Briefly Noted for May 27, 2021

I read Zach Carter’s magisterial biography of John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Not only is it a super-readable education in economics and a sweeping history of the 20th century told through the prism of one of its most important intellectual and political figures, it also turns out that Keynes was … VERY COOL. Did you know that he was a core (the core?) member of the Bloomsbury set and close friends and sometimes housemates with Virginia Woolf? How about that he was married to a world-famous Russian ballerina? Or that, even though his economics work wasn’t particularly mathematical, he started his career with a work on probability and exchanged mathematical proofs with Bertrand Russell? The guy was really amazing, and so is Carter’s book.

I also highly recommend Jim McGrath’s article in The Public Historian on Museums and Social Media During COVID-19.

My boys love a Youtuber called MatPat. His real name is TK, and he produces several video series including “Film Theory,” “Game Theory,” and “Food Theory.” In each video, he makes an elaborate, meandering conjecture: how to survive the Hunger Games, how to predict Oscar winners, why Minecraft is so popular, etc., etc., etc. They’re silly, dense with facts, expertly produced, and fun. But one of these videos stands head and shoulders above the rest: How Trump is Winning with Reality TV. Posted in February 2016 — still early in the Republican primary — the video predicts a Trump victory; explains exactly how it will happen based on Trump’s previous career as a huckster, media badboy, and reality TV star; and presages the media manipulation mastery that Trump will use as President to avoid accountability and poison our politics. It’s something only a social media virtuoso with 9 million subscribers could understand so completely: you just gotta watch.

Rethinking ROI

This semester I’ll be co-chairing our President’s “Life-Transformative Education” task force, a signature initiative to rethink undergraduate education at UConn. Part of a coalition of similar efforts at other universities across the country, the basic idea of LTE is that an undergraduate education should change (or at least actively reconfirm) the worldview and life trajectory of each and every student at UConn. Our work involves a top-to-bottom rethinking of everything from student advising to internship opportunities to capstone experiences for graduating seniors.

Closely tied to our practical efforts at reforming pedagogy and student care at the University is a broader rethinking of the real value of an undergraduate education and the way that value proposition is communicated to students, parents, alums, and in the case of a state institution like UConn, to the taxpayers and legislature of the State of Connecticut. It seems to me that part of that work entails rethinking how value itself is calculated.

Somewhere along the way, universities, like so many other institutions in our culture, began to measure their impact in strictly economic terms. In making our case to stakeholders (especially purse-string holders) we talk about the economic impact of sponsored research, work force training, and other direct benefits to business. Likewise, at the level of the individual student, there is a strong tendency to assess the value of a college degree in terms of a “wage premium,” or the amount of money a college graduate can expect to make versus a non-graduate (the cover story in this week’s The Economist is case in point.) By this way of thinking, the “return on investment” or ROI of a college education is a simple matter of subtracting tuition costs from the wage premium a student can expect upon graduation.

This is a crude measure of the value of a college degree. Life-Transformative Education suggests that the real value of undergraduate education lies in its capacity to change lives, financially for sure, but in other ways too. Thus Life-Transformative Education demands an accounting beyond the wage premium to determine the true ROI of college.

Trends in macro-economics may provide a guide. Even fairly conservative economists are realizing that simple measures of overall economic growth don’t provide a very useful picture of the success of the overall economy, especially in the face of rising inequality. These economists are moving “Beyond GDP” to count things like people’s health, a clean environment, and unpaid labor like elder care and child rearing, in addition to growth, as a more accurate measure of economic health. New Zealand, for example, now uses a “happiness index,” created from a basket of metrics, to make some policy decisions instead of GDP.

So what should a “Beyond the Wage Premium” calculation of college ROI include? What else should we count? I have a few suggestions, including:

  • the likelihood of finding a job that includes health benefits
  • the likelihood of finding a job that includes parental-leave and childcare benefits
  • future ability to change jobs
  • geographic mobility
  • mental health outcomes
  • domestic abuse rates

What else? I’m sure there’s plenty (on both sides of the ledger) that I’ve left out. Please let me know in comments, and if you’re an economist and would like to work on this, let’s talk.

Briefly Noted for October 24, 2018

Caitlin Flanagan’s eloquent description of how histories, true or false, operate in families (e.g. Elizabeth Warren’s family):

How many times during my childhood did my father tell me that when his grandmother and her sister sailed to America, they had traveled ‘a class above steerage’? I was a Hula-Hooping child of the atomic age, growing strong on USDA beef and Cocoa Puffs. What did I know about steerage? But I knew my father in the complete and inchoate way that a child knows her parent, and I knew he wanted me to understand something important to him and—somehow—to me. I understood the lesson to be: The Flanagans have been down, but they have not been out. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ Joan Didion once wrote. And we tell them inside our families so that something can live within them, some idea or value, some complicated honoring of an elder.

via The Atlantic

In their own words: How tech leaders can help you argue for the humanities

I firmly believe the case for the humanities is best made on its own terms. Rather than bending pretzel-like to explain how the humanities contribute to the prevailing values of techo-industrial capitalism, we should argue first and foremost for the humanities as good in their own right. We should be strong in our conviction that the social and moral goods produced by the humanities are of equal value to the economic goods produced by science, technology, and business. That said, it is sometimes pragmatic to show that even when measured by the standards of science, technology, and business, the humanities are extremely valuable. When arguing our case to decision makers who are themselves members of the STEM fields (e.g. your Dean or Provost) or who have become convinced of the central importance of STEM in the 21st century economy (e.g. legislators or members of your board of visitors), it is often more persuasive to do so on their preferred turf.

One way to do this is to argue from primary data that show the direct economic benefits of arts and humanities in our communities. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project is a good place to look for this kind of evidence. Another way is to refer decision makers to the frequent statements of prominent members of the tech community who have spoken out in support of the humanities education and humanities skills as useful in the tech economy. Good examples of this kind of secondary evidence are Mark Cuban’s recent statements warning students off finance and computing in favor of liberal arts; David Kalt’s assertion that “individuals with liberal arts degrees are by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders”; and the example of Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s crediting of his philosophy degree for his success. I’m sure you’ve seen more examples of this type, which I’d love to collect in the comments section below.

Quoting STEM and business types back to themselves is sometimes the most effective way to argue our worth. It’s one thing to say your work is important, it’s another to show that the people your audience respects most say your work is important. It may not be the case we want to make, but sometimes it’s the case we have to make.

What The New Yorker Got Wrong About Lawrence Lessig

In its October 13, 2014 article about Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC, The New Yorker writes:

In 2001, Lessig co-founded Creative Commons, an alternative copyright system that allows people to share their work more freely.

In fact, this isn’t quite right. Creative Commons is not an “alternative copyright system.” It is a licensing regime that uses the existing framework of copyright law to make it easier for copyright holders to release their works under open terms. This is an important distinction in thinking about what Lessig is trying to do with the Mayday PAC, which aims to use the loosening of restrictions on campaign donations that resulted from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to raise millions of dollars specifically in order to elect candidates dedicated to campaign finance reform. The New Yorker titled its piece, “Embrace the Irony,” and the Mayday PAC is indeed an irony. But in the context of Lessig’s earlier work on Creative Commons, it is a familiar one. Both efforts seek to use existing legal frameworks to subvert a status quo those frameworks were intended to support.

Truth (happily) stranger than fiction

I recently finished rereading, for the first time in many years, one of my childhood favorites, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I was immediately struck that the dates Bradbury imagined for his tale of human colonization of Mars are 1999-2026, setting the main action of the book in what is now today. Writing around 1950, Bradbury imagined a world fifty years hence where interplanetary travel was easy and the threat of nuclear war made Martian colonization a looming necessity. Almost musical in its rhythms, the writing is nearly timeless. But to today’s reader, there are more than a few anachronisms that sadly serve to break the spell Bradbury casts. Not least of these is his emphasis on the threat of total nuclear annihilation, which (though it still most definitely remains today) now seems almost quaint.

Yet an even more striking example is found in the chapter entitled “Way in the Middle of the Air.” In it Bradbury imagines a still segregated American South faced with a voluntary, sudden mass exodus of African Americans to the new colonies on Mars. Bradbury uses the device to examine and uncover the simultaneously hidden and vitally present role of black people and black culture in the social fabric of mid-20th Century South. It’s still a very effective critique, but what stood out most to me is not so much anything Bradbury had to say about race relations, but the fact that a brilliant, educated, committed futurist of the 1940s and 50s could more easily imagine his grandchildren living on Mars than in a desegregated South. This fact hit home even harder in light of the recent election of Barack Obama.

There are many, many joys to be had in The Martian Chronicles. That Bradbury was wrong about the relative possibilities of space travel and race relations is one of the greatest. If Bradbury were alive today [See correction, courtesy of reader Kenz, in comments] I’m sure he’d agree.

(Very Nearly) Fighting Over History in the Ohio Senate

Despite media claims, polling data, and bureaucratic number crunching to the contrary, one of the main contentions of Found History is that people care deeply about history—sometimes to the point of fighting about it. For evidence of this you don’t need to go to Kashmir or Kurdistan or some other far off province where wars fester over real and perceived historical rights and wrongs. Look no further than the Ohio State Senate, where a recent debate over a bill to designate September 22nd “Emancipation Day” caused a real ruckus.

As first reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the debate turned heated after Dayton Republican Jeff Jacobson took issue with Columbus Democrat Ray Miller’s characterization of Abraham Lincoln’s ideas on emancipation. Miller shot back with charges of “revisionism” and was asked to desist in his remarks by Senate President Bill Harris (R-Ashland). Miller refused, Jacobson protested, and Harris quickly ordered a recess and abruptly turned off the chamber’s cameras—even as the senators continued their argument. Democrats later criticized this tactic as “baloney.” Harris said he was simply trying to maintain control. The real question is control of what: the Ohio Senate or American history?

Watch the tape and decide for yourself. (The good stuff starts at about 25:00)

Stand-up History

English stand-up comedian Robert Newman builds his act on history. “The History of Oil” is his very funny, very sarcastic, 45-minute-long examination of British and American involvement in the Middle East. From WWI to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Newman tackles nearly a century of history, taking time out along the way to poke fun at British Rail, OPEC, military historians, and many, many more usual and unusual suspects.

Building Histories

I wanted to post this before a new issue came out, but alas I didn’t make it in time. In case you missed it, the May 21st New York Times Magazine featured a series of articles on the question of why contemporary architecture, above all other art forms, inspires popular cultural debates. The editors’ brief introduction suggests a tie to history. “Buildings aren’t always set in stone,” they write, “Over the following pages, four illustrations document places with more than one past.” (The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2006, p. 67) In other words, according to The Times, arguments over architecture are really arguments over history.

One article in the four-part series makes a particularly good case for the truth of this equation. In his piece Expanding on Jefferson, Washington College professor Adam Goodheart shows how decades-long disagreements over plans to build a new “South Lawn” at the University of Virginia are grounded in deeper debates about the role the past plays or should play in present-day life. He shows how campus architecture has motivated questions about appropriate modes commemoration and homage—in this case for Thomas Jefferson, founder of UVa and architect of the original Lawn. Ultimately, in Goodheart’s analysis, the debate comes down to a historiographical or historiotectural (my term) question: interpretation or imitation?

On one side is the faculty of UVa’s Architecture School, who have consitently argued for interpretation. As Professor Ed Ford says:

It’s like the pantheon, or Amiens cathedral, or the Kimbell museum—it’s not something you can replicate. If you build a copy of it next door, that will diminish the experience of the Lawn, not enhance it. (The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2006, p. 84)

On the other side are partisans of immitation, including many prominent alumni, with some persuasive arguements of their own:

Whenever we represent the university on a postcard, we show the Lawn. That’s us—and that’s Classical. (Don Pippin, The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2006, p. 84)

Quotes like this demonstrate how firmly the past is present in UVa’s architectural debates, how deeply it’s bound up with questions of identity. At the same time, Goodheart shows that these aren’t merely local questions. They extend beyond the university and the immediate players both in space and time. On the one hand, Goodheart points a full-page ad placed in the campus newspaper by external supporters of the traditionalist camp (including a representative of Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment). On the other hand, he points to an old issue of Architectural Forum, which even in 1934 observed:

The shade of Jefferson broods over Charlottesville. Misunderstood, embalmed by little minds in static thought, the revolutionist must turn forever in an angry grave. The grandeur of his University looks down at sycophants who ape his cornices at puny scale, forget his sense of space, and strive forever to repeat the form without the soul. (The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2006, p. 85)

The built environment, and arguments about it, are thus important places for the popular construction of historical narrative and identity. At UVa and elsewhere, the physical persistence and lasting employment of architecture make the art form a uniquely powerful focus for popular grappling with the past. Of course, this will not come as any great insight to architectural historians or historic preservationists, and nor is it anything really new to me. But being primarily a textual historian and working in this text-based, virtual medium of the blog, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the bricks, mortar, and concrete of buildings. Clearly the public does not make the same oversight in constructing its own historical identities. Found History shouldn’t either.