Category Archives: Economics

It may or may not be a true Confucian saying, but I have always liked the idea of cursing someone by hoping that they live in “interesting times.” “The clear implication,” says the Phrase Finder Website, “being that ‘uninteresting times’, of peace and tranquility, are more life-enhancing.” Or, at least profitable, if you are in the textbook industry. May they live in interesting times.

I bring this up only because Google is having an “interesting time” meeting its Utopian goal of making all of the world’s books digitally available. (“Could Google Books ruling affect college textbook market?“) If you put this together with cheap, electronic readers, and perhaps with a simple– and elegant, one hopes– printing system, then the end of our current intellectual property era looms ever closer.

At a certain point– depending, among other things, on when Google gets its permissions in order– a “textbook” will be a search algorithm that gathers together a list of the best available resources on a particular subject. These algorithms could have all sorts of parameters: an introductory” or “advanced” filter, or a filter that excludes or includes information posted after a certain date.

We not yet to the point– as far as I know– where we can begin designing that search engine. The problem is, of course, is money. Or, to be more accurate the problem is both wages– how authors can get paid– and profits, that is, how publishing houses can stay afloat. The first makes a lot of sense: we created copyright in order to encourage writing. We shouldn’t worry so much about the publishers.

Two seemingly very different stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention this week. (I’m writing this a few days early so I can travel to the CCCC‘s in Atlanta this week). One, “Presidents Defend Their Pay as Public Colleges Slash Budgets,” is about the ample rewards of being at the top of the higher education hierarchy, and the other, “A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2,” reviews the argument, expressed in the book Academically Adrift, that undergraduates too often graduate without becoming educated.

These two stories seem to exist in weirdly separate worlds, even though the piece about undergraduate education concludes, in part, with this quote from Academically Adrift: “”A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities.” I am always a little skeptical about the claim that students, overall, are not learning. The problem is that certain aspects of learning, such as critical thinking, are elusive at best. How do you quantify good thinking?

Still, it’s fairly obvious that an ugly mix of exploitation, consumerism, and standardized testing, at the very least, has undermined undergraduate education to an alarming degree. If that’s what the authors of Academically Adrift mean by “organizational culture” then I cannot disagree. But very little, if anything, in the piece about presidential salaries seems connected to any of these issues. These presidents are clearly running the system into the ground and getting rich in the process. It’s hard to see how that’s different from the corporate world at large.

When I was a little boy I got hurt playing both football and baseball. The problem, we found out, was that I had what is often called a lazy eye. (officially: Amblyopia ). My mom made me quit all sports, and I lost all interest. That’s never changed, so the marketing hype called March Madness is just that to me: hype. I don’t have anything against basketball, but I don’t have that passion.

Still, I know that lots of people enjoy the entire ritual from filling out the brackets to the final game. What I find more interesting this year is that the basketball championships have produced two revealing exposes of college sports. First, was the Frontline report called Money and March Madness (I mentioned it last week), and then was a Real Sports episode (#168).

I’ve always thought that the emphasis on sports in college was a symptom of U.S. anti-intellectualism, if not one of its causes, and I knew that enormous amounts of money were generated by these programs, especially football and basketball, but the scale of both the profits and the exploitation ought to shock anyone. It’s not millions, or hundreds of millions, but billions of dollars.

That means we ought to be able to fund a big chunk of our college system on our love (even I might love sports if this were true) of a few sports. Instead, of course, as both shows illustrate, the money is funneled into administrative and coach salaries and expensive stadiums and the like. When it comes to reform, though, both shows focus too heavily on the athletes.

The athletes are certainly exploited and they should be compensated: the idea of a graduation bonus is long over due and after graduation the athletes ought to be paid if their images are used in video games or promotions and the like. That’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. I think that the profits ought to be pooled and used as a kind of permanent scholarship fund.

As the cliché goes, this would be a win-win situation. I don’t think athletes are greedy; they just want a cut. I also think that many of them would be happy to know that, along with their piece of the pie, they are helping to create opportunities for generations to come. We’d emphasize the importance of education. And we would damped the greed of couches and administrators.