UP@NIGHT

Well, here we are again.  Elections around the corner and about to let the FOX guard the henhouse, yet again.

Yes, we are all angry.   But let us not forget how we got into the present economic mess as we listen to the Republicans promising new ideas, once again.   Stewart and friends nail this one.

Nostradamus meets the Grim Reaper

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This is an actual headline from an article posted on Bloomberg (News) at 7:21 this evening, September 1st, 2010: Economy Avoids Recession Relapse as Data Can’t Get Much Worse

The first lines of the article explain:

The U.S. economy is so bad that the chance of avoiding a double dip back into recession may actually be pretty good. The sectors of the economy that traditionally drive it into recession are already so depressed it’s difficult to see them getting a lot worse, said Ethan Harris, head of developed markets economics research at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York. Inventories are near record lows in proportion to sales, residential construction is less than half the level of the housing boom and vehicle sales are more than 40 percent below five years ago.

This is not from a skit on Stewart of Colbert.  This is from a leading publication on business on a day that the Stock Market rallied.   (I wonder what they will be writing when it retreats, again.)  So, let’s get this straight.  We are not going to have another recession, the dreaded double-dip, because things are already too bad to have one.   How then do we characterize our current economy?   Oh, I could think of a few words, but so can you, dear reader.

Things can get worse.  Here’s the ticket: The Republicans win the House this fall and things completely stall out as the GOP offers (once again) the panacea of tax breaks for the wealthy as the cure for our economic ills.

(Btw, the name of the person featured on this $10,000 bill is Salmon P. Chase.  If you don’t believe me, click here.  He was a Secretary of the Treasury and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Coincidence.  I think not.)

Was I correct in suggesting two weeks ago that Mad Men is in danger of letting style override content?  Many of you agreed.  Many disagreed. Today I offer a visual update.  Two photos.  Both taken on an iPhone on Thursday evening, August 5th, at the reasonably upscale Westchester Mall.   Mad Men fans will recognize the three posters in the left photo.  (The word “Style” on the center window, with a seated former Mrs. Draper, is a bonus.)  The photo on the right is drumming up business for Long Island University.

America has turned to style to replace substance (real income and growth) in tough times before.  Perhaps we are beginning to see a replay (although in the 1930′s at least the fashion was original).

……Cadillac (1960), Winchester, Virginia, June 2010……       Ubik, first hardcover.

In his novel Ubik, Philip K. Dick imagines a world in which corporations employ telepaths to undermine the interests of their competitors.  In turn, the competition hires firms with anti-telepaths in order to defend themselves against their adversaries and protect their privacy.  Dick is having a good time.  The use of psychic powers by companies merely mimics the dirty tricks employed by current corporate spies.  It’s still chess whether played in two or three dimensions.  New frontiers, same games.  (The best science fiction always makes the implicit present explicit.)

It seems that we face the world of Ubik today but on an even more personal level.  The World Wide Web is a marvelous thing.  But it doesn’t forget.  If you say something you might regret or post an unflattering picture, it is caught by the Web and freeze dried.  Employers, friends, strangers, those wishing you ill, or old-fashioned voyeurs will have you under their gaze with the click of a mouse for the foreseeable future.   It’s hard living in a Facebook culture when we can’t always control how we appear.  Different sorts of answers to this dilemma have been proposed.  Some legal: prevent the firing of employees based on information that does not reveal illegal activity.  Some technological: posts that automatically self-destruct after a number of months or years.  Some positively Dickean:  neutralize those who would do you harm by hiring a company to transform your presence on the Web.  Here is how the latter strategy is explained in a current New York Times Magazine article by Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” (Catch the name of the company below, ReputationDefender.  Dick might have called the company PsycheDefender.)

[W]ith the help of the kind of search-optimization technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles, ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. (Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases, the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find.

Perhaps this is akin to how the anti-telepaths worked in Dick’s novel.  But Dick’s concerns were not just with corporate dirty tricks.  The issues were deeper.  If one is always being watched, tracked in some fashion, defined by the gaze of others who one does not control, how does one become a person?  Being a person involves the possibility of changing the course of one’s life, of making choices to be (somewhat) different from how one has been.  The Web presents a real danger.   We can find ourselves permanently defined by past words and deeds, some from the long past.  Americans have always been especially attuned to the idea that we could remake ourselves, change our lives, start all over again, perhaps by going West.  But the Frontier option is no longer available, according to Rosen.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

One crucial point that the article does not address is that we appear to be shackling ourselves to a digital past at a time when real income for most Americans simply hasn’t been rising in line with the American Dream.  We believed, and were led to believe, that economic progress would provide us with opportunities in which we could realize ourselves in new and different ways.  The objects of our material desires, like the Cadillac pictured above, were objects that allowed our fantasies to play out.  If I buy one of those, I can be like those who own them.  If I buy this, and this, and this….I will be different.  I will be free.  Free of my past.  Free of the past.

But now that the party appears to be over, the new technology of the Internet has stepped in.  Give me an avatar and freedom will ring.  Yet the Web may have as many bobby traps in store for us as the unfettered materialism of the go go economy myth.  Unless of course we can call on a new company, ReputationCreators, that will give us whatever persona we would like.   The catch…for a price that many of us won’t be able to pay.

There is jabbering from the right.  There is remorse on the left.   Too much change.  Too little change.   But the promise was, change we can believe in.

Since the days of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists our Republic has always been, more or less, a house divided, and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.  Even wars don’t typically unite us.  To move the nation often requires an economic crisis, and then we argue about how to respond.  What then is a politician to do if he or she believes that change is necessary, for example, in health care?  Move too far to the right or left at any given time–unless there is a grave crisis, for example, the Depression–and your legislation is unlikely to make it through Congress or face repeal down the road.  And even if it isn’t repealed, there is the risk that it will not generate enough support to move the legislation off the books and into the real world.

When Obama said that he offered change that we can believe in, most on the right and left took him to mean change that was so different, we could believe in it.  The argument seemed to be about whether we wanted dramatic change.   But this is not what someone with his temperament and political philosophy would emphasize.  It wasn’t the dramatic nature of the change that we were being asked to believe in, but its staying power, its resiliency, its endurance.

Am I pleased with all of the moves that Obama has made.  No.  Do I think that he has gone back on his campaign pledge?  Hardly.   What he asked us, and is asking us, to believe in is legislation that will stick, in policies that will have staying power, ones that will take root over time and lead to other changes.   But this is the route of the sell out, those on the left say.  Of one who has given up on principles.  No.  It is a reasonable way of trying to get as much of the cake as possible given the nature of our political and economic system, which is not changing in a fundamental way any time soon.  Of course those on the left may disagree about how much of the cake might be acquired.   This, however, is a debate about the possible, which is just how Obama approaches these matters.  In this regard, the slogan was always there for all to see.   Come the next presidential election I don’t doubt that one of Obama’s major themes will be:  I brought you change that was positive and sustainable.   (If you think it is a weak message, I ask you to consider how many “mainstream” Republican politicians are furious about health care.  I submit that one reason, and a big one, is that they know his plan can stick and it will be a game changer, and not a good one for them over time.)

Here you have Professor Irving Fisher after the 1929 Market Crash explaining that stocks were not actually too high; it was just that people were going into debt in order to invest.  Right and wrong.  Stocks were too high and there was too much investment that involved debt.

And here we are eighty years later and we all know who took on too much debt in order to make bundles of money.  How come you didn’t you listen to Professor Fisher, financial wizards of Wall Street?  Perhaps because you were able to take the money and run?  (Or not even run.  Just wait for another bonus as the smoke cleared.)

(UPI Photo/Alexis C. Glenn)

Wall Street……………………….Henry Adams

Yes, it is certainly easy to be a Monday morning quarterback once the game is over.  But the game is far from over for the Democrats and Obama.   Brown’s victory in Massachusetts—won in part because Obama supporters sat out the election or actually voted for Brown because they were upset about Obama not being progressive enough on health care—is indeed the proverbial wake-up call.  Obama now knows that his administration is going to have to take a more political turn.  What does this mean?   Harnessing the populism that propelled Brown and Obama into office.  Of course those who supported them aren’t all the same populists, but there is an overlap.

People feel ripped off and they should.   They have been ripped off by Wall Street and now they are worried that the government will rip them off with new health care legislation.  That the former is true, and the latter is not, makes little difference to current politics.  What should have happened, and what now must happen, is that Obama must harness the outrage against Wall Street into outrage about how the insurance companies have ripped people off and will continue to do so unless stopped.  This doesn’t require that Obama become a flaming radical.  But it does require that he worry less about what the big bad banking system will do to us if we don’t cater to its wishes.

American capitalism will not go down the tubes if we make prudent decisions about what banks can and can not invest in.  It’s now clear, once again, that commercial banks that take deposits should not become investment houses.  This was the law of the land for more than sixty years until Republican Senator Gramm, and Republican Representatives Leach and Bliley, helped change things in 1999 with the the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.   While there are of course numerous reasons for why stocks are not worth any more today than they were back in 1999, it does seem that GLB’s legislation has not helped to protect us from bad times.  As a matter of fact, it undoubtedly was a major factor in the banking crisis.

No doubt Obama was worried that if he didn’t cater to the banks the American economy would recover more slowly.  But the political risk, and the risk to our economy in the future, is simply too great now not to harness the populist sentiment in the country.   And you know Americans have had a long distrust of bankers.  Writing at the turn of the twentieth-century about his reaction to bankers in the 1860′s, Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, said the following.  (He speaks about himself in the third person.)

He [McCulloch] was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by mockery.   The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XVI

So enough jokes on late night TV and more teeth in actual measures to reign in the fat cats, especially since the Supreme Court has decided to make money the undeniable king of our future elections by unleashing corporate wealth to finance elections.

And Adams would have a warning for Obama as he proceeds.

The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.  The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XVII

Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) versus The University of Louisiana, Lafayette (President Joseph E. Savoie)

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Adios Plato, and Aristotle, and Kant, and Hegel, and Dewey, etc.   I heard the news, today, oh boy.    According to the New York Times article, “Making College ‘Relevant’,”

The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.

So you’re not impressed.  Who cares about some backwater school in the state that elected Bobby Jindal its governor.   Perhaps, dear reader, there are some facts that you should know about The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, for they may reveal how serious the situation is for philosophy and philosophy majors.   Fall enrollment was 16,320 at Lafayette, according to its web site.  Also, according to its web site:

• The University of Louisiana at Lafayette owns a total of about 1,400 acres. Its main campus consists of 137 acres; the athletic complex and Cajundome sit on 243 acres; University Research Park has 148 acres; the Center for Ecology and Environmental Technology has 51 acres; and the Equine Center is comprised of 100 acres.
• UL Lafayette has a 600-acre farm/renewable resources laboratory with a 30-acre pond for crawfish and catfish culture in Cade, La.
• The Carnegie Foundation has designated UL Lafayette as a “Research University with High Research Activity.” That puts UL Lafayette in the same category as Clemson, Auburn and Baylor universities. The only other Louisiana institution in the same category is the University of New Orleans.
• The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
• UL Lafayette offers 78 undergraduate degree programs.

And it’s not as if the regents for the University care only about crawfish and catfish ponds and not philosophy.  According to the Times:

When Louisiana’s regents voted to eliminate the philosophy major last spring, they agreed with faculty members that the subject is “a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and science institution.” But they noted that, on average, 3.4 students had graduated as philosophy majors in the previous five years; in 2008, there were none. “One cannot help but recognize that philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students,” the board concluded.

As a former chair of philosophy departments, and currently director of a Liberal Arts program, I can tell you that it would be rough to defend a major, any major, if there weren’t any majors.  But here’s the thing.  I simply can’t fathom how a campus with over 16,000 students did not have one philosophy major graduating in 2008.  Usually universities offer dual majors and some students interested in philosophy take advantage of this opportunity.  Also, philosophy is often the major of choice for students hoping to go on to law school.  (None in Lafayette?)  So either philosophy is on its death bed, which might be possible, and/or the people in Lafayette simply aren’t working very hard or in the right way to produce majors.  (I counted four full-time faculty members in Lafayette’s Philosophy Department, which works out to approximately one philosophy professor for every 4,000 students.  I can see that this is an institution that has worked diligently to make philosophy available to its students.)

And what about Michigan State?  Well, it’s in Michigan, a state whose economy is currently as cold as its winters.   (Aristotle claims that we turn to the study of philosophy only when the necessities of life have been addressed.  Or in Feuerbach’s words, “Eat first, philosophize later.”) But the problem is not just down in Lafayette or up in Michigan.

I recently attended the Eastern Division Meeting of The American Philosophical Association and can report that things are indeed bleak in philosophy on the job front, that is, if you wish to become a professor of philosophy.  And this is especially true for young people.   Typically a very large number, if not the majority, of graduate students on the market gather for job interviews at this meeting.   It is as much a professional gathering as it is a jobs fair.  But fair it is not.  The swings in our economy can make the conference feel more like Vegas in any given year than a symposium at Oxford.

I have no doubt that other liberal arts disciplines have seen a serious decline in new positions this year.  Why should large swaths of academia be any different from the rest of the economy?  But liberal arts majors should not despair, for the vast majority of them will never seek employment as professors.  (And even those who want to become professors should remember that the market does change, even if it’s rarely very good, as it was in the 1960′s.)   It seems that what we have been hearing for years–namely, that the liberal arts supply critical skills and tools that many employers appear to want–remains true.  This too is spelled out in the article.

There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

It’s possible that these prospective employers were telling the researchers what they wanted to hear, but for many good reasons, I think not.  The fact is that the skills listed above are crucial to many, if not most, of the better paying jobs that will be available in the coming years.  (Just speak with well-placed business executives and ask how important communication skills are for good positions in their companies.)

Of course none of this addresses the intrinsic value of studying the liberal arts, often something that people learn to appreciate only when they grow older (as the Times article points out).  In this regard there is some good news for liberal arts and philosophy types: it seems that a lot of current students are interested in developing a meaningful philosophy of life.  The author of the Times article, Kate Zernike, uses a UCLA survey to show how in the last four decades finances have become more important to entering freshmen than philosophical questions.  But I prefer to see the glass half full.  After years of being socialized into a hyper consumer based economy, almost half of the freshmen are still interested developing a meaningful philosophy of life.

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

As a professor of liberal arts and philosophy, I’ll gladly take 48% and run with it…..

(Print, Southern Labor Archives.  Caption:  History Repeats Itself–The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages, And The Robber Barons of To-Day)

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Guess what?  The fat cats on Wall Street not only think that they will be doing as well or better this year than last, they think that any attempt to limit their outrageous salaries and bonuses will stifle innovation.   The following is from a Bloomberg.com story, “Bankers Expect Rising Bonus Pay to Break Records in Global Poll,” (Oct. 30, 2009).

Having shaken off the biggest economic decline since the 1930s, almost three in five traders, analysts and fund managers believe their 2009 bonuses will either increase or won’t change, according to a quarterly poll of Bloomberg customers. Only one in four see a decline. Asians are the most optimistic about pay and Americans and Europeans somewhat less so.

“The large banks are knocking the cover off the ball,” said Daniel Alpert, managing director of New York-based investment bank Westwood Capital LLC. The industry is “making money, though with government help.”

Worldwide, a majority of market professionals in the survey also turn thumbs down on government attempts to limit compensation, with 51 percent saying restrictions will stifle useful innovation. Only about 38 percent think pay limits will control excessive risk-taking.

In the U.S., where President Barack Obama has chided Wall Street for being “motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses,” 65 percent say the restrictions will damp innovation.

So, we are supposed to believe that if “market professionals” lose some of their bonuses, it will decrease their capacity and motivation to think about new ways to make money.  This claim is as lame as it is self-serving.  You would think that some loss would only drive them to new heights of creativity, given their alleged professionalism.  Yet they keep managing to get away with offering ever weaker rationalizations for why they need ever increasing salaries and bonuses.  Laughing all the way to the bank(s).  It seems that we have our own version of the Robber Barons.  They may oppose tariffs, but they have the equivalent of monopolies in many areas.  They work for institutions that are, after all, too big to fail.   Yet these “professionals” should remember that Americans have a limited tolerance for aristocrats, and they are beginning to skate on the thin ice of class: they are becoming an entrenched moneyed aristocracy.

If you question my assumption about Americans’ limited tolerance for self-inflated moneyed folks, I ask you to take the Gilligan’s Island test.  Which character or characters on Gilligan’s Island do you least trust: Gilligan, the skipper, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the professor or Mary Ann?   (Hint: notice that there is only one character not looking at you.)

AP/photo Boston.com