In his post on education, Chris

floats a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to.

However, since most of the commenters agree with Chris, it looks like I’ll have to provide the other side of the debate. I’m also not linking to any evidence, though I discussed a fair bit of it here

I’m going to argue, contrary to Chris and most of the commenters on his post that there’s no reason to suppose that, in aggregate, the proportion of the population undertaking post-secondary education is too high, and every reason to continue trying to remove obstacles to participation in education for students from poor and working class backgrounds. Further, I don’t think credentialism is an important factor in explaining observed changes in participation in education or the labour market.

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A few days ago, Tyler Cowen gave a “quite unfavourable review”:http://www.slate.com/id/2125041/entry/2125047/ to Barbara Ehrenreich’s _Bait and Switch_. Tyler observed, not unreasonably, that a job candidate like Ehrenreich’s _alter ego_, who didn’t appear to have much in the way of social networks, was unlikely to secure many offers. But as Paul Campos “observes today”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050919&s=campos091905 this logic cuts both ways – manifestly unqualified candidates can land plum positions which are far, far above their “level of incompetence”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle, as long as they have the right college room-mates.

bq. It’s clear that hiring Brown to run FEMA was an act of gross recklessness, given his utter lack of qualifications for the job. What’s less clear is the answer to the question of exactly what, given Brown’s real biography, he is qualified to do. … Brown’s biography on FEMA’s website reports that he’s a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. … Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) … it’s fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession’s hierarchy. … When Brown left the IAHA four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA. It’s bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don’t qualify them. But Brown wasn’t a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what’s known in the Mafia as a “connected guy.” That such a person could end up in one of the federal government’s most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works–or, rather, doesn’t.

Ehrenreich’s experiences as a middle-aged woman with a thin resume and no networks worth speaking of stacks up, shall we say, in an interesting fashion against Michael Brown’s experiences as a (slightly less) middle-aged man with an equally thin resume (if not a worse one) and high-level connections to the Republican kleptocratic classes. Tyler is right that personal networks count for a lot. But Ehrenreich’s riposte, I imagine, would be that the networks you have access to are a product of both your social position and your “‘ability to be a suck-up'”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/09/08/mclemee. A point which Brown’s skyrocketing career in the current administration drives home trenchantly (even now they’re hesitating to fire him).

Here are some people who have to lose their jobs, and maybe also get sued for wrongful death. Or go to jail.

1. Whoever is in charge of Louisiana’s state office of Homeland Security, maybe it’s this Major General Bennett C. Landreneau? Whoever it was who made the decision not to let the Red Cross into New Orleans. This person needs to lose his job, and he’s on my “get sued into the ground and maybe go to jail” list. If my baby had died of dehydration in the Superdome, I would be ready to kill this guy.

2. Whoever it was who gave the Gretna police orders to turn people back at gunpoint and prevent them from walking out via an Interstate to a shelter 2-3 miles away in Jefferson Parish. The Gretna Police Chief (Chief B.H. Miller, UPDATE: Arthur Lawson, guilty as charged.)? The mayor (Ronnie Harris)? Again, fuck these bastards. I’m not even that sympathetic to the policemen on the front lines obeying these orders. Is it even legal for local police to ban citizens from using public roads? I imagine there is leeway for emergency situations, but if no orders came down from above? If they did get an order from higher up, fire that bastard too.

3. Governor Kathleen Blanco. I have seen nothing to convince me that she has been at all competent in dealing with this catastrophe.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.

“I need everything you have got,” Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. “Nobody told me that I had to request that,” Ms. Blanco said. “I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then.”

Look, I think the feds are hiding behind a fig-leaf of federalism on this one. When she said “we need all the help you can give”, the 82nd Airborne should have been there the next day. Nonetheless, whatever i’s she had to dot or t’s to cross, she could have damn well figured out herself before the hurricaine hit, like, I don’t know, when she first got into office? Likewise, she could have put everyone in the same room and knocked heads together earlier to get some kind of unified effort going. Crying about how you’re dissappointed in looters don’t cut it.

4. Michael Brown, FEMA head. I don’t think I need to say anything here.

5. Michael Chertoff, head of DHS. There was a pop quiz on homeland security last week. He failed.

6. President Bush. There’s no point in suggesting that he resign or be impeached, since I might as well just wish that everyone had a pony. Still, we can try our best to hold him morally responsible for hiring incompetent political apparatchiks to do crucial jobs, and for manifestly failing to mobilize federal resources in a timely way once the scope of the disaster (that includes local failings too) was known. The buck has to stop somewhere, and I think the President’s desk seems a likely place. He will never run again, and the only punishments he can receive will be moral opprobrium, diminished political influence, and a severe hit to the electoral chances of his party. I suggest he receive them all.

UPDATE: I think it should be obvious that I listed these people in bottom-up hierarchical order, not decreasing-level-of-blame order. (Perhaps, in that case, 1 and 2 should be reversed, but you see my general thrust.) Someone who has 1000 gallons of water is more to blame when someone near her dies of thirst than someone with 1 gallon. The locals were overwhelmed and the feds should have stepped up to the plate, not complained about the mysteries of federalism. That doesn’t mean Gov. Blanco magically did a great job, or Jefferson Parish officials weren’t a bunch of racist bastards.

Tom Stafford points to academic publisher Elsevier’s involvement in the international arms trade. Even the legal aspects of this trade are deplorable, given the excessive readiness of governments and would-be governments to resort to armed force, but the boundary between legal and illegal arms trade is pretty porous. For example, there’s evidence that the arms fairs organised by Elsevier subsidiary Spearhead are venues for the illegal trade in landmines. Tom has a number of suggestions for possible responses.

Maria’s “post about America”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/04/myths-about-america/ got me thinking about issues to do with social mobility. Here I want to offer some completely data free speculations, to float a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to. That hypothesis is that there’s far too much higher education in Western societies and that it constitutes a real barrier to social mobility (and is probably bad for demographics too). To put it in a nutshell: strategies for improving social mobility by getting a broader swathe of the population into higher ed are bound to fail because it is too easy for the middle classes to maintain their grip on access to education. A better strategy would be to take that card out of middle class hands by abandoning the insistence on credentials that aren’t materially relevant to the job at hand.

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The Jared Diamond wars “have”:http://savageminds.org/2005/09/05/214/ “begun”:http://savageminds.org/2005/09/03/about-yali/ “to”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/in_deepest_anth.html “flare”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/in_deepest_anth_1.html “up”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/yalis_question_.html again. Of particular interest is this recent exchange between “Timothy Burke”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=94 and “Fred Errington and Deborah Gewertz”:http://savageminds.org/2005/09/07/a-response-to-timothy-burke/ at _Savage Minds_. Tim objects that Errington and Gewertz’s critique of Diamond is itself guilty of that which it condemns.

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It’s been a while since I posted one of these. Of course now that I have several immediate deadlines these things find their way to me again.

Cubeoban

Not too easy, not too hard.

If you get stuck on Level 3 then try the hint here.

The hosting site has links to dozens of other games. I won’t even go there though (not now anyway). I really do have to get a lot done in the next few days especially since I just found out that I have to be orientating our incoming grad students on Monday.

For reasons best known to themselves the Havens Center staff have given the George Galloway tour higher billing on their website than the Chris Bertram tour (scroll down the first link for Bertram, he has lower billing). Don’t bug me about this, or about sponsoring gorgeous george — I had nothing to do with either decision (it would be silly to pretend I had nothing to do with the Bertram visit). I’m going to miss Galloway, for domestic reasons, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that Chris’s talks will be more interesting.

Ten days after the New Orleans disaster, the US has accepted offers of foreign aid totalling $US1 billion, but most of the assistance is not getting through because of red tape. The total amount given by the US government in response to the tsunami was $950 million (at a comparable point in time after the tsunami, the figure was $350 million).

As a further comparison, here’s a report from December 31, 2004 of aid finally reaching a city in Aceh, close to the epicentre of the earthquake/tsunami that struck 5 days previously. That’s for a more widespread disaster, in the middle of a war zone, in a Third World country, with few roads, and thousands of kilometres from the countries giving most of the aid.

Two trade unionists and paramedics from California who found themselves trapped in New Orleans have “written an account of their experiences”:http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18337.shtml . (“Alternative link”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/sfsocialists/ ) A sample:

bq. By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the “officials” told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement”.

(via “Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/ – who has possibly the best background graphic in the blogosphere.)

Highly recommended: David Glenn has a new “article”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/5/glenn.asp in the _Columbia Journalism Review_ on George Packer’s vexed relationship with the Iraq war (public health warning: David is a friend of mine, but when I say that it’s a great piece, I’m speaking truth).
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Jennifer Howard has an interesting “article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i03/03a01101.htm in the _Chronicle_ this week about a classic slave narrative which may not be what it seems.

bq. _The Interesting Narrative_ is a swashbuckling tale that takes its hero from an idyllic boyhood in Africa through the travails of slavery and a series of maritime adventures to spiritual, legal, and economic rebirth as a free man in England in the last decades of the 18th century. An immediate best seller in Britain, The Interesting Narrative had nine editions in its author’s lifetime. … Mr. Carretta[‘s] …. doubts about Equiano’s origins began only when he undertook a labor of love: a new Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative. Mr. Carretta combed British records for traces of Equiano or Vassa, which was the name given him as a slave. “No one who had written on Equiano or cited him, even those who had reproduced versions of his text, had ever bothered to check. And I, having a mind of concrete, said, ‘He gives me a date, he gives me a place, he gives me a name, it should be verifiable.'” What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents — including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship’s muster, both of which list Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina — came as a shock. “I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,” Mr. Carretta says. “The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he’s free, he’s an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from?”

It’s not entirely certain that Equiano _wasn’t_ born in Africa; there’s a lively-sounding debate among historians on the topic. But the article still raises some quite interesting issues about the relationship between authenticity and identity. It seems to me that Equiano is an even more interesting and complicated figure if he invented part of his past than if he didn’t. Timothy Burke has an interesting “new post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=94 up on the Jared Diamond debates, suggesting, if I understand him rightly, that ‘authenticity’ can be quite as much of a trap as more overt forms of condescension. I’ll have more to say on this later.

Update: the Chronicle is hosting a “colloquy”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/ with Carretta on the topic at 1pm today.

Jim MacDonald (over at Making Light) offers us a compendium of vital life advice gleaned from folk songs. Number one is, if someone says to beware of Long Lankin, then totally beware of him, for real. More:

If you are an unmarried lady and have sex, you will get pregnant. No good will come of it.

If you are physically unable to get pregnant due to being male, the girl you had sex with will get pregnant. No good will come of it. You’ll either kill her, or she’ll kill herself, or her husband/brother/father/uncle/cousin will kill you both. In any case her Doleful Ghost will make sure everyone finds out. You will either get hanged, kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. Your last words will begin “Come all ye.”

Going to sea to avoid marrying your sweetie is an option, but if she hangs herself after your departure (and it’s even money that she’s going to) her Doleful Ghost will arrive on board your ship and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.

If you are a young gentleman who had sex it is possible the girl won’t get pregnant. In those rare instances you will either get Saint Cynthia’s Fire or the Great Pox instead. No good will have come of it….

Have nothing to do with former boyfriends who turn up and say it’s no big deal that you’re now married to someone else and have a child. If their intentions are legit, that’s got to be a problem. If it’s not a problem, their intentions are not legit.

You are justified in cherishing the direst suspicions of a suddenly and unexpectedly returned significant other who mentions a long journey, a far shore, or a narrow bed, or who’s oddly skittish about the imminent arrival of cockcrow.

If you are a young lady and you meet a young man who says his name is “Ramble Away,” don’t be surprised if, by the time you know you’re pregnant, it turns out he’s moved and left no forwarding address.

I’d just like to add a few words based on American folksongs (probably derivative of the English ones): if you do kill your pregnant lover by drowning her in the cold, cold sea, the odds are good that someone will find her body and make a fiddle bow of her long black hair, and pegs of her white finger bones, and then the only song that fiddle will play will cry your guilt out to the world. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This post is a follow-up to another from a few days ago.

First, the bullet-point version of this post:

• A one-question survey has very limited utility
• Most respondents have tweaked their default homepage
• Several types of default pages are popular with respondents
• We cannot generalize findings from one blog’s readership to another
• When trying to learn about people’s Web uses, it can be very helpful and interesting to ask them for details

Second, thanks to the 784 of you who took the survey! Read on for more.

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