As an indication of where the economy is going, someone should calculate permanent jobs created per dollar of capital expenditure for all the new datacenter construction. That’s probably a new low for expenditures of this magnitude. It’s more complicated to predict the effect on jobs in the rest of the economy, but that’s most probably negative.
It’s hard for me to think this doesn’t say something about the world we’re going toward. It’s not so much that there will be a shortage of jobs overall as of good jobs. What is it that we are going to use to bargain with employers? Traditional education is about knowledge and capability. In our familiar world it takes years to put together the package that an employable person represents, and there are many distinct niches that need to be filled. In the new world, knowledge is more readily accessible, the capabilities required are more generic, and staffing levels may be reduced by efficiencies. We’re only beginning to see how that will shake out.
As we noted last time, the private sector is not good at managing effects of radical change—on people and on the environment. On the other hand, we’re talking about really significant productivity improvements, so in principle that should be a good thing. But that’s not going to happen by itself. It sure didn’t happen at the start of the industrial revolution—for most of humanity that meant misery and war.
In this anniversary of the American Revolution there is a relevant quote from the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” That’s now true worldwide. In this time of economic ferment, climate change, and nuclear weapons we had better learn to work together for global well-being or there may be nothing left at all.
It seems to be taken for granted that everyone knows the objective of government: it exists for the good of the country. However it’s not obvious what the “good of the country” means, and that ambiguity leaves plenty of room for confusion. There are two models.
Model number one is more or less derived from the family. The good of the family is the well-being of its members. Government exits for the well-being of the population. Reasonable enough.
Model number two is a business. The goal of a business is returns to its investors. The employees are a cost center, and every dollar earned by the workforce is a dollar lost to investors. The population is at best a necessary evil, with fewer and fewer really required for business operations and with available slave substitutes (who can’t quit or change jobs) as Musk’s beloved H1B’s.
We are currently seeing model two in full operation. Everything has to be sacrificed to the 4.5 trillion dollar tax cut for rich people and businesses. Despite all the rhetoric about a golden era, all the money from the cuts and firings ends there. It’s golden for the people with the gold.
And that’s not the end of the story. As even Adam Smith understood perfectly, the private sector is actually not good at providing for its own success. Left to its own devices it rutherlessly sacrifices everything to immediate profit, which leads to longer-term collapse. Think about the cuts to education, research, and climate change. So as far as the two models of government are concerned, we’re running headlong into a worst of both worlds–sacrificing both the population and the economy.
This piece somehow never got into the NY Times as a comment to one of many articles about algebra in the eighth grade. For anyone who has missed this battle, the state school board in California at one time issued a prohibition on algebra in the eighth grade as an anti-racism measure. More generally, the over-representation of black kids in remedial math classes and white kids in college-prep math classes has been taken in some circles as prima facie evidence of racism, to be rooted out by all means.
Algebra in the eighth grade has become a key issue for both sides. The battle is not just over whether kids should be able to take a subject when they’re ready for it. Some selective colleges have upped the ante by requiring calculus as prerequisite for all applicants, something hard to schedule if kids can’t take algebra in the eighth grade. Here’s the piece.
This article misses the point. The real problem is that by the eighth grade children differ drastically in math preparation. There are lots of reasons for that—and it’s certainly not just a question of ability. However it is a fact, and it affects whether they are ready to take algebra in the eighth grade. Making up for that difference is not a little something to be done on the side. Focusing on the eight grade trivializes the problem.
Having different classes for students with different backgrounds is not a bad idea. Taking a class where you can’t understand what is going on will make you hate math forever. However one should never mistake lack of background for lack of ability. Kids should not be tracked; courses should have prerequisites. This isn’t easy, but I’ve worked in schools where that is done.
That may not get every kid ready for algebra in the eighth grade, but that was never really the problem to begin with. As you would never guess from the article, the vast majority of colleges teach basic calculus to lots of students as part of the curriculum. The admission process to selective colleges is badly screwed up, so some of them require early calculus in the same way they want kids to have cured cancer—it’s just nuts. But that isn’t the main problem to be solved. The main problem is teaching kids math, and most of that problem is earlier than the eighth grade.
Over the last few years I’ve tried to write a short book for motivated high school kids who might be interested in going beyond the basic high school curriculum. The idea was that they already know a lot more than the general public, and it wouldn’t take much to enable them to see and appreciate some famous results.
I gave it a try with four chapters: on cryptography and quantum computing, on the prime number theorem, on Galois theory, and even (most overambitiously) on Fermat’s last theorem. In all cases I tried to provide some substance but avoiding the terminology and abstraction that usually make these subjects inaccessible.
I have some relevant background. I have a degree in mathematics and taught math in college for a few years. I’ve had a technical career, more in software than in math, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to explain technical subjects to non-technical audiences. I’ve also done some high school tutoring, and I’ve worked with my children and grandchildren.
None of that says I’m fully-qualified for what I’ve tried to do. I’m posting this not because I think it’s done, but because I think some people might find it interesting, and something useful might be made of it. And I do think there is value in understanding progress in mathematics even for the age of AI.
There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”. Reasonable except for the surprise at what happened. Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption—whether we want to call it that or not—and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented. The classic work on the subject, which got just about everything right, was written in 1860. The only problem is that for all the intervening years many societies, including ours, have tried hard to avoid learning.
That blind spot brings up the subject of Civics—what is it that we all ought to know? That’s despite the fact that it’s hard to say the word Civics without wincing. My high school Civics course was a giddy paen to American democracy and its perfections. One sentence sticks in my mind: “Propaganda is a neutral term despite its unfavorable connotation; what makes it good or bad is what is propagated.” Take that for wisdom.
But it strikes me that we can point to a few things that belong in a real Civics course. I’m going to give three titles. I’ll start with Max Havelaar (the just-mentioned 1860 classic) for international relations, to disabuse people of the notion that we can be white knights to go fix the rest of the world. This is not a plea for isolationism, but for recognition that our interests will dominate and corruption will likely follow. At the very least we should be suspicious about our motives and about the reality of what we create.
A second title is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. This book has been around since 2016 and has had nowhere near the impact it should have. It documents the very successful effort of the Koch organization to take over the political system in United States and reorient it to their objectives. It explains most of what passes for incomprehensible in the press today—why the country has become ungovernable, why democracy is at risk, and how we got saddled with a mind-boggling Supreme Court. All of that was the plan from the beginning, and unless we’re clear on what happened, we’re not likely to be able to change it.
A third title is Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us. This book has some issues from trying to satisfy multiple constituencies, but its main message is clear: the different racial and other groups in this country have been turned against each other in a deliberate campaign of divide and conquer. And the only way to counter that is to recognize common interest and act for the common good. This was deliberate policy for Martin Luther King among others, but it’s not easy to do–group militancy will always fight it. However there is no alternative in taking on the powerful forces described in Dark Money.
Those books alone could give a big dose of reality to our political process. We can contrast that with what passes for Civics in public discourse today.
Most of what we hear about Civics today comes from the far right, where it’s back to the future–the contemporary version of what I had all those years ago with the John Birch Society. In the interim it hasn’t gotten better: this is still God’s country, above criticism and chosen to rule in His name. One particular feature worth noting is the weakness of the support for democracy. Democracy is defined as whatever it is that we’re doing, and it’s good because it’s ours.
On the left the world view is different, but fragmented. One person who does talk about Civics is the strange and (I find) worrisome figure of Danielle Allen. Ms. Allen presents herself as standing above the messy political discussions of the day and as a pure advocate for civic virtue. But her Civics lives in a world where there are no bad actors, and the primary issue is alienation of voters from the political system. In that world, the monumental importance of the 2024 election is hidden behind tales of civic involvement that ignore the real forces at work. In the end she’s cover for the people who have put us where we are.
For today, the kind of Civics outlined here doesn’t exist. But it’s worth recognizing that a real, substanitive Civics course is not so hard to describe. Maybe someday it could happen.
Heather McGhee begins her book The Sum of Us with the question “Why can’t we have nice things?”. And she makes clear what she means: “basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics”.
She then goes on to explore how racism has been systematically used by the wealthy and powerful to keep that from happening—which is to say how they keep that money and power for themselves. I’m happy to promote her book, however I also want to spend a little time here on her question—on the mindset that says we can’t.
My example is Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. I’m not going to argue the details. What I am going to argue is the senselessness of the knee-jerk reactions, i.e. how ridiculously entrenched is the idea that we just can’t have nice things.
The cost of the program was estimated by the government accounting office as $400 B, which puts it in the same ballpark as some stimulus packages. Virtually without exception that number was taken by the press at full face value. This was ridiculously, “humongously” expensive. It was going to undermine free enterprise everywhere, drive inflation, and possibly bankrupt the country. “We can’t afford things like that.”
There are two problems with that assessment. Let’s start with the $400 B number. For accounting reasons, it is for a program lifetime total taken over 30 years. That reduces the average yearly value to $13 B, which is the number to compare against stimulus packages. Except that number is itself too high. Again for accounting reasons it assumes that all current debtors will keep paying for the full period—something that has never happened in the past. Let’s take $10 B as a nice round high estimate, and compare it with another per-year item in the budget—the defense budget just passed. That number is $858 B. The humungous expense is 1% of that total. It’s not even big enough to count as a rounding error, and the inflation claim is a joke.
We’re so used to “we can’t afford things like that” that the press can’t do even that much arithmetic.
What’s more (on the free enterprise issue) that money was spent because college had become vastly more expensive precisely during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. (And the Republican legislature refused to do anything about it—hiding behind the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.) We like to talk about equality of opportunity. We, the USA, pioneered high school for all. In today’s economy college or some other form of post-secondary education has become necessary for good jobs (and bad jobs in this country won’t even get you above the poverty line!). So we’re not talking about buying televisions on credit—we’re talking about most people’s only chance at a middle class existence.
Biden’s debt forgiveness plan does not fix everything wrong with affordability of education. And it isn’t means-tested (although people who borrow are usually not rich and means tests are almost always counterproductive). But it is a step forward and addresses a real problem that was not caused (despite the rhetoric) by sheer profligacy. And the most ardent critics of the incomplete solution are the people committed to doing nothing at all.
Most galling, however, is the universal knee-jerk of “we can’t afford things like that” which can’t be bothered for even a cursory look at what’s real.
The public discussion of Biden’s student loan plan seems to be about some other country—certainly not this one.
Much of the discussion takes the point of view that Biden’s plan is a wildly-expensive and unnecessary change, since post-secondary education is functioning the way it always has. And further the plan isn’t sufficiently targeted to the poor, so there is no point in doing it.
In fact post-secondary education in this country is so broken you hardly know where to start. And the people targeted by the plan were so badly screwed by us that we have a responsibility to notice.
Let’s look at the history. The following chart is a point of departure:
It’s obvious from the chart that around 2008 something happened to the cost of college—it took off. A prime ingredient was the George Bush’s 2008 crash, which was a double whammy: states had less money to spend—so tuition went up—and students and their parents had less money to pay it. As we all learned during the Covid crisis, states have limited ability to deal with new expenses, as many are prohibited from running deficits. They need to rely on the federal government to help them out.
However the Republican Congress blocked all stimulus (remember the “balanced budget amendment”) to provoke dissatisfaction for the 2016 election. So there was no help to be had. Unsurprisingly people had to take on new levels of debt. And with Republicans continuing to sabotage the recovery, there were few jobs for these people when they graduated (or didn’t) and went immediately into arrears. Student load debt didn’t grow because students were irresponsible, it grew because government was.
Adding to that, Republicans spent years protecting fraudulent private pseudo-educational institutions because of the supposed superiority of the private sector. At such places you could earn a degree in “culinary arts”, for example, which was considered valueless in any real restaurant. Essentially all students at those institutions incurred monumental levels of debt and no skills. The worst of those have now been shut down, but Betsy DeVos did everything she could to defend them.
As a country we screwed a generation of students. From the numbers on the chart, $10 or $20 thousand seems relevant, but assuredly not profligate. As for inflation, the risk has been exaggerated by false comparison to the stimulus packages. The cost here is budgeted over decades; its current impact is minimal.
However we should be clear that this is a Band-Aid on a God-awful wound, because for the most part things have only gotten worse.
First of all, averaging over all institutions in the country gets a rather diverse mix of good and bad colleges. That’s appropriate for addressing needs of borrowers. However If you want to go to a good institution to get yourself a good job, the numbers are basically twice what’s on the chart: around $20 thousand yearly for a good public institution. For private colleges, we can be more exact since they act as a cartel: $80K. Even applying to these places can cost thousands. So much for equality of opportunity.
What’s more the public university system, instead of being strengthened, is under attack. That’s not just a matter of the well-publicized politization of education, bad as that is. Public funding in many states has been reduced to the point that public colleges are admitting out-of-state (or out-of-country) students in preference to in-state ones, because they need the extra money. That has actually become a major contributor to student loan debt! The financial situation is so dire that colleges are spending more on administrators to raise money than on education itself.
All of that sounds like a hard problem, but as with healthcare, just about every other developed country has found a way to do it. We need to strengthen the public system with necessarily more of a role for federal funding. Public education has to be first-rate and affordable—and available to everyone in every state. We’ve got to banish the preposterous model of education as a severely-limited resource with parents ready to kill to get their children into the right places! In addition we need to limit the size of loans people need to take and be rational about the payback. The Australian system, with payback based on ability to pay, is one working option.
It’s worth stating the obvious fact that with the current cost of education, the only way we’re keeping this country going is by importing foreign graduates (and telling them how much we hate their being here!). We’d have to shut down Silicon Valley otherwise. We should also be clear that when we talk about national security we’re talking not about aircraft carriers but about our national competence in key technologies.
It is also worth stressing the problem is NOT (despite rumblings from both the left and the right) that we’re sending too many people to college. Good jobs need sophisticated training. You can look at the government’s own (or anyone else’s) expectations of the jobs we’re going to need to fill. Sure there should be more specifically vocational training also, but that’s not the answer to the problem we know we’ve got. Also we’ve learned from the Covid experience that online instruction is no silver bullet to replace teachers.
Finally it’s worth responding to the charge that we’re not sufficiently targeting our payments to the poor. The fact is that the only route to equality of opportunity is making sure that there is a first-class system available to everyone. We used to understand that. We were the first to recognize that secondary education needed to be available to everyone. Eventually other countries caught on, because there was a big advantage to the country in doing it.
This has been proven so many times it’s ridiculous to have to state it—education is the backbone of the strength of the country. Despite some rhetoric, there’s nothing either left-wing or right-wing about this. Even Adam Smith knew it—he didn’t futz around wondering how little training poor people could get by with, he wanted universal literacy in the eighteenth century. If we want to succeed as a nation, we need to succeed at education.
This note is occasioned by John McWhorter’s piece in the NY Times, basically praising Clarence Thomas as a thinker who has been too easily dismissed.
While I agree with Mr. McWhorter on some subjects, I think he is very wrong on this one. And his mistake is the same one made by other people about other public figures.
First about Clarence Thomas:
He is someone who has received help every step of his career, but who has nonetheless declared himself self-made. His autobiography is emphatic to the point of absurdity on the subject.
His general philosophy is heavily influenced by that mythology. Like many other pseudo-self-made people (there are admittedly more rich than poor of them), he asserts “I did it, so can anyone else who has what it takes.” No one should be asking government for help. That he sincerely believes this does not make it either true or admirable.
Despite his self-delusions, he has not achieved his success as a thinker. He has achieved success as a propagandist for power. His ideas, however well or badly thought-out, are irrelevant to his current position. He is a tool in the Koch organization’s (and Republican party’s) battle plan. The position being propagated is simple and convenient: we just don’t have to care.
Contrary to what you sometimes read in the papers, he has not driven the Supreme Court to its current position on the extreme right. That is a Koch-managed and funded enterprise that has put a succession of Federalist Society judges on the Court.
We should now talk more generally. There were places and times in the past when people seemed at least worried about selling out. That is, whether they were putting personal advantage above some notion of morality.
We are no longer at that place or time. In the United States (and elsewhere) today, there is no morality stronger than financial success. People don’t need to agonize anymore, because riches are proof of morality. That’s the Clarence Thomas problem, and he is far from the only example.
I’d even put Milton Friedman in that category (along with a good chunk of the Federalist Society). Milton Friedman was certainly capable of understanding the logical flaw in his argument: it’s okay to declare that corporations serve their stockholders—but only if someone else is minding the store. If those same corporations are also running government, then no one is minding the store. Instead he made himself a wealthy and respected genius, again as a propagandist for power.
No one should be venerating propagandists for power, no matter how sincere such people believe themselves to be.
on the outside 