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.
The most important campaign message has to be a concise picture of what a Trump election will mean to peoples’ lives. Inability to do this was a great failure of the Clinton campaign. Even though the signs were clear, people were shocked by what really happened. The big women’s march early in Trump’s term was filled with people who suddenly awakened—too late—to what was going on. I remember an OpEd piece somewhere on the subject: “What have you got to lose?—Quite a lot as it turns out.” We have to get to people this time.
This can’t be complicated if it’s going to be successful, so a maximum of four points for any audience. For businessmen the priorities may be different than for students. So for this piece I’m not going to try to cut the list . Here’s one list of points to consider.
Women will lose control of their bodies
We’ve seen what Trump’s Supreme Court has done with abortion. That’s what Trump did last time and the perpetrators want more: a federal law outlawing abort in ALL states and strict prohibitions on availability of contraception.
Climate change will be become catastrophic.
We already see accelerating consequences. Trump will not only block US action but by strengthening the Russian-Saudi opposition he can effectively undermine all progress worldwide. We only have a limited window to begin taking action.
The US will become isolated and weakened internationally
Trump has already said that NATO is dead. Europe will belong to Putin and a vastly more powerful and emboldened Russia. The US will be isolated in a hostile world dominated by Russia and China. Allies will be unable to trust any long-term US commitments.
Public services of all kinds will be cut
Another big business tax cut will mean public services of all kinds including education will suffer. Weakening of Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare with no substitutes.
The economy will become even more skewed to the very rich
Trump supports big current businesses, such as his own. His Supreme Court has ruled for business over workers on every issue. His tax plan was a huge giveaway to big companies and rich people—the primary effect was stock buybacks not investment or jobs or wages. Despite the rhetoric he did not bring back manufacturing.
The US will face enormous risks at any strategic challenge
Trump faced one strategic problem—Covid—and only play-acted at being a leader. He did nothing to help keep people alive, even with the promise of a coming vaccine. That inaction is only one side of the problem. As many of his associates have noted, he has an all-consuming fixation on not appearing weak. That combined with impulsiveness and belief in his own genius means there are no limits to what he may be trapped into doing. Trump’s supporters want to believe he gets his way with threats, but threats without action are quickly hollow.
Government will be all over peoples’ lives
Trump has said that he will weaponize the Justice Department and even the military to control dissent. No one should believe they will escape this. The huge camps he talks about for illegal aliens show what he is willing to do to anyone who gets in his way. Trump is easily slighted and vengeful. Once he’s in power he’s no one’s friend.
Divisiveness will be worse not better
Trump makes no bones about caring only about “his” people. Even within his own party we’ve seen the most unproductive Congress ever.
We will lose democracy and it will matter
People may complain about how much say they have now, but that doesn’t compare with what is planned for Trump part 2. Once the election is over there will be no further legal means to resist anything. Dictatorships are bad for everyone—there is no way to fight corruption, protect oneself, or correct big mistakes.
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.
At least half of these deaths were due to deliberate misinformation from political interests calling the whole pandemic a left-wing plot. For month after month the most popular story in the Wall Street Journal was the latest reason why there was really nothing going on: it was just like normal flu; it was worst in New York because it was only in disgusting cities full of disgusting people.
Everyone in the country suffered, including very many who bought into the party line because they thought the propagandists were on their side. Since vaccines were coming, deaths delayed could be deaths avoided. What’s worse, almost of half the people who died were unvaccinated when they could have been, convinced by the arguments of people like the Fox hosts-who were actually vaccinated for themselves.
This Covid story is unfortunately typical of what’s happening in this country. The “populists” are the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels—people with the money to fill newspapers with issues they don’t care about (abortion, guns) so they can ride them all the way to the bank. The only major piece of legislation passed in the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich. As with Covid, the supporters drawn in with identity issues are the ones who will suffer—in jobs, healthcare, education, climate, you name it.
Taking this one step further, it is worth noting that the damage with Covid was not from action but from inaction. Most of the endless discussions of our fractured political system are missing the point. The country is ungovernable because they want it that way. If government can’t act, the powers that be are running things. As Steve Bannon put it, all we need to do is create chaos.
This story isn’t complicated, just lost in the cacophony of bought media.
There is nothing wrong in celebrating Elon Musk, who has achieved much of real value. There are even good messages to be drawn from those achievements. However there are also plenty of wrong conclusions that can and are being drawn about Musk. So it’s worth thinking about what’s wrong and what’s right.
Wrong message #1: We don’t need government involvement in the economy; the private sector can be counted on to get the job done.
Fact: Tesla was started with Obama-era seed money and Obama-era price subsidies for electric car sales. SpaceX got going with NASA contracts. Without government involvement we would have had neither. The major US automakers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to electric cars. The private sector is not good at supporting novel projects without a near-term payoff.
Wrong message #2: We can count on smart people like Musk to tell us what to do.
Fact: High achievers have their limitations and blinders just like everyone else. Musk’s statement that we don’t need “Build Back Better” because he himself never needed help from anyone is actually typical blindness of the class. I worked for a successful startup where the four principals fell out with each other almost immediately after we went public—because each was sure he was the reason for success!
Wrong message #3: In the end we can always count on American ingenuity.
Fact: Musk is one more example of the importance of immigrants and children of immigrants to the American economy. Same for Apple and Google.
Wrong message #4: A few big heroes are what makes for national success.
Fact: Musk was important as a technical visionary. No one else recognized that the technological basis existed for an electric car company. However he also fostered an environment where he could attract the best and brightest to his companies. The achievements of Tesla and Space X have that broader basis.
What’s more, the Person of the Year could equally well have been given to the many scientists and technologists who gave us the Covid vaccines. There are more than a few single heroes in our midst. Big achievements reflect individual contributions of many able people.
I’ll limit the right messages to two:
Right message #1: Technology matters, and things really can change
Both Tesla and SpaceX are fundamentally new businesses, rethought from the bottom up. In a very few years they have changed the US economy.
As contrast, a recent book about the Boeing 737 MAX shows what happens a company loses track of the reality of its business in a blind race for profit.
Right message #2: At all levels individuals can make a difference and should be rewarded accordingly
This is particularly important in technology-driven companies, but not only there. As noted, that was important not just for Musk himself but also within Musk’s companies. For contrast, my contacts at NASA and even JPL have described them as stiflingly bureaucratic. The difference between the SpaceX and the SLS project is undeniable.
Both companies and countries have a tendency to ossify into hierarchical structures that declare themselves to be meritocracies. Equality of opportunity—including opportunity for real success—is necessary both for individuals and for the success of the overall enterprise. For society as a whole, we need both a safety net and true opportunities for individuals to succeed.
That, not the pronouncements of Elon Musk, is what makes for success as a nation.
on the outside 