors are saying. Now please go away. The grownups are trying to have a chat.

In The Spirit Level, the authors collect evidence that countries with narrower income inequality show remarkably good results in a number of social metrics:

• Longer life expectancy
• Better health at all ages
• Reduced infant mortality
• Higher educational achievement
• Lower homicide rates
• Lower rates of petty crime
• Lower teen pregnancy rates
• Lower incarceration rates
• Higher rates of social mobility
• Lower rates of illegal drug use
• Lower rates of homelessness

A few caveats and details: The authors are making comparisons only between relatively wealthy, industrialized societies. Think U.S. vs. U.K. or Norway or Japan, not U.S. vs. Cuba** or Bangladesh or Zimbabwe. Among the poorest countries, the best predictor of how well a country is doing is (unsurprisingly) median income. Among the wealthy countries studied, median income predicts almost nothing.

The authors also present their evidence in such a way that it becomes immune to the standard right-wing counterattacks that afflict most comparisons between countries. Usually, if you say something like, "The United States has the same infant mortality rate as Cuba," you could expect a cleaver critic to try to undermine the comparison by citing some difference in how the data is collected and reported, while a slow critic would just say, "But we don't want to be Cuba."

But the authors rarely compare two countries. Instead, what they do -- repeatedly, and to great effect -- is plot the countries on a chart with two axes, with the y-axis showing some rate of some metric of social well-being (obesity, drug use, life expectancy, etc.) and the x-axis showing that country's level of income inequality***, then show the trendline that best fits the data (if such a trend is statistically significant).

So if you don't like the way Italy collects its teen pregnancy stats, or think France's life expectancy is some artifact of their diet, throw both points out. The trendline remains.

They also make all the same comparisons between the fifty states of the U.S., and invariably find the same correlations between income inequality and societal outcomes. "Icelanders just eat more fish" does nothing to explain why Texas has a longer life expectancy than Kentucky, but a shorter life expectancy than Utah.(*4)

That's the beauty of statistical analysis: when you have twenty or fifty points all helping to paint the same picture, the individual quirks of given states and population tend to get averaged out.

A challenge to right-wing orthodoxy

The results really are counterintuitive, and I think they represent a serious challenge to the whole right-wing, laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog orthodoxy. Here is just one example:

Imagine two relatively wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is little market incentive not to squander your education, because the government provides generous welfare and unemployment benefits.

In Society A, the wealthiest people (those in the top 20%) make about ten times as much as the poorest people (those in the bottom 20%) do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In Society B, the same comparison shows the wealthiest members of society only make about four times what the poorest do, so there is markedly less financial incentive to do well in school.

In Society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In Society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school. Thus, you would expect students in Society A to be more motivated to excel in their college preparatory work.

No surprise, Society A is the U.S., Society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin. An interesting feature of this gap is that it is narrower when comparing the children of our wealthiest to the children of their wealthiest, and widens steadily as we go down the socioeconomic ladders.

It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.

One other example: while highly-paid sports teams win more games than low-paid sports teams, those teams with big gaps between their best-paid and worst-paid players tend to win fewer games than would be predicted by aggregate salary.

Mechanisms

I hope you're convinced now that these correlations exist. But if they're so compelling, what causes them? I accept the explanations provided by the authors, which can be boiled down to this: we are status-obsessed monkey people who get stressed and freak out when we don't feel accepted within the social order.

This makes all kinds of evolutionary sense. In the world that molded our monkey brains, there was no more important resource -- or more pressing danger -- than the monkeys around you. If you were an accepted part of the tribe, you could expect a share of their food, protection from outside threats, and opportunities to procreate. If you were not a part of the tribe, you might be beaten, driven away from sources of food and water, or killed outright. The ability to read the social landscape, to know who was allied with who, who might be expected to return altruistic gestures, and how to keep yourself in the good graces of the tribe, were critical skills, and those who excelled at them got vast evolutionary rewards.

It's no wonder that so much of our conversation revolves around who likes who, who is fighting with who, who just broke up and why, ad nauseam. It's also no wonder that politicians spend their careers promising to do things that will increase your opportunity to improve your social status (jobs programs, homebuyer incentives, assistance with student loans, etc.) or promising to protect us from those who would reduce our social status (welfare recipients, illegal immigrants, big business) or demonizing those who seem to give their base inadequate respect (East-coast liberal elites, academics, fundamentalists of all stripes).

Studies in animals show that moving an ape from a population where he is the alpha male to a population where he is the... omega male? What do they call the animal at the bottom of the totem pole? Anyhow, moving to the other population will dramatically raise his cortisol levels, meaning that he is under stress, which has strong life-shortening, mood-altering consequences.

All this indicates that humans don't generally do well at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy.

So now what?

In light of this, what sort of policies should we be pursuing? Here are a few suggestions.

Treat conspicuous consumption as pollution. Like pollution, ostentatious displays of wealth have negative effects on those downstream.

Treat marketing as pollution. The most effective advertisements are often the ones that target your sense of social status. Your teeth are unacceptably yellowed. Your flabbiness tells others that you are lazy, and causes them to find you unattractive. What does your car say about you? A certification in the hot new field of penitentiary services is a ticket to a better life. You need makeup. Now you need better makeup. Your hair color doesn't "pop". Your acne repulses even your best friends. Your Mac tells people that you are a creative person who recognizes quality craftsmanship(*5).

There is something immoral about attacking peoples' insecurities in order to make a buck. But in the United States it is not only perfectly legal, it's tax deductible. Advertising -- even excessive, Nike-scale advertising -- is treated as a business expense. We're effectively paying Pepsi thirty cents for every dollar they spend blighting the landscape with billboards. Advertising works by trying to make people unhappy enough about themselves to buy a product, and the negative influence of advertising needs to be confronted.

We need more equal outcomes, not just more equal opportunity. The more unequal a society is, the harder a sell this one becomes. If you're already extremely conscious of social status, you're already primed to fear that such measures may reduce your ability to improve or maintain your own status. The Right will take advantage of that.

But facts are stubborn things. It's easy to speak glowingly about living in a meritocratic, equal-opportunity, colorblind society where hard work is rewarded with great wealth. It's much harder to do so while simultaneously explaining why generational wealth and poverty persist in such a paradise of opportunity, or why the United States ranks lower in many measures of social mobility than the supposedly crippled economies of Europe.

It's easy and cheap to shame the poor into believing they are wholly responsible for their lot in life. But those who want to do so are trying to lower the bar by which we judge policy; rather than demanding that policies demonstrate good outcomes based on hard numbers, they want us to be satisfied with a notion of equality that can be endlessly redefined to suit their agenda.

Attack inequality directly with greater educational funding for the poor, higher minimum wages, more generous unemployment benefits, universal health care, high taxes on excessive concentrations of private wealth, caps on CEO pay, and other measures. Replace the income and social security taxes of most Americans with a carbon tax (while expanding the EITC to fight the somewhat regressive nature of a carbon tax). Research ways to make education more affordable, effective, and accessible.

If the authors are correct, doing this will not only reduce poverty, but slim our waistlines, increase our life expectancy, reduce crime rates, and cause a whole host of other social goods.

Will it work? I think it's worth a try.





* The subtitle of the UK version was, "Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better."

** Though Cuba does have some notable features which are discussed in the book. For example, it manages to have a life expectancy on par with the United States despite living in what we would consider extreme poverty. Also, it has the highest U.N. Human Development Index rating of any country which has what the World Wildlife Fund calls "a sustainable ecological footprint."

*** I believe they use the Gini coefficient, but they claim that the specific measurement used doesn't make any difference to their findings.

**** Note that we're discussing statistically significant trends in noisy data, not perfectly linear correlations where a certain amount of increase in inequality always results in a proportional increase or decrease in obesity or life expectancy. For example, New York ranks #1 in income inequality, and it's not even a close contest. Yet it has nearly the same life expectancy of Utah (the second most equal state), and a way higher life expectancy than Arkansas.

While the authors never explicitly mention it, my impression of the many, many charts is that classic "blue states" (states with strong commitment to social welfare, that traditionally vote Democratic, like California, New York, Massachusetts, and Hawaii) tend to overperform the trendline. That is to say, they seem to do better than you would expect just by looking at inequality in isolation. Southern red states seem to underperform, though Utah seems to overperform somewhat.

I'll hazard a guess about Utah: it's the Church. We have to get our sense of social unity and equality from somewhere, and for a big chunk of the Utah population, membership in the Church provides that. I saw it as a member; no matter who you were, what you did for a living, or what marks of social status you had or lacked, as long as you were an active member you had a clear path to social acceptability.

***** Written on a Mac.

Repost: I guess the future of a Master of the Universe

Specifically, the future of this guy. The missive is truly vile, and whether it was written by an actual trader or someone trying to embarrass traders, I think it comes close to the way a lot of Wall Streeters actually think of themselves. So I think he gets off easy in my version of events.

[snip]

Nor do I expect "Wall Street" to maintain his vaunted work ethic when he's earning $10-$50/hr for his efforts, and not $200-$500.

Here's how I think it might play out.

He loses his job. The collapse of Wall Street makes it impossible to find another trading position. He never set much money away because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? His girlfriend dumps him when she realizes that, without his money, he's just a kinda short, pudgy guy with a hairline that's already starting to recede.

Broken and humiliated, he moves back to his home town. He even has to live with his parents for three months while he job hunts. Finally, he manages to find a teaching position.

He soon realizes that his herculean efforts won't be rewarded with sportscars, coke-fueled orgies, or the bragging rights that come from being among the best-compensated workers in America. He figures out that he's not God's gift to the teaching profession, that try as he might he can't actually teach kids better than the middle-aged woman one classroom over. He notices that wiping the noses of third graders doesn't give him the same surge of adrenaline that he once got placing million dollar bets with other peoples' money. It dawns on him that he can't teach the kids twice as much by pounding a Red Bull and talking twice as fast. In fact, he doesn't even like his new job; most days, he'd be happy to quit, and would happily take a pay cut to be back at Goldman Sachs.

He starts thinking about how it's time to start writing that novel or taking a vacation to Europe. He notices that he has time to date. He takes up that sketching hobby that he dropped after high school, and realizes that hey, he's still got it.

He meets a girl. She's unambitious and her specialty is French literature, not corporate mergers. She's nothing like his last girlfriend, which he finds oddly refreshing. One thing leads to another. Finally, despite her misgivings, she moves in with him, and her little dog too. He thought he'd hate the dog, but soon finds out that he enjoys long walks and that "I want to be you" look that the dog gives him from time to time, the same look the waiters at those high class restaurants used to give him.

The girl drags him off to Burning Man. Amid the dust and the fire, he breaks down. The life he has been missing all these years is gone, and the new life he's stumbled into is more beautiful and more perfect than his old, unworthy ambitions deserved. He says to hell with it: he likes who he is now, and doesn't care what his old self or his old trading buddies would think.

He asks his girlfriend to marry him.

She says yes.

He's no longer a Master of the Universe. He's barely master of an unruly mob of third graders. But he's no longer consumed by the arrogance or the ambition that once caused him to write that embarrassing e-mail, so he no longer needs to be a Master. He just needs to be.

Wall Street has a uniquely unhealthy culture where money matters more than people and you're only as good as your next trade. I suspect that most of the Wall Streeters are ruthless bastards because on Wall Street, being a ruthless bastard is a mark of honor. They see themselves as the real driving force behind America's prosperity because, hey, most everyone does; everyone wants to feel like their work is important, and Wall Street Traders are no exception. They see the poor as either parasites or rubes because it's hard to sleep at night if you believe deep down that you're bilking unwary grandmothers of their pensions.

Besides, Atlas Shrugged is probably the only fiction the author has read since he got his job, and that only because everyone around him was telling him how awesome it was.

The point is, we're naturally egotistical, rationalizing creatures, and never more so than when that ego is being fueled by million dollar bonuses. It's easy to see how someone under the influence could look at their paychecks and see evidence of their innate moral worth, rather than the good fortune of having one particularly well-remunerated skillset.

Mister "We Are Wall Street," if you ever read this, I don't judge you harshly. That rant was ugly and out-of-touch, but I've written quite a few of those myself, and I know how much fun they are. Your belief that the people below depend upon your largesse, or that we should tremble to compete with you in the job market, says more about you -- or at least the culture of Wall Street -- than it does about the real world. When you decide that you can't handle another year of eighty hour work weeks, and want to try your hand at a simpler life, we welcome you to join us.

Can tweets be copyrighted?

To bring you up to speed: Guy writes numerous particles of funny (funnyons). Other guy yoinks funnyons from a bunch of people, sticks them in a shoddy book. First guy gets indignant.

I'm probably making the mistake by weighing in on this, so let me preface this by pointing out that I'm not saying that anything posted to Twitter is trivial, or that information wants to be free. Nor am I saying that the book publisher behaved appropriately.

I'm not sure whether to agree with Merlin Mann's indignation at not having his permission asked. But I'm certain that he's wrong on a couple of points of copyright law. Example:

Everybody’s stuff—even the so-called “nothings”—are still THEIR stuff. And, any decision about how that stuff gets used—especially commercially—is solely THEIR decision. That’s not negotiable. And, I’m pointing enthusiastically at several hundred years’ worth of post-Magna Carta law on this matter to back me up here.

This is simply wrong, both from a factual and a moral standpoint. First, take the music business. A radio station doesn't have to ask permission to play a track from a CD. Any regime that requires such permission gives too much power to the copyright holder. Instead, the radio station pays licensing fees, fees which are set by statute, not by negotiation with the copyright holder.

There is no system of licensing fees for tweets, but I think the analogy holds: a system that allows for people to make a nugget of thought available to the public, while allowing that person complete control of how that nugget gets used afterward, is not going to be successful or fair to all parties.

[Another responder asked whether Bartlett's Quotations would be practical under such a system. He has a good point.]

Mann also draws analogies between tweettheft and actual theft, with all the troubles attending to such a comparison.

...imagine a “charity” based on pick-pocketing, or a fast-food chain that incorporates around the model of reselling all the hamburgers and corn on the cob they can manage to steal from your backyard grill.

The fact that the victim of the tweettheft still has full use of the pilfered tweets doesn't automatically excuse the thievery, but it does strain the credibility of the analogies. All it does is promote lazy thinking about copyright law and the nature of creative works.

I think that, in order for Twitter to provide the greatest possible value as a service, we cannot think of it as a stream of billions of tiny, individually copyrighted and licensable chunks of creative work. The nature of the service (API-accessible, third-party friendly, publicly visible, RSS-ified to within an inch of its life) is such that treating it so is impractical and constraining.

Twitter also has a culture that matches the ideological stance of the code. Retweeting, republishing, and favoriting are all encouraged. Things said on Twitter are usually treated as public utterances. If you direct a tweet @cnn, there is a small chance that it will get on CNN (clearly a money-making outlet). Maybe the producers ask permission to 'retweet' on national television, but I doubt it. Moreover, I doubt they'd refer to Twitter at all if they had to, though would that really be a bad thing?

The analogy isn't great, since most people who type @cnn are actually hoping to get their thoughts on TV. But the broader point is that, if someone likes a gem they saw on Twitter, and wants to repost it elsewhere -- even in a form where it will make that person money -- there should be a limit to how much effort the person should have to invest in using it. Mann's proscription: "asking permission, negotiating a license, and paying a mutually agreeable fee to the creator," seems excessive to me.

Things get especially dicey when we start asking what constitutes "making money." I think that because in this instance the infraction is in dead-tree format and available for $5.95, it adds a measure of false clarity to what should be a murky question.

What if the 'republishing' is on my website, drawing content from one of Twitter's canonical RSS feeds? Does it make a difference if I'm using my own favorites list or freeloading off of someone else's? Does it matter if I'm monetizing my website directly? Using the site to enhance my professional reputation or to publicize works of mine that are available for pay?

The worst part is, except possibly for getting ad revenue, you can do it all without leaving the confines of twitter.com itself. If you consider your Twitter feed a part of your online presence, something that makes you money and increases your reputation, then aren't your retweets a form of content theft? Interesting retweets are a big part of the value of @timoreilly's feed, and a big incentive for me to follow him.

I'm not sure I see a bright line between selling a tweet directly, republishing a tweet on an ad-heavy blog, and using it to enhance an online presence from which you derive book sales, contract work, or other monetary gain. Someone might have to explain to me where it lies.

So if the rule for Twitter was, "do as you like, so long as you attribute the source," I think that would be perfectly equitable, and easy to comply with. A rule against commercial use, on the other hand, will lead either to a minefield strewn with limb-severing munitions of arbitrary, or a near total shutdown of the culture that makes Twitter so much fun.

Repost: On the future of education

I'm looking forward to reading DIY U by Anya Kamanetz (the author who brought us Generation Debt), after reading her interview in Salon. The letters section was at times insightful, often rancorous, and sometimes displayed the worst fruits of our current education system. I tried to step in. I figure there are some half-baked ideas in here that might be useful with a bit more time in the oven, so I'm republishing it here.

The broad themes of the letters so far

Techno-utopianism: iTunes U is gonna be great! All Web 3.0, social networked and Twitterfied, with courses straight off YouTube and papers submitted to grades.google.com.

Class warfare: Online classes are just going to be one more way for the elites to screw the working class, the way prestigious universities are now.

My job has value dammit! Mostly from cranky academic types who seem to think very poorly of the students they teach.

Kids these days: with their cell phones and their whining and their stupid, piggish faces.

Adults these days: with their lazy teaching and arbitrary grading and ridiculous salaries for telling me stuff that I could just google if I was actually interested.

Techno-dystopianism: Online classes suck. They started sucking in 1998 and will keep right on sucking until the heat death of the universe, and by the way The University of Phoenix is a perfect vacuum of suck.

It sounds like we have all the stakeholders in the room, but we're just talking past each other. I'm going to try to pull an Obama and solve the problem by throwing money at it^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W set up a common framework for the problem.

Threatened academic types: Your work does have value. But the system you work within is crippled by high costs that make your work inaccessible to many Americans, and -- given the amount of debt racked up in obtaining an education -- downright dangerous to some. We need to find ways to make your knowledge more available and allow your teaching skills to reach more people. I think technology is going to be a big part of the solution.

I doubt that anything can replace the student/teacher interaction, but technology could be used to free up your time, so you can spend it guiding specific students with specific problems.

Until the technology matures, do your students a favor and start looking for free/open source textbooks that are relevant to your classwork. You could save your students a bundle.

Online coursework haters: The online experience is only going to become more and more effective at delivering education. Those who mock the quality of online education today are repeating the mistakes of those who mocked the online shopping experience twelve years ago. Both groups look at the deficiencies of the current experience, and project them into the distant future.

Students: If you expect education to be effortless and entertaining, you're going to be disappointed. The process of rewiring your brain to take advantage of the collective wisdom of ten thousand years of human culture and civilization is an agonizing process. Nor can you expect your degree to magically grant you an exciting, fulfilling job. Life is hard, maybe harder than it ought to be, and moving classes online isn't going to change that.

I believe that 90% of the secret to happiness is learning to manage your own expectations. The other 10% is Super Monkey Ball.

Student haters: Look, we as a society have overpromised and underdelivered the future to the next generation. Grade school teachers have long motivated kids by pretending they were teaching to a room full of future presidents and astronauts. Our consumption-soaked culture has promised everyone a big house, an SUV, and if I'm parsing the subtext of commercials correctly, sex with Beyonce.

That overpromising is especially cruel to people who have drawn the short stick in the great circular firing squad of life. But it keeps people hungry, dissatisfied, and willing to work, and therefore serves our corporate masters well. Okay, starting to ramble back there. The point is, we need to build an education system that can deliver on those promises, and $8500 a semester will not do.

Yes, students need to curb their expectations and be willing to put in hard work. But as educators, you are responsible for ensuring that the education system rewards their best efforts, guides them toward the values and habits that will serve them in their later life, and doesn't cripple them with debt straight out of the gate. Right now, the education system doesn't do any of those things particularly well, and as the people who make education what it is, you need to do some self-reflection.

Class warfarers: I think the diploma-based reputation system of the past will soon be at an end. It was the best we could do with the 18th-century technology at hand. But as The Sacrosanct Sheepskin is replaced with a more nuanced, competency-based reputation system, the value of "prestige" is going to tumble. Who cares about the quality of the instruction a student received, if objective benchmarks show that he can't do what he was taught?

Note: This isn't the first time I've whinged on Salon about education.

"The line of grace now has to be horizontal"

Before Glenn Beck singlehandedly poured gasoline on his career and set it on fire, Van Jones was Obama's Green Jobs Czar.* Now, after being drummed out of the executive branch for the sin of, well, having a past wherein he said and did things, he's moved on. But he gave a very interesting interview to Grist. A couple of paragraphs really jumped out at me:

It used to be, as you went through these stages in your life, you could go to the next town and start over. The only person you were accountable to besides yourself was, if you were a person of faith, God. The line of grace was vertical, between you and your creator. Now, in this age of YouTube and Google, all of us are leaving digital bread crumbs behind of the person we used to be. Anything you do or say, some silly thing you did at a college party if somebody had a cell-phone camera, can be seen by everybody, forever. You can know more than you ever wanted to know about pretty much anybody.

It requires more wisdom of society. The line of grace now has to be horizontal. We have to learn how to forgive each other and extend a certain amount of empathy as we all grow up in front of each other. At some point, there'll be enough people who have had these "gotcha" experiences, and we'll hit a tipping point. We'll have a different level of tolerance. But it's too early. We're still too new to this, we don't have the language, customs, and rituals to be able to handle all this stupid stuff we can learn about each other.

I'm not hopeful about the prospects of developing the language and rituals. When everything you do is etched into ones and zeros, your whole past becomes, well, present. If anyone holds a grudge against another person, they can find plenty of fuel around to feed their discontent. If someone wants to tarnish a reputation, Google will lead them right to whatever they need.

If we cannot forget, are we even capable of forgiving? Maybe forgetting is a critical part of the forgiveness process.

Tired. Need to think on this. Byes.


* Technically a made-up title bestowed on him by the media.

A few health care talking points

Reposted from a Yahoo News comment, in reply to the following:

ATTENTION: Attention, all you progressive, liberal, democrat, "pretend-no-one-has-to-pay-for-anythings!!! Attention all you "the-government-will-make-my-life-better-for-me-so-I-don't-have-to-actually-be-responsible" democrat sheep!!! Try this exercise, PLEASE: STEP 1. Go back to the very beginning of these comments and read each comment and look at the votes on the postings. STEP 2. Do some SIMPLE math (you should not need your congressman to do simple math for you, right?) STEP 3. Realize that THESE very votes here--that are KILLING Obama and progressive comments--are a fore-taste of the votes you will be seeing in the next two election cycles!! RESULT: Bye-bye Democrats!!! Bye Bye One-term President!! READ the numbers and weep--you got SOCIALISM and HEALTH CARE for those who do not work and do not pay into the "system' BUT--and it is a BIG BUT: the government running it will RUIN it very quickly for the POOR and ILLEGALS TOO, AND, best of all, there is no recovery now for GUARANTEEING the dems LOSSES by this vote and government take-over.... Read the votes and WEEP!!!

Here's what I wrote back:

A few points, in no particular order:

* Yahoo is no substitute for a properly sampled, well framed survey of public opinion.

* If any party "pretends no one has to pay for anything", it is the party that A) went to war (twice) without raising the taxes needed to pay for it (twice!), B) passed two mammoth tax cuts without making the spending cuts to match it, and C) passed the highly popular prescription drug benefit without passing any unpopular tax increases to pay for it. A,B,and C were all Republican initiatives.

* Illegal aliens do not qualify for insurance subsidies under Obama's plan.

* In prior years, before Obama stole the idea, the right wing was happy with the idea of having an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Mitt Romney was a fan (and signed an individual mandate into law as governor of Massachusetts. The American Enterprise Institute (also no haven of socialism) also supported the idea.

* Polls have shown that the better people understand the health care plan, the more likely they are to like it. They have also shown that Massachusetts' Obamacare/Romneycare plan is far more popular now than when it was being passed into law.

* Honestly, the differences between Obama's plan and Romney's plan are small. In other words, only a few years ago, it was considered centrist enough that a Republican governor could put his signature to it. Now, a very similar plan is socialist?

* Prior to the passage of the main bill, most polls showed the country split on health care reform, with about a quarter of the people who opposed it being disappointed that it wasn't more "socialist" (e.g., no public option or single payer). Polling also showed that a great many of the individual elements of the plan had 80% or 90% support. So you insult my intelligence when you pretend that the will of the American people has been thwarted.

The R word

Reposted from a Boing Boing comment

The math and the history makes exact figures difficult, but the idea behind reparations is simple: Because of preferential treatment in the past, one group of people has a position of advantage over another today. Therefore, simply ending the practices that led to the advantage isn't enough.

In pre-Civil War American South, blacks were forced to spend their lives building up the wealth of others, rather than wealth for themselves. After the Civil War, well, same thing.

When the federal government gave away the bulk of the Midwest to homesteaders (and think of the amount of wealth that represents), almost no blacks benefited.

Then, when the government gave millions of WWII vets a free education through the GI Bill, black veterans had a difficult time taking advantage of the gift. The military had been desegregated, but the colleges had not.

So even if we could call ourselves a post-racial society today (we can't), some people would be entering the era of equality as unequals. Poverty is very easy to pass onto one's children, easier than wealth in some ways.

Honestly, I don't believe that formal reparations are the answer. But I think that we as a nation make only token efforts to help poor Americans prosper, or to try to include them in society. If that ever changes, I think the calls for reparations would disappear.

Are Health Savings Accounts the answer?

Indiana governor Mitch Daniels brags in the Wall Street Journal about his state's health savings account program. I'm basically undecided on the issue, but given that there were almost zero criticisms of HSAs in the comments, I just had to be the voice of discontent.


My comment:

It seems to me that health savings accounts are just another way for healthier, wealthier, younger people to partly remove themselves from insurance pools, raising premiums for those who remain. Also, I'm completely unconvinced by Daniels' claim that HSA participants aren't generating their savings in part by going without important medical care.

For those of you claiming that Obama is only skeptical of HSAs because "he loves statism," please read a bit of how HSA opponents actually think. Also, congressional testimony of another skeptic.

Numerous studies indicate that, while consumers who bear a greater proportion of their medical costs use less health services, they are almost as likely to pass on medically necessary procedures as they are on wasteful ones. I'm sure a doctor or nurse would make an outstandingly savvy consumer of health services. The rest of us, not so much.

I do have to congratulate WSJ for having an unusually high-quality comments section. Yes, it's 95% free-marketeers, but they're articulate, and seem to be managing their ODS pretty well.

Corporations

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace, and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption will follow, and the money power will endeavor to prolong it's reign by preying upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated into a few hands and the Repubic is destroyed."

- Abraham Lincoln Some guy impersonating Abraham Lincoln

From this we learn 1) that Lincoln was a broody guy, 2) that Republican party today doesn't resemble the Party of Lincoln in the least, and 3) that ours is an endless struggle.


Update: Never mind. The quote is a fraud. I mean, it's a danged good quote, but there is no evidence that it has anything to do with Lincoln.