The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money

I have been reading this book by Bryan Caplan, mainly because I agree with its title, but I was barely able to convince myself to finish it, because I found the contents boring. Caplan is an economist and a professor at George Mason University, near Washington, D.C., and he seems to be a budding policy wonk. As I often say, American academics tend to write poorly, and economists are among the worst. This book is stuffed with charts and data that I don't think are necessary to make his main point, which is very simple: higher education, as it is presently structured, is a waste of money. That is something I've been thinking about for many years, and I've already mentioned it on this blog a few times. 

I sort of fit the data that Caplan brings up. I went to college after high school, because that was what you were supposed to do. No one actually encouraged me to go, and I had a good time and studied whatever I liked for four years. After a brief stint in graduate school, I decided that I would never be a philosophy professor, and I delivered pizzas for a few months. My mother-in-law then sent me the catalog of a local vocational college, and I looked through it. Becoming an electrician, welder or printer seemed attractive, and I gravitated toward printing, since it is associated with books and knowledge. I also have some mechanical abilities and thought that running a printing press might be fun. I started the program in the autumn of 1976 and finished in December, 1977, graduating at the top of my class. I immediately got a job in January, 1978 as the supervisor in a small print shop at Indiana State University. I continued working in the printing industry in Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois until I retired in September, 2007.

Caplan's main point is that what is studied in four-year college programs isn't practical, because it only produces a few vocational skills that provide about twenty percent of its value. However, a four-year degree has a "signaling" value that he thinks accounts for about eighty percent of its value. The signaling says that you are probably a more competent and reliable person than someone with a lesser education, and employers accept this. I agree that this is an inefficient process, and that it would be more effective to use college funding differently. In other respects, Caplan seems primarily to be a simple-minded libertarian who opposes governmental waste. He does not make specific recommendations regarding how current educational spending should be reallocated. Implicitly, he sounds a lot like a Reaganite who wants to put an end to "big government."

Returning to my own story, I did feel that my educational process was unnecessarily haphazard. There was no orderly procedure at any point regarding what I ought to consider doing. I was not unusual, because, as Caplan points out, very few undergraduate majors are directly linked to careers. Of the four undergraduate philosophy majors I knew, two became lawyers, one became an architect and one worked mainly in fast food. A specific problem that I had was that I was always better-educated than my peers and often better-educated than my boss. This occasionally led to work tensions. It didn't help that I got a part-time M.B.A. from a highly-rated program. However, on a personal level, the M.B.A. was beneficial to me because it was the first time that I had ever thought about the capitalist structure of American society, and I began to plan the remainder of my career and retirement when I was thirty-six.

In other respects, as an intellectual work, based on my extended readings, I think that Caplan's book is a complete failure. He is aware that some people have genetic advantages with respect to their academic success, but he never explores this fact. Also, though he seems to be aware of behavioral economics, his thinking in this book more closely resembles the obsolete "rational agent" model of economics. More significantly, he is myopic about the future of work. A lot of social turmoil is emerging now, I think, due to automation. This is a problem that isn't going to go away, and I think that the solution will eventually have to be basic income – probably another waste of money as far as many libertarians are concerned. Although Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, seems to have been forgotten after the initial fanfare, the only realistic solution is probably going to be a reversal of the wealth distribution that he critiqued. Currently, several billionaires are rallying around Donald Trump because they like things the way they are. 

On a more subjective level, I reject Caplan's approach because I don't really identify with capitalism. Having been steeped for years in the works of E.O. Wilson, Frans de Waal and Robert Sapolsky, I'm coming out as a hunter-gatherer. Typically, hunter-gatherers had no formal educations and were never paid wages. Furthermore, I think that all of the useless books that I've read over the years have enriched me personally, and my aesthetic sense is more important to me than my bank account. So far, I've only worked for about forty-three percent of my life, and I'm hoping to get that down to thirty-three. Twenty-two years to go!

Popular Nonfiction May Distract from Better Ideas

Recently, I temporarily switched from reading accessible nonfiction books that are popular among educated readers to newly-published books issued by academic presses. One was from Cambridge and two were from M.I.T. As a matter of curiosity, I've been following their reception to see what kind of reactions they've evoked. Understandably, Paleolithic Europe, by Jennifer C. French, isn't attracting much attention, because it costs a lot and is specifically intended for an academic audience. However, I am surprised by the tepid response to Born Knowing, by Giorgio Vallortigara, and Reason and Less, by Vinod Goel, because they are not directed exclusively toward academic readers, aren't as expensive and include important findings in scientific research that I think have significant applications in the field of human cognition, not on a purely theoretical basis, but regarding the workings of cognitive functions that are evident in everyone's daily life. Of course, this kind of reaction is to be expected and corresponds with what I've said about the publishing industry. You won't necessarily make much money from good ideas, but you can usually make a lot of money by carefully promoting mediocre or bad ones simply by using existing commercial channels.

Born Knowing, I think, is relevant to a wide range of disciplines. At the most basic level, it shows how the neurological systems of all animals, both simple and complex, are the product of evolution, and, as such, are related primarily to survival and reproductive success and do not necessarily mirror what we might think of as objective reality. Our neurological systems mediate between us and the world. Although Vallortigara does not focus on human cognition, I think that he goes a long way toward refuting some of the ideas that are still popular among some philosophers. He seems inadvertently to be reviving Kant's concept of phenomena and noumena. In particular, I think that his findings can be construed as a refutation of Plato's Theory of Forms, and, more generally, of the objectivity of mathematics. In a way, he dovetails with Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and I think that this has enormous implications for what we think counts as objective knowledge. The book also makes clear that language is not necessary for rudimentary thinking, specifically in arithmetic and geometry. I would go a step further than Vallortigara and say that the reason why mathematics currently seems inadequate for solving the fundamental problems of physics could be that mathematics is an aspect of our neurological makeup and not something fundamental to nature. Organisms like us did not evolve to perform such tasks, and our neurological features may limit our capacities in that respect.

Reason and Less, for me, is valuable in a less theoretical sense, because it discusses our actual brain function. As I said in my comments about it, it provides a practical basis for critiquing public decision-making processes so as to minimize cognitive errors. I found Goel's model more useful than Daniel Kahneman's, as presented in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Goel shows how irrationality is intractably linked to rationality in the structure of the human brain, whereas Kahneman mistakenly, I think, suggests that, with the proper rewards and coaching, poor decisions can be minimized. Kahneman does not seem to recognize how cognitive dysfunction is endemic to humans, and that there is no such thing as a quick fix for this problem. In my view, Goel's model is more appropriate than Kahneman's at the policy level, because it takes into account the fact that the policymakers themselves are subject to the same kinds of errors as the people whom they are attempting to assist.

The point of this post, then, is that important findings such as those published by Vallortigara and Goel can easily become buried in the media and never get the attention that they deserve. At the same time, less significant ideas such as those put forward by Daniel Kahneman and pundits like Steven Pinker get all of the attention. Of course, there is always the chance that, over time, the better ideas of obscure academics will be promoted in academia and make their way to public consciousness. However, as the publishing system currently works, this can hardly be considered an efficient process. Thinking, Fast and Slow became a bestseller and made Kahneman a household name, while no one has heard of Vinod Goel. Similarly, Steven Pinker is one of the best-known public intellectuals in the world, while Giorgio Vallortigara remains an obscure researcher. Unsurprisingly, Kahneman published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Pinker with Penguin. These publishers have far larger production runs than the academic presses, and their purpose is to make money, not to promote good ideas. I suppose that this is just the way that the world works and is to be expected, but I still find it annoying that there are people out there who have good ideas which never make it into public consciousness, while lesser works dominate the media year after year. It is important to keep in mind that, at any given time, the ideas promoted by leading public intellectuals may be inferior to ones that are already circulating in smaller circles.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics II

The second half of the book was not particularly exciting to me, but it was interesting in the sense of learning how a new academic discipline came into existence. Debate about behavioral economics within the economics profession began at a meeting at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of rationalist economists, in 1985. Thaler and a few others started to organize seminars and recruit new researchers, and by the 1990's behavioral economics had become a recognized field. Early topics focused on finance, where research indicated that the efficient market hypothesis, which had been academic dogma for several decades, was incorrect. Later, Thaler's research moved to irrational behavior in NFL draft selections, game shows and other areas. Finally, there was an intersection between behavioral economics and behavioral law when Thaler teamed up with Cass Sunstein, the law professor, and wrote the book Nudge, which was published in 2008 and became a bestseller. The thesis of Nudge is that behavioral research can be used to produce better public policies and improve individual behavior in ways that are beneficial to the public at large.

Perhaps what interests me the most about the book is the late admission by economists that human behavior is not rational. I had always held the economics profession in low regard, and that was one of the reasons. Another reason was that, while I was an undergraduate student in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the default major for unimaginative upper-middle-class males seemed to be economics, while my friends tended to major in philosophy and the arts, and I considered them more intelligent and less conformist. Then, while I was in graduate business school in the 1980's, the two economics classes that I took made no sense to me, because the rational agent basis for economics was still accepted without question and no allowance was made for the considerations later addressed by behavioral economists. Even though the M.B.A. program that I was in was highly rated, I thought that the faculty lacked real intellectual talent. As I became involved in my own investments, it became apparent to me, based on observation of the stock market, that financial markets could not possibly be efficient. To this day the efficient market hypothesis is still widely accepted by economists, and it provides part of the conceptual basis for index funds. Sabine Hossenfelder, the theoretical physicist whose book I discussed a year ago, confirmed my opinion of economists when she said that economics is a fallback field for physicists, because the math is easier and the pay is higher.

Although I am not a great fan of Richard Thaler, I thought that he acquitted himself very well in the final chapter. Given the dogmatic nature of his field, it took some doing to introduce behavioral concepts, and this may never have happened without Thaler, Kahneman and Tversky. In the end, unlike most economists, Thaler is a strong advocate of empirical research in economics and hopes to extend behavioral research into macroeconomics. When you review the circumstances that produced the Great Recession, it is easy to see how the misguided triumphalism of well-known economists such as Alan Greenspan facilitated a major economic disaster only eleven years ago. Nevertheless, behavioral economics is nowhere near providing a comprehensive economic program. Perhaps my main criticism of Thaler is that, while he is modest and self-deprecating and has helped expand his field, he still pays homage and fealty to the status quo in his advocacy of "libertarian paternalism," which, though it encourages rational behavior, seems implicitly to preserve elements of a hierarchy which places so-called rational agents, i.e., economists, at the top of the pecking order. Libertarian paternalism incorporates distinctly American pro-capitalist elements and presumes that a meritocracy of superior individuals, who would by definition become wealthy, would work to help less-capable people by designing systems to make them behave more rationally.

In this vein, I was surprised that the book made no mention of Thomas Piketty, who is a macroeconomist whose work is also based on empirical data. Although at times Thaler shows some socialistic affinities, he usually tows the line as a loyal capitalist. Capitalism, in my view, is an ideological fantasy that is on its way out. Socialism is another ideology with its own set of problems and a history of failure, but I think that some version of it will become inevitable as technology renders human labor obsolete. I don't know whether Piketty or other economists will collectively come up with a system that works well for future generations, but at the moment the wealth tax proposed by Piketty seems like a sensible approach. In the real world, a system such as libertarian paternalism is more likely to produce a plutocracy than a well-balanced democracy. At the moment, populist movements throughout the world seem to be fueled in part by public resentment of "elites" such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In the case of Obama, racism no doubt plays a role, but it is noteworthy that Obama is a friend of Cass Sunstein and seems to like the idea of libertarian paternalism. One might argue that those who adopt libertarian paternalism are engaging in a current form of politically correct social climbing and in reality may not have much to offer the public. Obama's political career, in my view, was mostly a failure.

To sum up, Thaler's introduction of behavioral research to economics was positive in the sense that it added not only an emphasis on empirical evidence but also an element of altruism, both of which had been in short supply in economics. However, Thaler seems timid in his advocacy of altruism, which was and still is anathema to the thinking of many economists, particularly in the Chicago school. The fact remains that, in their profession, economists are often obfuscators and apologists for wealthy and unscrupulous benefactors. Some of them even subscribe to the idiotic ideas of Ayn Rand. There is an implicit elitism and selfishness among economists who believe that they are part of the select few who make rational choices and deserve to be rewarded accordingly.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics I

I'm halfway through this book by Richard Thaler, which was published in 2015. Thaler is an economist and one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. Economics is not an especially interesting topic for me, and I generally prefer macroeconomics, such as that found in Thomas Piketty's Capital, to more circumscribed areas such as this. I am making an exception for Thaler in order to understand behavioral economics better. The book is partly autobiographical, and it describes the development of his career starting in 1970 up to the present. That adds a dimension in that you can see many of the pitfalls of academic life, which relates to my interest in the sociology of academia.

Early in his career, Thaler noticed that the actual decision-making processes used by people are often not rational in the sense that economists understand the term. There are different schools of economic thought, but the predominant one in the twentieth century entailed the idea that humans are rational agents who collectively make rational choices with respect to maximizing utility. This means that people usually make optimal choices regarding whatever it is that they value, and economists have traditionally focused on their financial decisions. From an economic standpoint, it is mathematically convenient to assume that people are rational, because that allow economists to predict collective human behavior with relatively straightforward mathematical tools.

The early behavioral economists conducted simple experiments like the ones described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, demonstrating unequivocally that human decisions are often not rational in a quantitative sense. Thaler collaborated with Kahneman, Amos Tversky and others, and behavioral economics arose as a bridge between the academic disciplines of economics and psychology. In Thaler's language, Kahneman's "fast" or "System 1" thinking very roughly corresponds with Thaler's "Human," and Kahneman's "slow" or "System 2" thinking very roughly corresponds with Thaler's "Econ." Humans are fuzzy thinkers and Econs are ultra-rational. There are many examples of people arriving at answers that are mathematically or logically incorrect. Thaler differs somewhat from Kahneman in his search for what might be called extenuating circumstances or non-numerical values that affect how actual decisions are made. One example involves the way that Uber's pricing algorithm can alienate consumers. Uber increases fares automatically when the number of passengers in a particular area goes up and there is an insufficient number of drivers available. It is possible for fares to become ten times the normal rate. This formula can backfire when customers believe that they were treated unfairly and when anti-gouging laws provoke lawsuits. In the past, economists favored the Econ types for all of their models, because that type makes purely rational decisions based on maximizing value, which in most cases means money. Thaler in particular helped demonstrate that factors having nothing to do with maximization go into the decisions that most people make. In other respects, Thaler's discussion covers some familiar concepts such as confirmation bias and the endowment effect, the latter indicating that people value things that are currently in their possession more highly than they ought to rationally.

Reading about Thaler's career, you get a sense of how one might fail in academia. In his early years, he was conflicted between making enough money to support his family and pursuing his area of interest in research, which, at the time, was barely on the fringes of economics and was frowned upon by most economists. If he hadn't met Kahneman and Tversky and a few others and participated in research with them, behavioral economics may have remained an undeveloped field. As it turned out, it took off and has produced several Nobels. In this book, Thaler seems like a very ordinary sort of person with plebeian interests, and one can readily imagine him finishing off his career teaching traditional economics in a humdrum economics department somewhere. It is even possible that he would never have obtained tenure and may have switched to a different career.

Though my enthusiasm for the book is limited, I am holding out for the later chapters that cover the uses of behavioral economics for social benefit. Since I have visitors arriving soon, it will take me a while to finish, but I will eventually make another post.

Town and Gown

One of the reasons why I chose to retire to Middlebury was that it has some similarities to the town where I attended college, namely, Greencastle, Indiana. Greencastle is also a rural county seat, and DePauw University is about the same size as Middlebury College. There were things that I liked about DePauw, but I wouldn't want to live in Greencastle again. I still have some connections in Indiana, but none of my relatives live there, it is a right-wing state, the educational level is low, the terrain isn't interesting and it gets hot there during the summer. Middlebury and its vicinity are much prettier and more rural, the people are better educated, the cultural amenities are superior, and so is the college. Actually, it would be fine with me if I never returned to Indiana again.

My first year at DePauw was almost a magical experience for me. I set off on a train by myself to college, sight unseen, from Manhattan, with a trunk and a reel-to-reel tape recorder in August of 1968. My father, the drunk, drove me to the station and symbolically gave me an acorn to plant when I arrived. In those days, prior to the closing of the rail line, Greencastle was a whistle stop, and I had to tell the conductor when to stop the train. It seemed as if I were in the middle of a cornfield, because that was about all you could see, and the old train station had long been abandoned. I left my belongings unattended by the tracks, walked toward town, came across a drugstore and called a cab. As colleges go, DePauw wasn't as bad as it might have been, and living in that environment was nirvana to me after living with a dysfunctional family in a suburb that had become an enclave for social climbers. Knowing that fraternities were idiotic, I elected to live in a dorm. I met many of the international and out-of-state students, so at first it didn't occur to me that the majority of the students were dull Hoosiers or the children of wealthy families from the Chicago suburbs. I was just elated to live in a place where ideas seemed to matter and most of the people I ran into didn't seem like fools. Unfortunately, I was later hoodwinked into marrying one of the dull Hoosiers, and the rest is history.

No doubt there were some town and gown disputes while I lived in Greencastle, but I wasn't aware of them at the time. DePauw is a Greek-dominated college with lots of rowdy fraternities. Things changed considerably while I was there, and by the time I left most of the students looked like hippies and smoked pot, though beneath the surface they were still conservative Midwesterners who ended up becoming accountants and lawyers. DePauw was originally associated with the Methodist Church, but Middlebury had no church affiliation and was created by townspeople who felt a need for an institution of higher learning. If you fast forward to today, there are some town and gown disputes in Middlebury, but they seem to be minor.

The relationship between town and gown has gradually become clearer to me. The townspeople are just ordinary people earning a living, and the college is populated by professors who generally know far less than I once attributed to them. As I've said, professors are usually just good students who wind up teaching college, and in hindsight I don't think I learned much from them. I used to be annoyed by the fact that my college experience wasn't well thought out and that no one at the college took any responsibility. I would have been OK with DePauw if anyone had said that with my curriculum I would receive some intellectual stimulation and have a good time, but that I would eventually have to learn something more useful to earn a living. I did eventually study printing and business, which proved sufficient to finance the rest of my life, but the process would have been far more efficient if I had gone into it knowing that I would be doing a few years of broad study followed by a few years of vocational study, and that the two would not necessarily intersect. I only found this out on my own over a long period without any help. If I knew then what I know now, I would not have expected to be prepared for the workforce when I finished college and would have selected an actual vocation before receiving my B.A. degree. At the time, the people at liberal arts colleges were mindlessly repeating the mantra that they were teaching you how to think critically and communicate well, which supposedly would leave you set for the rest of your life. In retrospect it was a lie, because throughout my working years critical thinking and communication skills were far less important than following instructions and conforming. If anything, my liberal arts education made me more incompatible with the American workforce than I might have been otherwise, because the ability to think independently is a handicap in most jobs. My undergraduate experience turned out to be a personal growth period with no practical advantages. I now view many of my former professors as vaguely incompetent adults who should never have been given the charge of vulnerable minds.

The town and gown here are fairly well integrated, and most conflicts are quickly resolved. It helps that the college has a billion-dollar endowment and doesn't balk at spending it to keep the downtown looking respectable, which makes it appealing to the wealthy students they seek. Some of the students are so rich that they could live off their trust funds and never work. There are cases in which the town and gown have literally merged. After he graduated from Middlebury in 1972, future governor Jim Douglas married his dentist's assistant, Dorothy, a woman who grew up on a farm here. She still does all the yard work (and probably all of the home repairs) and he now works as an executive in residence at the college. We have no affiliation with the college and are just as likely to oppose it as support it, depending on the issue. Recently we opposed the use of a neighbor's house for student housing, since Middlebury students have a reputation for drunkenness and loud parties. On that issue we sided with the local bubbas, who stopped by our house in a large pickup truck to tell us that there would be shooting practice next door to the students' house early in the morning after a Halloween party there. Although I sympathize with students who want to live off campus – I lived off campus myself for two out of four years – I'd rather not have them living around here.

We have many affinities with the college. Occasionally we attend concerts and lectures, and the art museum isn't bad for a small college. We attended the wedding reception of one of our neighbors, who is an economics professor. Her children had been over for some stargazing. The college has an enormous economic impact on the county, and I think of it as comparable to a large manufacturing plant, but with a highly-educated workforce. We're not close friends with any of the faculty, but I think they add to the desirability of the region. Last September, when my daughter and grandson were visiting, we happened to be seated next to Jay Parini and his wife at a restaurant. Parini is a well-known English professor who was a friend of the late Gore Vidal. His wife struck up a conversation with my daughter about babies. I like that informality. If the college wasn't here, this would be an economically depressed county with far less cultural vibrancy than it currently possesses.

Intellectual Stimulation

It is probably true of my readers that, like me, they seek a certain amount of intellectual stimulation. Working and other day-to-day pursuits have always seemed a little repetitious to me; in a way they seem like biding time, and I get a sense that I should be figuring things out better rather than plodding along mindlessly in a routine. There is a tendency in society to reward people for going with the flow and not thinking too much, as in "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous" (Julius Caesar). Life is easier for the employers of docile and compliant workers, and jobs keep people off the streets, where they might commit crimes, join gangs or foment political unrest. I see the American Dream as part of a thought control conspiracy that works better than communist propaganda ever did. In the 1960's, people used to jokingly say "America, land of the home, free of the brave." "Maggie's Farm," by Bob Dylan, has been my theme song ever since I first heard it in 1965. The song ends with these lines:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

Dylan's old rebelliousness still appeals to me, but I parted company with him long ago when it became apparent that he has no interest in ideas and in every way is an anti-intellectual. Although I didn't end up in a career that required much brainpower myself, I have always been interested in ideas and have found it somewhat of a challenge to get intellectual stimulation. Some of the difficulty had to do with living in places like Terre Haute, Indiana and Dixon, Illinois, but even college towns and urban areas seemed to have their limitations. My friends and acquaintances from college were more mentally alert than my co-workers, but you could hardly consider them stimulating conversationalists. Thus I turned to books, periodicals and trips to Europe for my mental health.

Since the 1980's, besides reading a variety of books, I've gone on and off the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, each several times. Currently, besides the Times Literary Supplement and Nature I get most of my journalistic reading from 3 Quarks Daily. I've now had it with the Times Literary Supplement again and am giving up on Nature because most of its articles have very narrow ranges and are extremely technical. I'm going to switch to Boston Review and Nautilus based on a few articles of theirs that I've read. I prefer reading printed pages to screens, and that isn't likely to change. Although I'm fairly happy with 3 Quarks Daily, it doesn't feature many in-depth articles and doesn't come in print. I've mainly given up on Internet discussions, but may still make posts from time to time. In addition to this I continue to read about astronomy, which is literally and figuratively a huge topic.

I seem to have a love-hate relationship with intellectuals. On the one hand they are the best-read people around and have the potential to enlighten you on a variety of topics, but on the other hand they tend to be careerist hacks who don't have an original idea in their heads and use whatever knowledge they possess to divert attention from the fact that they don't know anything important and in most respects behave like trained monkeys. After reading them for years, I find that the literary magazines consist mostly of obscure articles that function much like reality TV for PhDs, in which you might learn, for example, that such-and-such eighteenth century literary figure had a difficult relationship with his wife, which subsequently led to an affair with such-and-such contessa. Whether the literary figure's writing was worth reading in the first place doesn't often come up, and in most instances it probably wasn't worth reading then and is even less worth reading now. You begin to feel as if these articles are parlor games for the damned living in hell. I am lucky to find one in ten articles in literary magazines remotely interesting.

A topic that I tend to avoid is politics, which is quite popular among educated people. I quickly lose interest in these types of discussions, because, as I've said, I don't think that either democracy or capitalism are viable on a long-term basis, and most of this discussion takes them for granted. The so-called left likes democracy, and the so-called right likes capitalism, and there has been no progress on this in my lifetime. I had hopes that scientific people would be an improvement over humanities people, but, while as a group they seem more honest and more likely to find usable solutions to the problems facing mankind, they are locked into a constraining career hierarchy that limits their ability to effect change for the better. There seem to be stupid turf wars over money in research and academia that inhibit the production and implementation of useful ideas on all fronts. The literary and intellectual magazines seem as if they are offshoots of academia that share its weaknesses while adding some of their own, such as selecting articles that will keep them afloat financially whether or not they contain any good ideas.

My hope is that there are more Tony Judts and Czeslaw Miloszes out there who will one day eloquently address the issues of our time, but finding them now seems more difficult than ever.

Good and Evil are Social Constructs

If you follow American news, you will have noticed the popularity of the word "evil" among politicians. George W. Bush liked to use the phrase "axis of evil" in reference to states that support terrorism. Barack Obama vowed to destroy ISIS's "brand of evil" and called the beheading of Peter Kassig by ISIS "pure evil." Between countries, this kind of language works both ways, and it was Ayatollah Khomeini who started the present trend in 1979 by calling the U.S. "the great Satan." For someone like me, who is not religious and doesn't believe in the objectivity of moral systems, this is in turn annoying and amusing. In academic circles, where ethics is studied as a subject, we are theoretically supposed to be able to resolve these kinds of differences, but I think it is impossible given the current literature, which is written by philosophers more often than by scientists. In political circles, conjuring "evil" is akin to calling for "patriotism," which, as Samuel Johnson put it, is "the last refuge of a scoundrel."

In my conceptual scheme, morality, good and evil are nothing more than manifestations of our genetic and cultural predispositions to behave eusocially. We have a vague sense of wanting to help and cooperate with other members of our group, and in the absence of any obvious justification for this we make up moral theories and ascribe authority to imaginary supernatural beings. The truth is that there is nothing that intrinsically binds all of humanity together, and one of the greatest challenges that we are currently facing is how to trick ourselves into thinking that we all belong to the same group. Thus, when political leaders call foreigners names, they are inadvertently perpetuating world strife. There aren't many options here, because even if, for example, ISIS is a deranged group of mindless murderers, we are not convincing them that their belief system is incorrect. They are equally determined to prove to us that ours is the one that is defective, and there is no higher authority recognized by both sides to mediate the conflict.

When you look at our animal past, all of this chest pounding and violence is easy to understand; it is so easy to understand that no explanation is required. Especially within the political sphere, where politicians vie for public support, the appeal to the lowest common denominator usually prevails. What bothers me more is how intellectuals insinuate themselves into these kinds of decisions and, while pretending to shower us with the benefits of their knowledge, they often only add an unnecessary layer of obfuscation if not outright falsehood. The fact is that most of the thinking about morality in the West can be traced directly to Christianity, and even if grains of truth can be found there, it is essentially one worldview among many and has no particular claim to validity in the universe of belief systems. A more plausible approach, I think, involves recognizing our animal natures, abrogating religion, and shifting the dialogue to empirical research about human nature and plausible methods of conflict resolution. It seems to me that in the West, particularly the U.S., a more conscious effort is needed to break away from the "Christian values" mentality that permeates everything from politics, law and academia to the media.

You've probably heard the term "situation ethics," and I propose as an alternative the idea of "situation atheism," which, if you define atheism as the absence of any historical belief system, might offer a value-neutral way to arbitrate conflicts between groups when cultural beliefs are a primary contributing factor. The idea would be for groups that don't see eye-to-eye to find solutions that optimize outcomes for each group while eliminating all factors from consideration that relate to beliefs. Thus, for example, ISIS might be given land somewhere in the world where their members might practice their religion as they chose as long as they did not violate international law. The U.S. and its allies would agree to the same and not attack ISIS as long as ISIS held to the terms of the agreement. Thereafter, each party could, if it so chose, live according to whatever belief system it favored, no matter how bizarre or ludicrous. An experiment along these lines has already been done with the State of Israel.

My hope is that culturally and theologically neutral super-intelligent computers will one day arbitrate major human conflicts using algorithms which may then be beyond our comprehension. Unfortunately, animals that we are, it is difficult for us to expunge nonsense from our decision-making processes. In the meantime we will have to continue listening to our theoreticians and political leaders spouting out useless or crowd-pleasing nonsense.

Skepticism

I have always had a somewhat anti-authoritarian, divergent way of thinking about a variety of subjects. In graduate school I was chastised by a professor for ridiculing some of Aristotle's views in a paper I wrote. Although I didn't study much science or pursue it as a career, I have preserved a level of scientific skepticism throughout my life. For this reason I was delighted to see that Steven Weinberg, the theoretical physicist, also exhibits a healthy skepticism regarding the works of Plato and Aristotle. Within the context of the history of science, he views them as poets rather than as scientists or mathematicians. He sees them as elitists who thought that experimentation and the verification of theories were beneath them. In particular, regarding Aristotle's theory of planetary motion, Weinberg says "We would have to conclude that on his own terms, in working on a problem that interested him, he was being careless or stupid." Weinberg finds the Hellenistic period centered in Alexandria far more productive than the earlier period in Athens, though he admires Plato's writing style.

You will have noticed from some of my previous posts that I frequently question conventional wisdom in a range of topics. For example, I recently brought into doubt Lincoln's competence as president, and I haven't offered much praise for the American literary, academic and intellectual communities. It will also have become apparent that I'm not a fan of capitalism or democracy. American popular culture is hardly even worth discussing.

Over the last year or so I made an effort to reassess my skepticism regarding academic philosophy and concluded that nearly all of it is arbitrary bunk. I see this problem, like many others, mainly in terms of the inherent limitations of human beings. Once a body of work is established in written form and a community of scholars has assembled to discuss it, that work may become immortalized through ritual processes that willfully overlook its inherent lack of significance. A body of work may become a de facto religious text and the focal point of one academic cult or another. This pattern can be seen in the early evolution of modern universities, which began as theological institutions with no special interest in objective analysis. Philosophy used to be called natural philosophy, which included science, but the sciences began to break off from pure philosophy in the nineteenth century, and much of what now remains in philosophy departments, I think, is detritus from accumulated theological reasoning. It is obvious to me that many philosophical questions are best answered by reframing old philosophical concepts in the context of the ongoing scientific study of man, but that idea may be identified as heresy within philosophy departments. Philosophy, like many fields in the humanities, seems to have drifted off into a netherworld run by sentimental adult hobbyists.

In my opinion, much of what passes for normal within academic and commercial environments effectuates an unrecognized injustice to both science and art. For many people science is no fun, because, besides being difficult to learn, it shatters their illusions. In both the humanities and commercial culture, people gladly seek refuge from the hard and potentially disturbing facts of science. They would rather not know that their entire lives are insignificant episodes within the biological froth that has been roiling over the surface of the earth for billions of years. As a fellow human being I have some sympathy for them, yet my conclusion is still that people ought to grow up sooner or later. The corruption of art operates a little differently from that of science. In the case of art, I don't think that good art requires much explanation. Thus, I don't adorn my quotations from Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov or Patrick Chamoiseau with superfluous comments stating what's good about them. Ideally a genuine work of art speaks for itself. In my view, the academic experts who take it upon themselves to explain to us what is good about a work of art are often the least qualified to describe the ineffable characteristics which are effortlessly recognized by those who are aesthetically aware. If you will pardon my use of a somewhat unfair cliché, those who can't do teach; in this context they teach philosophy, art history, creative writing, poetry, literature and quite a few other subjects. On the commercial end of scientific and artistic marginalization and degradation, one need only recognize that money tends to distort people's motives when their true goal becomes that of selling a product or service.

The Ascent of Frivolous Scholarship as an Element of American Decline

You will have noted from some of my previous posts that I am not enamored with a lot of what goes on within the academic world these days. I have problems with M.F.A. programs, for example, and found the recent political correctness exhibited by students at Smith College absurd. Furthermore, in hindsight, some of my undergraduate teachers seem to have been out of touch with reality according to the way I currently think. It doesn't help that I am now reading Thinks..., a novel by David Lodge, who is probably one of the best satirists of academia. And I live in a college town where I can pass for a professor and am occasionally amused to watch unacquainted academics mistakenly size me up to determine my rank within their strata. Then yesterday, on top of it all, I read an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, who is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

The jargon used and the style of argumentation seemed so ridiculous to me that I don't see how any educated person could take Povinelli seriously. Yet she has a top faculty position at a leading university. What is even more alarming is that this state of affairs has existed for many years. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal satirized postmodern cultural studies by publishing a hoax article, discussed here, which was accepted uncritically by the editors of the academic publication Social Text. Sokal intentionally spiced his article with statements that would obviously be questionable to scientists and mathematicians, but because the editors agreed with its conclusions, they didn't bother to have it checked by a qualified scientist.

As a non-academic, I don't have much contact with this cultural schism. However, since I've been reading more science-oriented writing lately, Povinelli's interview was jarring to me. The difference in language usage, terminology, concepts and worldview from that encountered in ordinary public discourse or even in the specialized philosophical discourse that I'm used to is striking. Particularly when you consider that this was an interview format, one would expect a higher degree of intelligibility than, for example, in a technical research paper. As written, I doubt it would meet the editorial standards of The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Review of Books, The Wilson Quarterly, etc.

Although I'm not in a position to say much about this phenomenon and am not particularly interested in looking into it further, I do see a disturbing pattern of balkanization in academia. The traditional academic disciplines of English, history, philosophy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics covered different areas and often used different languages and methods, but they were not in conflict while I was in college. The difference now seems to be a politicization of academia rather than the emergence of new, defensible concepts. I get the impression that much of this is an offshoot of the feminism of the 1970's combined with French theory emanating from thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. Most of it sounds like utter nonsense to me.

The "two cultures" problem seems to crop up regularly in universities. It caused economist Larry Summers to be fired as president of Harvard in 2006, and no doubt adds pressures throughout the academic world. I am not usually sympathetic with people like Summers, who tend to be aggressive, insensitive careerist bullies, but in his case he had science and reason on his side. My concern is not that science ought to have more respect and funding than the humanities, but that the high castes within some of the humanities are populated with people who are just plain intellectually bankrupt. They are presiding over what should be meaningful branches of knowledge and turning them into fantasy boutique inventions that serve their own purposes. This kind of frivolity and bad judgment in major public and private institutions is probably symptomatic of the excesses in countries that are in decline, and it has parallels in the ongoing dysfunction of the federal government. Furthermore, academics like Povinelli are culpable for the dissemination of confused and false information that is likely to be a hindrance rather than a help to those students who take them seriously.

Intellectual Blunders

Although in some ways I may have been suited to an academic career, there were factors that worked against it that have become clearer to me over time. The most obvious was that my study habits weren't particularly good until I was about halfway through college. Slightly less obvious at the time was my innate skepticism of the merits of prevailing views in subjects that are not intrinsically precise. For example, if an idea came up in a philosophy class that I thought was either too vague to be of much use or just plain wrong, but we had to examine it because so-and-so said it was important, my natural tendency was to look at philosophers sociologically. Eventually I began to see the philosophy department sociologically, with many prevailing ideas, whether good or bad, in place simply because they suited the faculty members collectively in ways that had nothing to do with their merit. Most of the subjects in a liberal arts program are not exact, and the same pattern could be observed in them.

The deeper I delved into philosophy, the more unsatisfactory it seemed. Philosophy in the U.S. has centered on the analytic tradition that took shape early in the twentieth century specifically at Trinity College, Cambridge, where G.E. Moore explored the foundations of ethics, Bertrand Russell explored the foundations of mathematics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein continued Russell's work in mathematical logic. The goal was to escape idealism and metaphysics, which had been popular up until that time, and place philosophy on more rigorous footing like that of the sciences. Ironically, little of the work from that period has any relevance today. Moore's book, Principia Ethica, is now seen more as a model for philosophical writing style than as a valuable exposition on ethics. Russell's Principia Mathematica is only narrowly relevant in formal logic and has been ignored by mathematicians since the work of Kurt Gödel. Wittgenstein repudiated most of his early work when he set off on ordinary language philosophy later in his career. Nevertheless, the analytic style is still in vogue as far as I know. My view is that philosophy lost its way at about that time. As the sciences became more specialized and more exact, the need for scientists to be natural philosophers, as they used to be called, declined, and the role of stand-alone philosophy has remained unclear. But that hasn't stopped academic philosophers from trying to carve out a niche for themselves and engage in turf wars with other disciplines. I'm not sure how this will be resolved, but I don't regret leaving the field. Today, many scientists hold philosophers in low regard, and I can see why. I may be wrong, but I get the impression that most of what goes on in philosophy departments these days is a waste of time.

My skepticism about academic philosophy has alerted me to conditions and people in other academic fields when noticeable mistakes are made and perpetuated by leaders in the field. An interesting one that I came across is the case of Louis Agassiz. He was one of the leading scientists of the nineteenth century and taught at Harvard. He did important work in biology and was the first to propose and find evidence for an ice age in geological history. In addition, he was one of the first popular science writers and became well known throughout the world. So far so good, but beyond these contributions he totally rejected Darwinism and the theory of evolution and was himself a creationist. He was also a proponent of polygenism, the theory that each race has a separate origin, which led to the subsequent accusation that he was a racist. In short, by the time of his death in 1873 he was completely out of step with modern science and a relic of the past. Some of his questionable writings are still in vogue and circulated by creationists in support of their views.

I am currently in the process of reading How Not to Be Wrong, by the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg. The book provides informal explanations of how math works in a variety of contexts that come up in your life and contains numerous humorous anecdotes to make his points. One that I found particularly interesting was about the psychologist B.F. Skinner. Apparently in college Skinner wanted to be a novelist, wrote sonnets and took no psychology courses. After college he attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and gave Robert Frost several of his short stories to read. Frost wrote back "All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice....I take it that everybody has the prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the prejudices of other people." Actually, this sounds like pretty good advice to me. Skinner then moved into his parents' attic and attempted to write, but he made little headway and finally gave up. He later wrote "A violent reaction against all things literary was setting in....I had failed as a writer because I had nothing important to say, but I could not accept that explanation. It was literature which must be at fault....Literature must be demolished."

When Skinner later became a psychology professor, he devised an experiment to show that Shakespeare had no particular skill at alliteration in his sonnets, a process which he thought could be produced randomly. He wrote "Proof that there is a process responsible for alliterative patterning can only be obtained through a statistical analysis of initial consonants in a reasonably large sample." He sought to show that the first letter of one word of a sonnet has no effect on other words in the same line. Using 100 sonnets as data, he concluded that "In spite of the seeming richness of alliteration in the sonnets, there is no significant evidence of a process of alliteration in the behavior of the poet to which any serious attention should be given. So far as this aspect of poetry is concerned, Shakespeare might as well have drawn words out of a hat." Of course, Ellenberg, the mathematician, goes on to demolish Skinner's argument: "A statistical study that's not refined enough to detect a phenomenon of the expected size is called underpowered—the equivalent of looking at planets with binoculars." The detail was there, but the data was insufficient to show it. Apparently Skinner had an axe to grind with Shakespeare, and that had clouded his thinking.

Skinner, like the philosophers mentioned, was attempting to increase exactitude in his field. He later became known as a radical behaviorist. I sympathize with his desire to make the field more scientific, because earlier pioneers such as Freud and Jung were not really scientists. While they did have insights into human nature, it is hard to see how anyone ever took concepts such as the id, the ego, the superego, the collective unconscious or archetypes very seriously. Long ago I read several of Jung's books, and I now see him as a crank/mystic, not as a scientist at all. Skinner goes overboard in the opposite direction, and is of little or no use on some of the more subtle aspects of human existence. Even so, I agree with his emphasis on studying behavior and his association of all mental activity with the brain rather than with a soul or some other unknowable force. Apparently he has been stereotyped somewhat by his critics, but a lot of his work has held up and can still be seen in fields such as behavioral economics and in the use of positive and negative reinforcements in various therapies and child rearing.

There are, no doubt, many bad ideas still floating around in academia—more than I could ever know. Fortunately I have never had to deal with Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan. When I was in college there were no such things as women's studies or gender studies. There was no Ph.D. in disaster ethics. Even so, I see no reason to eliminate most "soft" subjects from academic curricula. There will always be a place for the study of the arts and other fuzzy humanistic subjects. One caveat is that problems emerge when the humanities attempt to reinvent themselves as sciences. Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society there is more money to be made through the sciences, and the humanities are likely to decline in importance as fields of study under the current status quo.

Free Speech I

I recently became aware of a controversy that arose following a panel discussion organized by Smith College, titled "Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts," which took place on September 22, 2014 in New York City. This panel was formed as a response to protests at Smith that caused Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to cancel her engagement as 2014 commencement speaker. One of the panelists, Wendy Kaminer, who is a free speech advocate, used the words "nigger" and "cunt" during the course of the discussion. These words were examined by Kaminer in the context of their use in public discourse. As Kaminer explained at the time:

I just, I think there is a very important difference between calling somebody a name and uttering the name in the context of talking about how it's used. And I think it's incredibly important to recognize that difference, because, you know, there are other words and other concepts that are going to make somebody feel threatened and somebody feel disrespected, and somebody feel psychologically unsafe. And if people can't learn to deal with those feelings they really can't function effectively in a free society.

Kaminer's position seems rather innocuous and obvious, yet her use of those words still deeply dismayed some Smith students. According to the interpretation of Jordan Houston, a student at Smith:

What unfolded...left many Smithies feeling outraged, hurt, offended, and betrayed. Assuming the role as a moderator between four Smith panelists, among them being lawyer and social critic Wendy Kaminer '71, President McCartney sat in on what turned from a civil discourse on the idea of "free speech" vs. "hate speech" into an explicit act of racial violence.

Houston's view is an example of the destructive power of political correctness that has taken hold on many college campuses. Fortunately, Kaminer has found many defenders. Overall it would appear that the backlash at Smith by those who labeled Kaminer a racist is seen to reflect badly on Smith College.

As noted in an earlier post, I have grown skeptical of the desirability of the college environment. The juxtaposition of unworldly, ideologically rigid professors with naive undergraduates sometimes leads to ridiculous outcomes. I get the sense that some of these students are more empowered than they ought to be for what little they know. It seems that political correctness has blinded them to the meaning and value of free speech. One would think that a college campus is the last place one would find closed-mindedness and dogma prevalent. In a way, students like Houston are behaving in a manner that confirms their status as members of an elite class that is so far above all others that it can create its own reality, even if that means misrepresenting the reality of those whom they purport to defend.

College

A subject that has intrigued me ever since I was in high school is the nature of colleges and universities. Perhaps because of my background, it was by no means obvious to me what college was all about. My parents had not attended, and at a deep psychological level they were operating on an ancient model predating civilization: my father was a warrior and my mother was a prize of war. In my mother's mind she was akin to Helen of Troy; she even formalized that idea by legally adding the middle name "Helene" late in her life. I was named after King Paul of Greece, a childhood acquaintance of my grandmother and a first cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Thus, I was raised with an imaginary high social rank, whereas my friends, like most Americans, came from families that were advancing their social status through the conventional means of education, and their families had lingering memories of humble pasts. They were better adapted to the environment than I was.

Because I never cared much about money or linked college to having a career, I thought that it should be something like a Platonic academy where wise people discuss the world with little concern for practical matters. Of course, that was a naive point of view. Colleges and universities have always been practical concerns, starting first as training centers for the clergy and eventually becoming inextricably connected to the professions and government. Generally speaking, the older a university, the larger its endowment and the closer its ties to the corridors of power. From a socioeconomic standpoint, the success of a university is identical to the financial success of its graduates. Pure thought may occur there, but it is at best a secondary activity.

When I arrived at college in 1968, it gradually dawned on me that it was a complex sociological phenomenon that only tangentially related to learning. Yes, there were professors, students and academic subjects, but I always felt something was missing. The majority of the students at the college were upper-middle-class children of first-generation college graduates who had done well financially after World War II. Although it wasn't a well-known, nationally ranked college, it served the purpose of bestowing sufficient status on the parents while affording their children an acceptable route to adulthood. Many of the students, me included, weren't really sure why we were there. I simply enjoyed being far from home and living in an environment that was more intellectually stimulating than what I was used to.

It soon became apparent that, from a sociological standpoint, the college was a place to find spouses and carve a position in the social hierarchy that would benefit you in adulthood. This pattern became blurry over time, because it was the 1960's, and the students soon branched out from beer-guzzling frat parties to smoking pot and posing as hippies. Many of them ended up becoming the self-indulgent, narcissistic Baby Boomers so familiar these days. The most progressive among them transferred to less conservative colleges. Of those who stayed, I and many others married someone we met there.

What I've been thinking about lately is the actual quality of the academics and of academic quality in general. The faculty had good credentials, but it is hard to say that the classes were anything more than what a student might expect to encounter at a mildly demanding finishing school. I recently asked friends whether they had enjoyed any of their courses there, and they said no. I liked a few of mine, but that occurred randomly: Twentieth Century Russian Literature, Greek Mythology and Homeric Greek - nothing that led anywhere. Most of the classes were boring and poorly taught.

I was a Philosophy major and now hold a low opinion both of that department and of the field in general. The department offered good introductory courses but seems to have been unprepared for and uninterested in advanced classes. I was corresponding with one of my former professors until recently but finally gave up. He would make an excellent caricature of a misguided intellectual, along the lines of Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch. Educated at Princeton and Yale, he has always struck me as a quintessential egghead: he picks apart sentences to extremes that few people could comprehend, yet his ideas are all derivative, and he has published little or nothing. Finally I realized that it would be impossible to engage him in the kind of discussion that occurs on this blog. I think he is stuck in a narrow kind of analytic philosophy that bears no relationship to actual life. His working ideas for day-to-day living were all absorbed uncritically through osmosis by living in an academic environment for his entire adult life. Like Casaubon, he thinks he has found a key to deep meaning, but from the exterior he is simply delusional and out of touch. After corresponding with him for several years, I decided that he had nothing interesting or useful to say.

The same goes for many academics, in my opinion. Entering an academic position often has little to do with mastery of a subject or teaching ability. I get the impression that most tenured faculty are just good students who got PhDs and then by default became college professors because that was the only job for which they were qualified. Being a good student often means little more than liking to read and having good work habits, a good memory and above average intelligence. These traits alone are not a guarantee of in-depth understanding or teaching ability. What is often missing is creativity, and by nature creative people are not attracted to teaching, with the possible exception of those extroverts who enjoy having a captive audience. The most productive academics typically abhor teaching and avoid it whenever they can.

Where does this leave the undergraduate student? In the current economic environment, they would be well advised to learn a trade and study liberal arts in their spare time. Otherwise they will need a graduate degree to ensure employment, exposing themselves to the array of boutique degrees of questionable value now marketed by universities to keep up their cash flows. Caveat emptor.

Thomas Piketty IV

In conclusion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an important and impressive book. Chief among its virtues is Piketty's commitment to a broad cross-disciplinary approach to his subject, economics, which he sees as a sub-discipline of the social sciences, along with history, sociology, anthropology and political science. Most people are fully justified in their lack of interest in economics, because it is usually presented as a narrow, technical field that doesn't relate directly to other subjects. In contrast, Piketty writes like an Enlightenment thinker who is concerned about important issues such as the future of mankind, not just little things such as U.S. GDP growth next year. In short, he is a big thinker, whereas Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and probably even Milton Friedman, comparatively speaking, are not.

Even so, I don't necessarily recommend that you read Capital unless you are particularly interested in policy discussions related to economics. It is a long, thorough and detailed book that touches on many topics, but the central message is quite simple. It is that the current state of the world is such that the wealthy are likely to become wealthier and the poor are likely to become poorer. As a believer in social justice and the responsibility of governments to maintain an acceptable level of equality, Piketty recommends that permanent new taxes on wealth be instituted globally. He also suggests that one-time taxes on wealth could be used to eliminate or reduce national debts. The latter would be preferable to decades of austerity, which has little effect on the wealthy but places a heavy burden on the poor.

Much of the book is devoted to showing how wealth inequality grew up until 1914, when it collapsed, and how it took off again during the recovery after 1945. His thesis, which he amply documents, is that the 1914-1945 period was a historical aberration. The wars and the Great Depression wiped out most of the prior wealth inequality, and the surge in economic growth after 1945 temporarily allowed the less-wealthy to advance economically. Now, Piketty argues, we have resumed the long-term trend in which the return on capital exceeds the return on labor. People who are wealthy now will become wealthier from their investments while the rest of society will languish indefinitely with little chance of making economic progress. Enormous wealth is accumulating in the top .1% of the population. The number of billionaires and multi-billionaires is growing, and even large private university endowments are growing faster than those of smaller universities. The largest endowments grow at the highest rates because the universities have the resources necessary for the best investment research. For example, Harvard, with an endowment of about $30 billion, spends about $100 million per year to manage its assets and gets a real return of about 10.2%, higher than that of all other universities except Yale and Princeton. In this environment, ordinary workers will never catch up with the wealthy and small, private universities will never catch up with Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

The parts of the book that I found most refreshing involved Piketty's critiques of the U.S. He debunks the idea of American exceptionalism, saying that current information suggests that social mobility is lower in the U.S. than in Europe. He attributes much of the wealth inequality in the U.S. to overpaid executives. He speculates that low top income tax rates have encouraged U.S. executives to bargain harder for higher compensation, since they can keep more of their earnings than they would otherwise. If higher top-level income tax rates were reinstituted, executives would have less incentive to demand higher pay and American wealth inequality would be reduced. Courageously, he goes on to say:
...no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests-and that includes economists, who currently occupy an enviable place in the US income hierarchy. Some economists have an unfortunate tendency to defend their private interest while implausibly claiming to champion the general interest. Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest. Without a radical shock, it seems fairly likely that the current equilibrium will persist for some time. The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion, and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century's globalized economy.

In full disclosure, I must say that I have some sympathies with wealth inequality. Historically, extreme wealth has often led to good art as a result of attempts by the wealthy to differentiate themselves. When the Italians were wealthy we got Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian. When the Dutch were wealthy we got Bruegel, Vermeer and Rembrandt. When the French were wealthy we got Flaubert, the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, Debussy and Proust. The arts tend to flourish when there are rich people throwing money around. On the other hand, I can't say that wealthy Americans have much to show for their artistic interests unless you include bad taste (The Queen of Versailles comes to mind). Secondarily, also on the positive side, although I'm not rich, I'm wealthy enough that the book affirms that if I manage my investments properly, not only am I unlikely to experience financial difficulties, but my wealth will probably increase during the remainder of my life, thanks to the backward political process here and the absence in the U.S. of useful public intellectuals like Piketty.

At the conceptual level, I consider Piketty to be the responsible adult that few Americans seem able to be. Why didn't an American economist write this book? As Piketty politely refrains from saying, this is a narrow-minded, materialistic culture all the way up through the intellectual ranks. The policies he recommends should already be under consideration, but whatever headway they make will meet tremendous opposition at each step. It is possible that by following Piketty's guide and publicly debating the issues discussed in his book the state of society could be improved significantly. To me, this is a more serious approach than what has been brought up by either liberals or conservatives in recent decades. I wish Piketty's ideas the best of luck, but still hold fast to the view that humans ultimately are not sufficiently rational to organize themselves in an equitable and sustainable fashion. As I have said earlier, I don't believe that either capitalism or democracy is essential to human life, and this book does not look that far into the future.

Thomas Piketty II

I'm slowly working my way through Capital and will make a few more comments. What has interested me the most so far is Piketty's account of the economic conditions under which people have lived over very long historical periods. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, wealth was based mainly on land ownership, there was little economic growth or inflation, and people lived to about age forty. Since 1700, the value of agricultural land has plummeted as a percent of national income. Foreign capital owned by Britain and France peaked around 1900 and crashed starting around 1914. Domestic capital, i.e. financial assets and the value of businesses, declined up to World War I but was offset by increases in foreign capital. Then the two World Wars devastated the world economy. From that time onward, foreign capital and agricultural land have been insignificant in value, domestic capital (as a percent of national income) has returned to 1700's levels, and housing has skyrocketed to become the largest component of national wealth in Britain and France.

Piketty's analysis is highly detailed, and the above is just one small part of it. He seems to be moving in a direction that will show that the Industrial Revolution was a one-time event that is unlikely to be replicated, and that a peak of wealth inequality occurred just before World War I, corresponding with the Belle Epoque in France. This seems like an appropriate benchmark to me, because I have long seen that period in France as a flowering in the arts that could never have occurred without phenomenal wealth. Somehow the Eiffel Tower, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, modern art, Proust, Debussy and countless other artists emerged during that period. Reading Proust, it is obvious that his contemporaries were swimming in money.

One of Piketty's theses is that wealth would have continued to accumulate at the top, and inequality would have continued to increase were it not for the World Wars, which inadvertently reduced wealth inequality. He thinks that, even though the world economy has been significantly restructured since the wars, wealth has resumed accumulation at the top, returning us to a state of increasing inequality. Furthermore, although he has not gone into detail as far as I have read, most of the economic growth since the wars was a natural rebound that occurred regardless of economic strategy. Europe, for example, recovered with strong central governments, while the U.S. thinks it recovered by emphasizing entrepreneurial activity in the private sector. Thus, Piketty seems to have an underlying theme saying that America's free enterprise dogma has little support in economic history. I believe that later in the book his recommendation will be to address this problem by instituting higher taxation on wealth.

I find it refreshing to read Piketty, because he is not a one-dimensional economist. For example, he cites the novels of Balzac and Jane Austen to show how differently people thought about meeting their living expenses in the early 19th century compared to now. To some extent, the variation in income from land was negligible and inflation did not exist, so it was much simpler to judge a person's financial status in those days. The economic structure of society was far more stable. Piketty seems to have a breadth of knowledge that makes most American economists look like narrow academic specialists and a far cry from genuine public intellectuals. Over the last few years I have come to dislike Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for their inability to create an economic narrative that would effectively demolish the absurd and self-serving narrative that has been successfully advanced by American conservatives for more than thirty years.

Thomas Piketty I

For many years I've had an interest in investing, which sprang from my desire to retire. I would have retired at age 30 if I could have afforded to, because I never much liked any of my jobs or considered them a meaningful use of time. Investing is related to economics, which did not interest me until recently. As an undergraduate, it seemed to me that the people who studied economics were conventional, unimaginative and materialistic: they were conforming to their parents' expectations and only wanted high-paying jobs when they graduated.

My academic path provided little intersection with economics majors. By nature I'm an empiricist, but I am also interested in aesthetic matters, which meant that I was not a perfect fit for either science or the arts. I ended up majoring in Philosophy, which in many ways is a compromise field that lies somewhere between art and science. Looking back, Philosophy was not a particularly good fit for me either. Part of that may have had to do with the fact that the course offerings at my college were limited. The relevant department was the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and several of its members had received divinity degrees prior to receiving their PhDs. The coverage of continental philosophy in the department was weakened when the one professor specializing in it left for an administrative position elsewhere. In hindsight, I was in a state of ignorance and denial as to my fit with Philosophy. I was exposed to British and American analytic philosophy, which I didn't enjoy much, find relevant to anything or consider to be of much intellectual importance. These days, philosophy departments are fighting to avoid being labeled obsolete, and, given their syllabuses, I'm not surprised.

When I later entered business school (an even worse fit, though I liked some of the courses and completed an MBA), I took two semesters of economics. It was hard for me to relate to the subject, because from the start I noticed that economists made assumptions about the world and proceeded from there even though the assumptions seemed highly dubious. My attention to economics increased in 2004, when I began to manage my mother's assets because of her Alzheimer's disease. For investors, some knowledge of market cycles has become crucial in recent years. My interest heightened after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the Great Recession. I followed Paul Krugman closely and read This Time is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which is the first major empirical study of financial crises. The fact that This Time is Different was published in 2009, after the crisis had begun, and that no comparable studies had ever been made, confirmed to me that economics as practiced in academia has an agenda that is largely disconnected from reality in a manner not entirely unlike that of academic philosophy.

Over the last few years, there has been a constant battle between liberals and conservatives over the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the appropriate governmental response. I have found this disappointing, because the economists involved rarely cite any convincing studies, and the two camps go on their merry ways without addressing any fundamental issues. Finally we have a significant study, which has just been published in the U.S. It is Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. I believe this book has the potential to change the debate for the better by infusing it with empirical data and a theoretical approach that exceeds the limited scope of American economics.

Piketty is a precocious French economist who completed his PhD at age 22 and then taught at M.I.T. However, he became frustrated with the way economics is studied in the U.S. and returned to France after two years:
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

The central thesis of Capital is that the rate of return from wealth usually surpasses the rate of return from labor, meaning that the rich usually become richer, gaining ground over the ordinary workers who make up most of the labor force. Simply put, investments provide a higher return than employees can obtain in the form of wages. We are seeing this today especially in the U.S., where the wealthy are becoming exceedingly wealthy and the middle class is just treading water. As obvious as this may be even to a casual observer, it is not a view accepted by many economists, policy makers or politicians. Piketty documents his claims with carefully compiled data covering longer historical periods than have been studied by other economists.

At a glance, this may not sound particularly exciting, but I think it may prove to be the most important publication on policy issues in several decades. Moreover, it seems doubtful that conservatives will be able to quickly whip up a counter-study, since this one took many years to complete and is unlikely to contain serious flaws. My hope, then, is that it will have a positive influence on political discussion and put to rest some of the myths that have been lingering from the Reagan-Thatcher era.

I've only just started to read the book and will probably have more to say about it later.

Academia

When I look at American intellectuals from my vantage point outside academia, I am often struck by how removed most of them are from the big issues of the day. They seem to communicate within their groups while being oblivious of everything else.  It wasn't always that way.  Immanuel Kant made an important contribution to astronomy before he became known as a philosopher, and he wrote on a variety of subjects.  No one in academia today resembles Bertrand Russell, who made significant contributions as a logician, social critic and popular writer.  I suppose you could put Noam Chomsky in this category, but he is not perceived as an important thinker by most Americans.

What has happened?  Although I can't claim to have an insider's view, it seems that the vast amount of knowledge that has accumulated over the years can only be dealt with in small chunks by the human mind, necessitating a narrow focus in most subjects.  That must be a large part of it. However, there also seem to be more sinister causes.  Among those would be corporate intrusion into universities and the corporatization of universities themselves. Corporate thinking requires a narrow frame of reference, in which all thoughts ultimately revolve around cash flows and profits.

For a generalist thinker like me, this is a disturbing turn of events.  The American landscape is dominated by a business mentality that makes icons out of people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, who are not big thinkers at all. In fact "big thinking" has become sort of a niche subject controlled by publishers who promote their feeble authors like commodities. One of the reasons I've started this blog is that it seems almost impossible to find current writing about this question.

The U.S. has always been an anti-intellectual country, and it would be a distortion so say that big thinkers ever had much of an impact here.  You would have to go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to find that.  I wouldn't be surprised if a poll asking people who their favorite philosopher is would produce "Jesus" as the most popular answer.

In my view, the current state we are in is quite dangerous.  Without anyone to frame large issues for the public, the country ambles along with the blind leading the blind.