Category Archives: Economics

The Social Network Bubble

By Ray Watkins | Published: May 10, 2010
Americans-- I have to put myself in that group too, of course-- are easily fooled by Utopian claims. Maybe we don't really think that an IPAD will transform our lives, not really anyway, but we're willing to buy one anyway, just in case. In the last few decades especially, this has been the secret of that collective hallucination known as marketing. New technology is our collective self-medication. Inevitably, of course, we are disappointed. It turns out that multitasking is neurologically impossible. YouTube is used by the military to promote war as much it is by professors to help students understand MLA. IM'ing seems to be gone; texting is a great tool for bullies. And now, it turns out that...
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Teaching as Working at Home

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 21, 2010
A colleague sent me a link to this New York Times piece ("Debunking the Myths of the Telecommute") about telecommuting. It's an interesting comparison to my own working-at-home teaching. There are a lot of similarities: the writer and I both use lists, and we both try to respond to our colleagues and bosses promptly. There are some real differences too. I don't care if my neighbors see me walking around in shorts and a t-shirt all day (my pajamas) and I don't begin the day by taking a shower, exactly as if I were going into an office. I might do that, though, if I didn't live alone. My days are structured by meals and exercise and...
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It’s the Inequity, Stupid

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 19, 2010
Doug Henwood has a great interview with Diane Ravitch about her new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education." (I am once again catching up on podcasts.) Ravitch basically repeats what's more or less common sense among people who study education: it's not bad teachers, or the unions, or not teaching the basics that's so damaging to public education. It's the inequity, stupid. A school's potential impact on a child's learning is dependent on certain preconditions. If you are poor, not well fed, don't have good medical care, etc. you won't do very well. Duh. Of course, what's so horrific is that instead of dealing...
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Made Not Born: The Power of the Humanities in Capitalism

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 12, 2010
Not to get all technical, but most of the time the capitalist market is almost shockingly reified, even by academics who you think would know better. The market, at best a rough description of a myriad of social and economic forces, seems to be constantly doing things that we just can't do much about. Sometimes it's explicit and almost religious in tone-- the market is omnipotent and infallible-- and sometimes its implicit. There's rarely any larger agency behind the decimation of the U.S. automobile industry, for example; it's simply the unions and foreign competition. (More recently, however, poor management is sometimes blamed.) It didn't just happen, though, by magic; the industry was destroyed by short term thinking and by...
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Library to World: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 7, 2010
Nearly one-third of Americans age 14 or older – roughly 77 million people – used a public library computer or wireless network to access the Internet in the past year, according to a national report released today. In 2009, as the nation struggled through a recession, people relied on library technology to find work, apply for college, secure government benefits, learn about critical medical treatments, and connect with their communities. "Study: A Third of Americans Use Library Computers"
This is one of those ironic bits of good news. On the one hand, it suggests the enormous importance of the library in a democratic society; on the other, it suggests something about the enormous scale of U.S. poverty in general and in...
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Cultural Capital Never Wastes a Crisis

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 5, 2010
If you are unfamiliar with the idea of education as a form of cultural capital, it's easy to think of the idea as static. You either have it or you don't. The Open Education movement, as recently described in the New York Times ("As Colleges Make Courses Available Free Online, Others Cash In"), however nicely illustrates that education cultural capital works as a complex dynamic, an economy or an ecosystem. It's capital, and so it doesn't simply accumulate, it circulates, and as it circulates it changes, sometimes subtly. In this case,the implicit question seems to be, "what happens to the educational capital of, say, Harvard or Yale if they give away their course materials." In one sense, of course,...
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