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Thursday, July 10, 2008
Educated into Astonishing Ignorance
“If you don’t like it, why doncha leave?"
So I’ve been camping out in Stan Katz’s corner of the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” for about 24 hours, off and on. Completely hogging the comments section: there are 45 comments, and maybe 8 of them are long-windedly mine. (It’s still going on, and you may want to get in on the conversation--as good an opportunity as any to have your ideas about the “job market” rattled a bit.)
Anyway, it drives me bonkers, the crazy things that folks--who obviously think they’re both educated and bright--have to say about “the economy.”
If I were an economist, I’d be appalled at just how badly we were doing at teaching folks anything. For instance, check out Sgt Rock, an engineering prof, below. He thinks he understands economic reality very well.
Thing is, I spend a fair amount of time with people who aren’t humanities profs--schoolteachers, printers, maids, engineers, flight attendants, telephone linemen and call center managers, to name a few. They often have pretty good ideas about culture--thanks to their humanities profs or the schoolteachers trained by same. They often have a decent level of critical media literacy.
But among the Americans, they generally have a pretty poor understanding of economics. Often while thinking that they understand economic reality with total lucidity. Is that because they get their economics from the tube and the newspapers? Or is it because of the disciplinary situation of economics in the university? (The “post-autistic” and other dissenting economists generally feel overwhelmed.) I dunno.
Here’s an example. In response to someone I’d been a bit hard on, I explained:
In this unmoderated forum, we get a ton of trolls, especially of the managerial or fourth-hand armchair-neoclassical-economist variety. (“Well, if you don’t like it, why doncha leave? Go where the Market will pay ya, hyuk, hyuk”).
Yielding this response:
Sorry Marc, now you’re playing the troll. You’re obviously not an economist. But if you want to be the voice of morality for the academic world, you need to answer a very basic question. If it’s that bad, why do they keep doing the job? Why do they choose this career?
Economics is based on common sense. Unlike what humanities profs all believe, there is thinking ability outside the humanities. Just because the question is one you don’t want to think about does not make someone posting the question a troll.
Oh the horrors! We should try to answer economic questions using basic economic theory!
A little provoked by the fact that this anonymous interlocutor was caricaturing “what humanities profs all believe,” arrogating all “common sense” to economists, not to mention ignoring what I and a number of posters had previously (and frequently elsewhere) written in answer to the imaginary trump card he was throwing down ("If it’s that bad, why do they keep doing the job? Why do they choose this career?") I replied a bit on the tart side:
“Economics is based on common sense… We should try to answer questions using basic economic theory!”
In reality, as opposed to economic models constructed for one’s market-fundamentalist paymasters, the vast majority of human beings act pro-socially, and against their individual interest. Especially when they are removed a few iotas from fear and desperation.
The “autistic” greed-pigs among us and their paid enablers—the purveyors of “basic economic theory!”—need to see their piggery as the simple, inevitable, product of justice and right. But it’s actually the complex, far from inevitable result of centuries of jealous, callous struggle to maintain the power and wealth of the owning class.
As Warren Buffett likes to say, “There’s class war all right. And the rich are winning.”
Young people still line up to enter grad school because other alternatives have been foreclosed. Professionalism is steadily less of an “escape” from working-class experience, and working-class experience is of growing immiseration.
People stay in graduate school because there’s a chance they’ll be luckier than the others (and there are still few alternatives). Or else they leave and join one of the alternatives—typically management, like choosing to be a police officer instead of being a miner. Unless they have family wealth or another source of income, in which case they might afford to be a social worker or a teacher, etc.
People work contingently because they hope, or because they can afford to—they’ve married a manager, inherited money, etc.
People struggle on wages lower than those of bartenders despite years of education because they don’t know what else to do, and the job is often at least as pleasant as bartending.
But why don’t they act rationally and organize?
Well. Often the law is rigged against them, in the most labor-hostile “industrial democracy” on the planet. So is public opinion (filled up with the nonsense of your “basic economic theory” in the one of the most educated-into-ignorance populations in history. And they face the opposition of powerful, numerous, well-paid administrations and the crude, ignorant, self-interested piggery of many fellow profs in the “market-smart and mission-centered” disciplines.
So, troll-boy: Nope, I’m not an economist. Neither is Nelson, Berube, Rich Moser, Joe Berry, Eileen Schell, or a dozen others. But we’ve described the system of academic labor better than any neoclassically-trained econometrist, including William Bowen. And I’ve explained why. In a book with big words.
So get off your pseudonymous self-congratulatory flame-baiting troll’s ass and read. You can read over a hundred pages in free pdf at my site, in case you’re having trouble making payments on your Beamer.
Then if you want to have a grown-ups’ informed debate, I’ll meet you anywhere, anytime. With cameras. To debate all the economics you want.
So I wasn’t very nice. But as I said, I was more than a little provoked by being patted on the head like a nice little humanities prof playing with brightly-colored objects.
So then this genius--"Sgt. Rock"-- writes in:
Thanks Marc (post #40). I’m quite glad to find out that fundamental laws of economics don’t apply to History PhDs. Further, I’m thrilled to hear your many reason why they don’t apply.
Right now, students with a BS in Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering that my little school produces start at $55K-$70K per year and most of them have multiple job offers. When the economy slows down, the demand for my graduates declines and it’s a little harder for them to find jobs. We recognize that our graduates are valued according to the fundamental law of supply and demand and we tell them so and — fortunately for us — these laws of basic economics seem to work pretty well.
Maybe there is a simple lesson here that might apply to History and other humanities. I’m not sure because I’m just a simple engineer and we don’t spend too much time talking about class wars and the like.
— Sgt. Rock · Jul 10, 10:32 AM · #
I’m sure I could have handled this confessedly “simple” fellow better, but here’s what I wrote.
Yes, Sgt. Rock. Good for you. Glad what appears to you and your educated-into-astonishing-ignorance cronies as the “fundamental laws of supply and demand” (read much? even in economics? clearly not) work as a proxy for quality of life & justice for the very small group of people you spend time with and care about—you know, those folks who are actually proud that they “don’t spend too much time talking about class wars and the like”.
Too bad the “fundamental laws” of your reality-bubble don’t work so well for the rest of the country (which you’d know, if you, uh, read anything outside of your discipline—including even some neoclassical economists).
Funny how your “fundamental laws” don’t seem to apply to the rest of the world. Where there are plenty of places where the “fundamental laws” are those of reasonable degrees of equality, guarantees of justice, and educations that allow the citizens to have both the brains—and the time— to talk about social class “and the like.”
Anyway. Econ profs? Really? You can’t do any better than produce a “Sgt Rock”? Is that the best you can do? Maybe you need a bit more dissent in there.
Next week, or the week after--I might take a week off from y’all, since I’m getting crusty--I’ll take this up with the aid of the labor correspondent for the New York Times.
Stephen Greenhouse’s imperfect but vivid and helpful new book, The Big Squeeze, leaves out academia, but shows how all the doltish, piggish, pathological “innovation” by university quality management is part and parcel with what’s happening to everyone else.
Only it’s happening--as I point out in my book, and he overlooks--more vigorously to those of us working in higher ed.
For reasons worth thinking about.
Comments
If you can adopt the belief that the production and distribution of wealth work by a kind natural law, you are relieved of collective political responsibility for what happens and are free to do what you believe to be in your best interests without a further thought.
Here’s a good example of where that’s got us.
http://kontentkonsultvideo.blogspot.com/ (scroll down to the documentary on the American suburb.
Does it really do any good to try to educate these people? When they discover the real elite they identify with, believe they are part of, aren’t any more on their side than residents of the 9th Ward--they may be more open to questioning their pet assumptions.
Rational argument and evidence are no match against the kind of delusional thinking that makes a person feel safe--one doesn’t give up those believes without powerful compensation--and not in the absence of a real person representing what are otherwise merely abstractions--rhetorical games.
The great weakness of internet discussion.