Why Clinton’s New Tuition-Free Higher Ed Plan Matters

“Take this, demand more, seize all.” That does seem to be what works, doesn’t it?

Since the human capital model of higher education has been thoroughly debunked at this point, what exactly is the benefit of this supposed to be?

I don’t think shifting the burden of the debt onto the public at large is better. In fact it’s worse because the subsidy to tuition will incentivize even more people to pursue tertiary education.

Surely the superior option is to _increase_ tuition to disincentivize people from taking on the debt in the first place?

If you want to rectify your mistakes, then… a blocky approach to being told things you don’t currently believe, that’s not gonna get you there.

I don’t think shifting the burden of the debt onto the public at large is better. In fact it’s worse because the subsidy to tuition will incentivize even more people to pursue tertiary education.

And your argument against a more educated citizenry is…? [1]

[1] I include vocational and other options outside the classical college offer in this.

The argument, I assume, is that free-ish college for most is likely to be understood not as a pure good because the availability of education for whichever citizens desire to pursue it is a wonderful thing, but as part of the multi-decade, never-can-fail-can-only-be-failed society-wide conviction that education is the solution to poverty and/or inequality. Because a nation of policymakers one day noticed that people with college degrees made more than people without them, and thereby had the genius notion that if everyone went to college, everyone would earn more.

So debt-free college, in the abstract, is wonderful. But I for one (not to speak for Mr. Costas, whose Olympic coverage my mother could not abide because his eyes were “an inhuman shade of blue”) would not want it INSTEAD of (a whole bunch of stuff we’re not gonna get in the next decade anyway).

I mean, your premises for every conclusion are the sum of a lifetime’s experience and logic, and your actual conclusions are a few short deductive-reasoning steps. It’s far more likely that the errors that emerge in your conclusions are errors in your foundations, your premises, than in those few short steps.

Which means fixing the errors in your thinking about X doesn’t actually involve all that much thinking about X, it’s more about finding your erroneous premises.

@merian

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an educated populace, but considering the lack of a (causal) connection between education and human capital, there’s something wrong with _spending tons of money_ on an educated populace. You could try to go for an “educated people vote better” argument, but educated people are just as rationally ignorant as anyone else. Education doesn’t solve public choice problems, incentives alignment does.

@Collin

I’m not sure what it is you think I’m misunderstanding. Please clarify. Perhaps you’re not acquainted with the literature on the economics of education? There’s scant evidence to support the human capital angle. Type in “sheepskin effect” on google scholar and you’ll find some good entry points.

Damned toddlers are wasting our free kindergarten money too. We don’t need to pay for kids to what, play with blocks? Learn how to read? Eat ice cream? That’s just paying me to eat ice cream.

I’ll be interested to see whether HRC can actually make this happen. Good for her if she does.

Unless there’s a plan for existing student loan debt being executed alongside, this looks like a perfect formula for making 22-30 year olds loathe and resent their immediate younger cohort.

cassander: “The upper middle class will benefit at the expense of the bottom 2-3/5s who don’t go to college. […]. Instead of debt, the middle class will get higher taxes that will, on average, amount to more or less the same amount of money.”

They will benefit at the expense of the bottom 2-3/5s, except that they won’t benefit.

Also note the easy slippage from Hirsch _Social Limits to Growth_ style “if a college degree becomes a job requirement for everyone, then everyone feels that it’s necessary to get one but they end up getting no positional benefits from doing so” to “it doesn’t benefit a community to have a university in it.” I recommend that communities where people predominantly think this way close down all of their wasteful universities and make their students attend universities in my state.

cassander

In texas they have the robin hood plan. Yet if you actually live there you see clearly how public schools in richer communities have better facilities. How is this?

Re:update. I was always going to wait for the fine print. Workfare worked out so well in the 90s. New Clinton same or worse than old Clinton.

Yep, it’s hard to get quite so enthusiastic about ‘US re-introduces Corvée labour for poor students’ I think…

So what’s the point of providing free or low tuition to public universities for all, while at the same time ignoring the huge debt-loads that 20-or-30-or-older-something are still laboring under? Is that “fair”? (BTW the total outstanding debt for public uni. tuition stands at about $500 bn, just about the same as the deficit in public uni. financing since 40 years ago, assuming the rates of public financing had remained the same at the 40 years-ago level). Jill Stein has proposed reducing past student debt, much of which is actually held my the Federal gov. at profitable rates (sic!), presumably though a Fed purchasing program (‘people’s QE”, eh?). The principal returned to private holders of such debt could be contained by raising bank capital requirements, (which desperately needs doing anyway). So who ya gonna vote for?

http://financialaid.berkeley.edu/middle-class-access-plan

It’s the high schools, stupid.

PS, if you want to win the hearts of working-class America, fund their kids’ sports/band/drama whatnot.

This comment thread really misses the point of the OP, in my opinion. Let’s put aside for now questions about the merits of higher ed and consider this in purely political terms. Even with the Clintonoid fine print, it’s a step forward. And, just as mass mobilization pushed Clinton in the direction of Sanders on this issue, more mobilization can possibly rewrite the fine print at some later point.

Everyone who cares about politics should read the Gilens and Page study from a couple of years ago. There are two main takeaways: (1) the opinions of most people have essentially no weight in the political process (2) except when they organize collectively. What’s important about the Sanders eruption this year is not the guy himself or the specifics of his program but the extent of bottom-up organizing. The only thing that matters is to understand the power of mobilization and to keep it going. I strongly agree with CR that people need to see benefits/victories from organized public pressure in order for it to be self-sustaining.

36: It’s interesting the ACA is explicitly called out as a model by Clinton

Yeah, without following the links, I guessed that students would not receive “free tuition” but a check from the gov’t, maybe a bureau or new division. The idea would be providing “choice” to students, competition between schools, but especially a new flow/stock of cash from tax revenue through finance.

37: The neoliberals aren’t dumb, and have the goal of embedding the new safety net in finance to an irrevocable and permanent degree, such that reforming or socializing or nationalizing them will require a total, revolutionary, and prohibitively expensive restructuring of the entire political economy. An example is the way retirements are now embedded, via 401ks etc, in the equity and bond markets.

more mobilization can possibly rewrite the fine print at some later point.

Tell it to the Greeks and French.

I think your caveats imply that they have coopted another idea that involves blowing smoke in our eyes. If this is the ‘aspirational’ plan imagine with the compromise plan will look like.

This is how they avoid change–they create something intricate to wallpaper over the need, it becomes confusing and unpopular and a source of resentment eventually. A two-income middle class family slightly over the cap will be hopeful they qualify, then perplexed by the rules showing they don’t, a slightly less affluent family may see minimal gains…but most won’t get anything out of it. (Even struggling families in more expensive areas or with more children may not.) Thus, everyone will resent their tax bill more and their tuition bill more–because they imagine someone is getting what they aren’t. They’ll heap the resentment on the poorer students. I predict this will also open the door to attack public universities. Likely, they’ll also do some convoluted thing to the standard financial aid programs.

This result is exactly what Sanders’ proposals are designed to avoid. This result is exactly what most social spending policies of Democrats are designed to create.

When Republicans come along and say government doesn’t work and it costs you but benefits someone other than you–Democrats will have fertilized the field for them once again.

Awy #1: ” just throwing money at the dorm building industry isn’t going to cut it”

Bob Costas #5: “it’s worse because the subsidy to tuition will incentivize even more people to pursue tertiary education.”

Bob Costas #8: “Surely good government should look to the interest of the nation/economy/world at large instead of the wasteful interests of a subset of the population?”

Someguy88 #10: “doing such a great job at controlling costs, cough, cough, cough (I almost choked to death writing that)”

Medrawt #11: “would not want it INSTEAD of (a whole bunch of stuff…)”

Cassander #14: “The upper middle class will benefit at the expense of the bottom 2-3/5s who don’t go to college.”

Bob Costas #15: “Education doesn’t solve public choice problems, incentives alignment does.”

—- Above we find all the evidence necessary to show that civilization is going down the tubes. These comments are equivalent to:

“The amount of money in the world is fixed, and fostering creativity and innovation can never grow the pie larger, and it can never pay-off the resulting debt SOONER than before (because we, the commenters, cannot do the simple math).”

“Money does NOT go in a cycle: so, if you spend it here, it CANNOT later be spent over there (because, we the commenters, do not understand how the economy works).”

“We already know what kids are going to do with their lives, so it does no good to educate them beyond that, and give them the space and time to find out for themselves (because we, the commenters, do not know how other human beings grow).”

“It is much better to socially-engineer the future according to our own expectations about how other people should already fit into the market system, by using incentives! (because we, the commenters, believe that if we put the The System ahead of individual human beings, golly it will somehow all work, someday).”

It has everything to do with ‘missing white woman’ and bright, shiny objects.

“Iraq, Tony Blair, Chilcot, Email, Extremely careless?” Hey, lookee, kids! Free money!

And so it goes, many of us asked how HRC proposed to magically transform herself into Sanders and here we have it. To ” If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” “Your premiums will go down, and “My first act will be to close Gitmo” we can add “Free university! (some conditions may apply) TM.

A promise is only a plan if the powers that be actually follow through on the substance. The only notable aspect of this press release from the Hillary campaign, timed to drive the news cycle away from a mountain of evidence detailing HRC’s blood lust and dishonesty, is that normally sensible people swallow this goop like mother’s milk.

Sanders certainly doesn’t believe a word coming out of her mouth. He hasn’t endorsed her, or quit. Evidently, Bernie feels that HRC will say anything to try to get off the hot seat and cynically try to convince Bernie supporters that she was for free university all along.

I mean that’s clearly the topic of all those 225k a pop speeches to Goldman Sachs, et al. That’s what she was pitching to the banksters – pony up for free education. The reason she never came clean about her speeches is now obvious.

Humility.

If you talk about university education as a public good, then people will tediously say that it isn’t and that you should describe it as having positive externalities. But the presence of a university really is a public good for the community that it is in. It is non-excludable (it produces a benefit for the whole community) and nonrivalrous (some people benefiting don’t use up the benefit). People who think otherwise should, as I wrote above, feel free to make their areas even more backwards flyover hellholes than they already are.

So then there’s the question of how many universities / how many students are enough. Note that the people arguing this seem to think that the market magically decides the right amount of this public good.

I agree that some people go to university who have no real interest in going to university, but feel that they have to for their job prospects. The way to fix this is obviously to stop making it so that people need jobs in order to live. Once some people are able to drop out of the jobs system, employers will have to offer better terms to the people who remain, and one obvious way to do this is to stop needless credentialism — after all, it doesn’t cost the employer anything to drop the requirement for a credential that isn’t really needed for the job.

#44

so sanders is correct to doubt hillary because there is no actual actionable plan behind the rhetoric, while we are supposed to take sanders rhetoric at face value because…?

Well on the bright side people would be paying exactly what online classes are worth

Anarcissie: Very nicely put. If the public at large are being asked to subsidize university education (as they already do anyway, through the underwriting of student loans), it is entirely natural that they should ask whether it produces things of value to them.

The broader issue is that this proposal is happening in the context of a couple of decades of pushing to make university into a prerequisite for any kind of decent job, including many that used not to demand it. Drawbacks of this trend include:
– it offloads employers’ training expenses onto employees and the government.
– it has let universities raise their fees much, much faster than inflation.
– it fills universities with uninterested people who only came to get some credentials…
– …and wastes several years of their lives on something they don’t care about and wouldn’t have needed.
– it makes life a lot harder for people without degrees…
– …and hence makes them likely to feel resentment and hostility towards universities.

I find it very reasonable to ask the public at large to subsidise people to seek greater understanding of humanity and the universe, and I think a fair proportion of the public agree. But I don’t see any reason why the public should pay to get someone a piece of paper that their employer is using as an arbitrary filter.

Do note that the UC Berkeley program is more generous because it explicitly takes living costs into consideration and then does not allow total costs to exceed 15% of the family’s income if that income is below not $125 but $150K. Of course at Berkeley that was part of a compromise to raise tuition. My worry is that to compensate for the subsidy UC Berkeley will eventually have to raise tuition to the point where an increasing number of the richer families may think that their kids would be better off at an expensive private liberal arts college, and we could do damage to the public university system. There could be as always unintended consequences about this plan.

@10 someguy88 07.06.16 at 9:09 pm

Hey you guys and gals [of the Democratic Party] have been doing such a great job at controlling costs, cough, cough, cough (I almost choked to death writing that) here is a blank check from the federal government and here is another blank check from your state.

You are correct, sir. The last fiscal year that used a budget proposed by a Republican President, total government spending (federal+state+local) in the US was about 41% of GDP. Since Obama has been in office, that has steadily declined – down to about 34% for 2015.

On a different note, the state-level-opt-out ability should help keep costs down overall, plus it may keep the tax subsidy that “blue” states provide to “red” states from growing.

@Rich Puchalsky

>But the presence of a university really is a public good for the community that it is in. It is non-excludable (it produces a benefit for the whole community) and nonrivalrous (some people benefiting don’t use up the benefit).

Who is the community here? The college town? The state? The nation? And what good is being produced and how do we quantify it?

> So then there’s the question of how many universities / how many students are enough. Note that the people arguing this seem to think that the market magically decides the right amount of this public good.

No, we’re arguing that whatever the public good universities produce, they unquestionably are (or at least, can be) a generator of private good and that the market will get closer to the mark than the clearly self interested political bargaining of the education complex.

>Once some people are able to drop out of the jobs system, employers will have to offer better terms to the people who remain,

wait, what? I thought we were getting rid of jobs.

>and one obvious way to do this is to stop needless credentialism — after all, it doesn’t cost the employer anything to drop the requirement for a credential that isn’t really needed for the job.

First, it most certainly does add costs. Educational institutions, even if you think they teach very little, do an awful lot of sorting. They’re an astoundingly expensive way of doing that, but those costs are born by society at large, not the individual employer. Replacing that system with one just as good would cost the employer money and might be of dubious legality.

Second, how on earth does ending needless credentialism help employees who have credentials? If anything, it hurts them by putting them on a more even plane with those that don’t have them.

@Ogden Wernstrom 07.07.16 at 5:12 pm

> You are correct, sir. The last fiscal year that used a budget proposed by a Republican President, total government spending (federal+state+local) in the US was about 41% of GDP.

This is mendacious in the extreme. First, the last republican president did not set state and local budgets. Second, the budget spent in 2009 was not the one proposed by the last republican president, but one amended by the incoming democratic president to include several hundred billion in stimulus spending. Third, federal spending as a share of GDP always increases in recessions as automatic spending increases and GDP shrinks or flatlines. Honest accounting would say that the 2008 federal budget was 20.2% of GDP, that it shot to 24.4%, and that the refusal of the republicans to authorize as much spending as the president has asked for has brought that number back down to 2o.7%

Ogden Wernstrom,

You are comparing apples to Ostriches based on extremely selective cherry picking. Are you a VP, CEO, or government worker?

@rich

>Rich Puchalsky 07.07.16 at 5:48 pm

> It doesn’t, obviously: it helps employees who don’t have credentials. In doing so it lowers the pressure for people to get needless credentials just because they have to work.

Employers started using credentials because more people started getting higher educations, not the other way around. the root of the problem is the subsidization of credentialism, not employer demand for credentials.

Does anyone know if Clinton’s new higher ed plan includes drone strikes against upper level administrators?

I can’t help but wonder – where is ten hours of student work for thousands of students going to come from? I’m not, on the face of it, sure that this will cause the firing of university staff, because all those students will need to be trained and supervised and the work itself will have to be found – fairly low-stakes work that can be done by an inexperienced 18-year-old who may or may not be very responsible and who will inevitably have a shifting schedule due to classes and breaks, and who will only be there for ten hours a week. I work at a university and finding work for students is sometimes a bit tricky as it is.

Some jobs are great for low hours student work – unskilled cafeteria work, the simpler and less consistent kinds of cleaning, certain kinds of phone- and email- answering – and some more skilled jobs can be filled by students if they are able to work more hours (so that they can get more practice more quickly and so that they are available more consistently). But to incorporate thousands more student workers at every public institution, managing them all for ten hours a week each, changing their schedules and appointments – that is not a money-saver and in fact will probably be pretty staff-intensive.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more staff-intensive it’s likely to be – picture needing to train in a bunch of new students every semester, for one thing.

Cassander, I suggest you go get educated, dude. That’s some laughable nonsense you wrote up there.

the ten hours is the initial stages of a vague plan to increase engagement between the private sector and education. it will be fleshed out once the new industrialism folks get done trolling twitter

RNB: “This was not a secret or confidential”

Oh, I see, the part about her disclosing a state secret was sarcasm and RNB doesn’t think that she actually disclosed anything important. What was confusing was the bit about Sanders providing the support of putting his imprimatur on the plan “at the crucial time that Americans have discovered” something that was reported a month ago. Unless that also was sarcasm.

“The plan didn’t change, Sanders just put his imprimatur on the existing plan in order to support HRC” (a paraphrase, not a quote) is, of course, pretty insulting to Sanders supporters. If it’s true, they’re supposed to be reassured that they had an effect because they are apparently too stupid to figure out that they really didn’t: if it’s false, then HRC can’t even acknowledge that they did have an effect and has to pretend that she was going to do this all along.

@74 as usual Kevin Drum already hit it out of the park. We knew as early as January that the confidential emails were about the putatively secret drone strikes in Pakistan and we knew that none of the emails had actual military details in them. This was confirmed again http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/07/hillary-clinton-never-came-close-compromising-national-security

@74 I am not saying that Sanders’ supporters are dupes. They have won something, but it’s not universal free public college. What they have won is control over Clinton’s priorities. She has to ease the burden of college cost; she has to make her commitment credible to do something significant if not exactly Sanders’ original plan to win the support of his youthful backers.

No one in this thread had mentioned drone strikes at all. As far as I know, no one here even believes that HRC’s Emails revealed anything important. So why did the topic of how the Emails didn’t reveal anything important about drone strikes have to get introduced as if it had any connection with Sanders’ support of HRC’s education plan?

Was it that someone said “We’d better get more stuff about the Emails about drone strikes not being important out there for Google”?

Employers started using credentials because more people started getting higher educations, not the other way around. the root of the problem is the subsidization of credentialism, not employer demand for credentials.

There are lots of things that more people started doing in my lifetime, some subsidized, most of which employers don’t care one way or another about when it comes to hiring.

Identifying the root of credentialism as “educational credentials were subsidized,” therefore increasing employer demand, is like explaining a house fire with “the house was made of flammable wood.” A dozen nearby houses were also made of wood and didn’t burn. When the government started subsidizing corn ethanol employers didn’t start asking candidates to bring a jug of it to interviews. What’s a more proximate cause of employer credentialism?

A quick Google doesn’t see any major media stories about Clinton Emails and drones since sometime around June 10. I’m writing this on July 7.

From a USA Today story from today:

““The goal of this whole effort – it’s not a game, it’s not silly business,” he said on CNN. “This is to create public policy.” [new paragraph] Sanders told USA TODAY his campaign staff and Clinton’s worked over the past few weeks on the education proposal. He said Clinton spoke strongly about higher education during the campaign and offered “good proposals,” though they were different from his.”

So I think that this whole supposed connection is more RNB confusionology. It’s too bad: I’d originally read his sarcastic statement about the Emails as not being sarcastic, and I’d been hoping that he’d done a full and blatant switch into Trumpism. That would have been a fitting use of his gifts: I would have respected that.

@84 I couldn’t get myself to shill for Donald Trump or Charles Murray, but “Kidneystones” will wear the sheriff’s badge and continue shilling for Trump now that Sanders has conceded to Clinton.

Play your role, kidneystones. Criticize Hillary Clinton as your boy Donald would, not as Yanis Varoufakis would. Given your self-appointed task to maintain ideological diversity at CT, you have talk about the (graveyard) peace that Qaddafi would have maintained in Libya; and apologize for him as well as Assad and Putin. That’s what your boy The Donald does.
At any rate, consider this about Qaddafi. What would he have done to Libya had he remained in power as more and more territory slipped out of his hands? Here’s a hint
http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/my-last-phone-call-from-charles-taylor-or-how-qaddafi-plagued-africa-pirio.html

Getting back to the actual reason for this thread, it really makes no difference whether employers used credentials because the credentials were subsidized, whether the credentials started being used because employers wanted universities to screen employees for them, or whether the two things were coincidental. It still remains true that no matter how we got here, credentialism can be deflated by lowering the oversupply of labor, and (in my opinion) it’s not really up to universities to judge whether someone / some group of students is there to get an education or to get a credential.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/08/10/college-compact/

The whole thing is a hysterical monstrosity. Corey’s students will be required to spend 100s/1000s of hours at make work jobs. They will basically be paying for almost two years of tuition by doing completely un-needed make work instead of say working over the summer. On top of that line two indicates that families will still need to chip in. Let’s say for another year of tuition. Basically you will be getting a years free tuition and the federal government will get to police state Universities bringing their powers innovation to bear on Higher Education. Looks like they are going to make sure that everyone gets a degree.

Basically you get nothing and the government gets a crack at ruining higher education.

I think this thread has almost everything that is wrong with modern crooked timber comments sections. It’s a depressing example of how far they have degenerated in the last 10 years.

This discussion of credentials reminded me of something that Jack Welch was reported (via the GE management grapevine) to have said in the 1980’s: “Why are we spending so much time training engineers? Why don’t we out-source the training to universities and only hire engineers with Masters degrees?” (Of course the answer, which nobody probably told him, is that colleges only teach engineering techniques, not product knowledge.) So as usual, I blame Welch.

@96: So as usual, I blame Welch.

Oh, I think the current Interwebs tradition is to blame Fiorina. Nobody seems as interested in Welch’s mistakes.

Also part of the answer might be that universities can only train Masters candidates who don’t need more training (I don’t think you can get an MS on the strength of your bachelors degree and some years in the real world–sounds awfully odd) if corporations have effectively surrendered the IP to academia.

Anarcissie #99: “individuals don’t make a lot of difference”

RNB
Are you paid to spew this bs? I’m serious.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html

@103
Do you thinks he’s paid? RNB’s comments are in support of HRC no matter what she says, even if she is altering or contradicting her previous positions. That kind of sticks out from the typical CT commentator who stakes out positions on ideology or policy. RNB comments appear so out of the norm in this regard as to make me wonder if he’s paid.

The policy announced is a policy to provide financial protection for people accessing a service. Yet our esteemed commentators seem to be commenting entirely on access issues (will it lead to increased use?); quality issues (why waste money on services that are already low quality); and labour force issues (the growth of credentialing).

Don’t you think it would be a more productive use of your time to discuss the topic of the OP (financial protection) and to go find other blog posts about HRC’s policy on enhancing access, improving quality, and reforming workforce credentialing, if you want to comment on them?

Unless your purpose is to simultaneously condescend to each other, and show how much you hate HRC. In which case carry on, I guess.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/public-colleges-chase-out-of-state-students-and-tuition.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
A little more about the cost side and how states are dealing with it. Hint: find students you can charge more.

faustusnotes 07.08.16 at 6:20 am @ 106 — As I read the OP and commentaries thereon, the whole of the Sanders-Clinton plan seems to go well beyond financial protection, and has a free money appearance which touches on issues such as what sort of thing is actually being bought, what it is good for (individually and socially), what will be charged for it, who will put up the money, and so on. In medical care, subsidizing payments seems to have vastly increased amounts charged for services — tedious examples on request — which would be tempting self-interested behavior for the institutions involved.

Anarcissie, the student loan system is already a free money rort, it just puts all the risk on the people least able to bear it and with the least ability to control the quality of education they get for the money. Even if nothing else changes, shifts that burden off of individuals is a potentially important change.

Also it seems that a few people here need to be reminded that we live in a free money system. There is no finite supply of money, and any analysis of a govt program that assumes there is is immediately wrong.

Also it seems that a few people here need to be reminded that we live in a free money system.

Free for some.

But, that free money is financing asset inflation and cost escalation: rents must rise.

Rich Puchalsky @ 111: this that embeds academia within finance, a typical neoliberal kind of thing. But it also embeds it firmly within what I call the neoliberal managerial class. There will have to be a huge number of people managing the different parts of this thing, . . . it’s a characteristic employment operation for the managerial class as a whole.

If the 21st century had a Marx, he would be explicating this development: the alliance between Capital and the executive class, which reaches down to cultivate the support of the managerial class.

There’d be an analysis of how financialization brings sclerosis to the organization of the economy. At the very moment, when technology could be enabling us to simplify everything, we are choosing to make things radically more complex and inflexible, mostly in order to funnel more and more money upward.

There’s be a new analysis of alienation: about de-skilling and, say, how airline pilots do not know how to fly planes, and doctors do not know how to do diagnosis. Credentials replace competence, because competence is actively not wanted.

on the impotence of do-gooderism, the difficulties in this thread of even coming with a vision of how and why college education is good for society or the student, are illustrative of some basic deficit in our shared thinking, aka our politics.

maybe, the problem is that the immediate task in our moment is demolition of obsolete structures and that’s scary and the politics of Clinton — long a form of preservationist pretend and extend — has always been about offering an alternative to demolition and its frights. an alternative offering financed by rent-seekers with a big financial stake in continuing the quiet subversion of the status quo.

Faustusnotes 07.08.16 at 2:48 pm @ 112,
bruce wilder 07.08.16 at 3:23 pm @ 114 —
It is true that the government can print all the money it likes, but in order for it to be worth anything, that is, in order for it to elicit labor, goods, services, it has to be kept away from poor people so that they can be made to work to provide those goods and services. For most people who are not at the upper end of the economic food chain, money is not free. And anyway, the generation of substantial amounts of funny money in the financial space of the not-rich could actually be greatly to their disadvantage, since it could lead to inflation which perhaps only a minority could take advantage of. Thus I think it makes a difference whether education is primarily for positional advantage and class indoctrination (not productive), or to acquire actually valuable skills, which may be exercised for individual and collective benefit. And I think this opinion might be widely held in the democratic expanse, at least among those who think beyond considering anything called ‘education’ as a truckload of vanilla ice cream.

@108 Note what the article says: “Jay Dee Michael Jr. said he might never feel the same again after his son was rejected from several U.C. campuses.” It does not say that Michael was rejected by all the UC campuses. So the family which is complaining of their son not getting into the UC system may well have had their son accepted into one of the ten UC’s, but did not like that campus because it was not prestigious enough or is too racially diverse or is not prestigious for some because it is racially diverse. The New York Times reporter did not pursue the hypothesis that the prejudice Trump has legitimated is motivating this family’s anger at the UC system. And prejudice here may like usual also do damage to the one who carries it. It may be that this family has rejected an offer from one of UC’s great campuses (just look at the social science faculty at UC Riverside–it is simply outstanding; I know world-class faculty at UC Merced) because they did not want their son at a campus they thought too diverse to be prestigious.

@104 You do understand that you are dealing with me on false ad hominem grounds, not in terms of what I have actually argued. It seems that you have been reading, and have been infuriated by, my posts. I can honestly say that I don’t remember a single thing you yourself have argued.

Ogden Wernstrom,

I am saying the opposite of what you have me saying. If you want to eliminate the Dept of Education and give every one who graduates HS 15K or 20K I am in.

They can spend that money on whatever they want. If they want to work 20 hours a week and attend CC for two years and than not work at all and attend whatever public or private U they want to attend let them. Let them do what they want. Trade school no trade school whatever they want. Don’t create an unworkable Frankenstein monster that will serve as a slush fund for the Democratic party. Let’s not have the Washington micro managing higher education. (Well more so). Let’s not force kids to do make work. Let’s not treat them as idiotic infants.

bruce wilder 07.08.16 at 5:26 pm @ 124:
‘This formulation is not quite right. The imaginative intuition misses the insidious nature of how it works. Money is not scarce in the brave new world; money is credit and credit is abundant, more abundant that opportunities to be productive. …’

If money is not scarce generally, you have to explain why we do not see radical inflation in the prices of ordinary goods, paralleling those we observe in (some) real estate, equities, collectibles, and other things interesting to the rich.

My answer to this puzzle is that there are two monetary realms: the realm of the rich and the realm of the poor, separated by access to credit. In the latter, people usually have to work (or suffer) to obtain modest amounts of money. That work may go into providing material goods and services, so that money in the realm of the poor is actually worth something — I can go to the store with a couple of dollars and buy a can of beans which someone was paid to grow, can, ship, put on the shelf, and sell me — labor. I believe this is sometimes called ‘the real economy’. In the realm of the rich, money comes from low- or no-interest money provided by the government, banks, trust funds, and other financial manipulators. It is not worth much per unit and can disappear overnight (as witness the events of 2006-2008) but the rich have piles of it and can always get more, since they own and operate the government. (Some money may leak down into the lower realm, but it can easily be sucked up again through the economic food chain in the form of taxes, interest, fees, fines, appropriation of public property, graft, profits, and no doubt a lot of other methods I’m forgetting at the moment.)

I know this is very broad-brush and simple-minded, but I can’t see any other reasonable explanation of the phenomena. If my analysis is more or less correct, then money is not free; it’s based on suffering, on people giving up part of their lives, making all money seem valuable even though much of it is simply pulled out of the void.

awy: the actual judges are employers

??!?

Anarcissie: . . . there are two monetary realms: the realm of the rich and the realm of the poor, separated by access to credit. In the latter, people usually have to work (or suffer) to obtain modest amounts of money. That work may go into providing material goods and services, so that money in the realm of the poor is actually worth something — I can go to the store with a couple of dollars and buy a can of beans which someone was paid to grow, can, ship, put on the shelf, and sell me — labor. I believe this is sometimes called ‘the real economy’. In the realm of the rich, money comes from low- or no-interest money provided by the government, banks, trust funds, and other financial manipulators.

I think our broad brushes give similar impressions of the way the system operates.

I wouldn’t say the rich and poor are “separated” by access to credit. The poor have abundant access to credit and that’s a problem, because the terms are onerous, in large part because the difference in credit terms is used to finance transfers from poor to rich. If you are really rich, your credit card pays you a rebate. If you are poor, the charges are usurious. If you are rich, the bank never charges you a dime. If you are poor, and you have a bank, the bank charges numerous fees.

People volunteer, more or less, for some of this abuse. Lots of people buy lottery tickets, but our marketing saturated society creates many hazards.

Do you think Donald Trump worries about his credit rating? People lose jobs because of bad credit reports. They go to jail because of bad debts.

My point about the real economy — where you can buy a can of beans — would be that global resource limits are looming like a great brick wall over secular stagnation. We haven’t needed many people to grow the beans in a long time and ditto now for the can and almost every other manufactured good. It is not supposed to be mentioned in polite society, but Ben Bernanke’s first attempt to foam the runways with liquidity in 2007 resulted in a global commodities crisis. The price of wheat doubled in a year, reaching a record level in February 2008. So, yes, I think we should think long and hard about exactly why we don’t see radical inflation in the prices of ordinary goods, paralleling those we observe in (some) real estate, equities, collectibles, and other things interesting to the rich, because sometimes . . . mistakes are made and they can be quite revealing.

the extension of the term seems clear enough

BW: “It is not supposed to be mentioned in polite society, but Ben Bernanke’s first attempt to foam the runways with liquidity in 2007 resulted in a global commodities crisis. The price of wheat doubled in a year, reaching a record level in February 2008.”

I don’t understand what happened in this incident. Could you explain what you think happened?

I googled “rort” and got, “a wild party” alongside “scam or fraud”.

When referring to a fraud, does rort carry any connotation from “wild party”? It would be nice if it did.

RP @ 137

For background, here’s a link to a short white paper from the Levy Institute:
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_96.pdf He’s talking particularly about long-only commodities index funds as a market de-stabilizing development.

Wikipedia has articles on the commodities boom and related topics, if you need factual background on the magnitude of the phenomenon.

There’s a useless tug-of-war that goes on over whether monetary policy can fuel speculative fevers in commodities or whether commodity price spikes have to reflect “fundamentals”. Krugman, as I recall, was true to form, writing notes arguing that the run-up in 2007 had to be about fundamentals, it had to be “real” and not financial, like it couldn’t be both, because . . . inventories.

Of course, it can be both, which is what I would argue. The world has been close to its commodity / resource limits since 1973 and as happened in 1973, it can bump its head on the ceiling, causing a crisis.

And, when there’s enough money (aka effective demand) to push against those limits, inflation can come on hard and fast. In those circumstances, there are financial plays and arbitrage opportunities — essentially variations on carry trades — that can make money by accelerating and amplifying the runup in prices into a bubble, provided there’s some source of liquidity that can be manipulated to transfer the downside risk elsewhere.

The linked paper sketches some of the global financialization that set up the potential for a commodities bubble. Onto to this bonfire, Bernanke sprayed his liquidity firehose in 2007, triggering a destabilizing commodity inflation by unwittingly providing a source of liquidity. One reason one can be pretty sure it was driven by financial factors is that it was uniform across a broad range of commodities. That doesn’t mean it was not fundamentals also — the world really is near (or by some foresightful reckonings well past) its resource limits. The bubble had to (be) burst causing a couple of months of deflation and loss of liquidity — enough to trigger the global financial crisis; great job, Ben.

I think the policy of secular stagnation is largely a NOT-well-thought-thru response to getting burned by global resource limits, combined with the usual attractions of deflation for creditors. People sometimes talk as if a Keynesian stimulus program, financed by MMT free money could get everyone employed and prosperous and I think, without some hard preparation, it could be catastrophic as the world runs out of everything and marginal prices for key commodities rise precipitously. There’s no overarching plan, just a kind of blind craftsman responding to rough pain and looking for calm while hoping not to walk into a wall or off a cliff.

I don’t follow these things closely, but I think there are a lot of places in the world that are surprisingly close to famine. As the linked report hints, financialization has been linking global commodity markets, reducing the capacity of states to protect local populations. I think this was a major factor in the de-stabilizing of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.

I hope that answers the question. I haven’t thought much about this stuff in the last five years, so I feel a bit creaky and don’t have good details at hand. Also, I don’t want to derail the thread, so I don’t plan to respond to the peanut gallery, but if you have some specific question, I’ll try to answer.

Do you have a organization in the USA to coordinate the State governments working with the Federal government?

In Australia we have the Council Of Australian Governments, or COAG, where they meet and discuss things to coordinate the States and the Federal governments.

http://www.coag.gov.au

Do you have a similar peak body in the USA?

ZM 07.09.16 at 4:19 am
Do you have a organization in the USA to coordinate the State governments working with the Federal government?

In Australia we have the Council Of Australian Governments, or COAG, where they meet and discuss things to coordinate the States and the Federal governments.

http://www.coag.gov.au

Do you have a similar peak body in the USA?

No, they don’t. There is a National Governors Association, but it does not include formal Federal representation; it’s for consultation between States, not for consultation between the State level and the Federal level.

The Council of Australian Governments grew out of the regular Premiers Conferences which (despite their name) did include formal Federal representation; a key factor in establishing this kind of regular Federal-State consultation is our system of horizontal fiscal equalisation, for which the US has no direct equivalent.

@127 someguy88 07.08.16 at 6:55 pm:

Ogden Wernstrom,

I am saying the opposite of what you have me saying. If you want to eliminate the Dept of Education and give every one who graduates HS 15K or 20K I am in.

Since I said that “[someguy, among others] want to be the judge(s), and have already decided that some/many/most students would be there for less-than-satisfactory-ROI reasons; therefore, those students must somehow be denied, even if it means denial of subsidy for a broad spectrum of potential students.”, I’m trying to figure out what the opposite would be. You don’t want to pass judgement on this issue? You have not decided that anyone would be there for less-than-satisfactory ROI reasons? You don’t believe that those students who would be subsidised by this program must somehow be denied? You actually have a much-more-elite-selective idea of who should be denied? The word “opposite” created goalposts I can’t see.

Then you go straight to “eliminate the Dept of Education” – which appears to be the result of some judgement you have already made, and would deny services to many.

If we eliminate the Department of Education, will that budget be able to cover increases in the budgets for transfer payments, law enforcement and corrections?

@128 cassander claims, “[w]e aren’t trying to deny anyone”, then opposes the program (in some fashion that does not deny anyone access to said program, it must be), and somehow redefines “judge” so the word is applicable only to “yes”.

Ogden Wernstrom,

Right we cannot just disagree about the effectiveness of the policy proposal. It must be that I hate children.

I mean I started with let’eliminate farm subsidies but when I mentioned eliminating the Department of Education it became clear that I really just hate it when poor kids learn.

No discussion of what be involved in eliminating the Department of Education. No acknowledgement that the Federal government provides less than 10% of US education spending, so, even if by eliminating the department of education, I meant not spending any of that money on education, it would mostly mean a reduction in spending not denying services to anyone. We actually have no idea what it would mean for the overall quality of service supplied and in any case we have no idea how much local and state spending would replace any reduction.

No, hey, I like that fact your proposal is so much more inclusive, but how could we pay for it besides eliminating the Dept of Education?

No. None of that. You know I hate children and want to deny them education and anything good. You know I love denying poor children stuff.

Not even a thought about how paying high school graduates 15 – 20K would impact the graduation rate. No need to wonder if that would result in less crime and poverty. No you know.

You know that anyone who questions the effectiveness of HRC Rube Goldberg Frankenstein contraption is hater who wants to deny children goodness.

Well played. Are in Higher and Ed and salivating at the thought of all that gravy? Trolling? Or really that thoughtless and narrow minded?

someguy88,

You are right that you offered no discussion of what be involved in eliminating the Dept of Ed., you just proposed it without stating any reason. It appears to be an agenda you had, and this issue became an opportunity to pull it out and wave it around. (They tell politicians to do something like this – rehearse statements about various issues, and when asked a question, answer the question for which there is a good canned answer.)

The statement, ” it would mostly mean a reduction in spending not denying services to anyone” tells me that you have already decided that the current spending does not provide services to anyone. But then, “[w]e actually have no idea what it would mean for the overall quality of service supplied” admits that the effects are unknown.

I don’t like to do random stuff to our country with no idea what the outcome will be. I’m more conservative than that.