Category Archives: Writing

In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.

Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.

“Did Social Security and Medicare Crash the Economy?,” Dean Baker

One of my favorite bands, The Gang of Four, has a song (“History is Bunk“) based on Henry Ford’s famous contention that “History is bunk” (or myth or several other things Mr. Ford said). The thing is, to a capitalist, or to capitalism, anything that cannot be used for generating profit is bunk. That’s what Ford meant– and what he felt, no doubt, at a very visceral level– and even after 100 years of more history piling up, modern capitalism is no different.

Capital seeks profit, not knowledge or insight. This is one of the many ways that critical thinking is, by definition, anti-capitalist: analytic thinking is founded on the idea that history, even for its own sake, isn’t bunk. Yet American culture has a remarkably poor memory and the commercial media, in its rush to profit, seems all too ready to declare history bunk again and again and to forget even the most basic, very recent, historical facts.

As Baker emphasizes, we cannot forget this fact: it was not the elderly and the poor who collapsed the economy and it should not be the elderly and the poor who pay for the repairs. So far, the people who caused the collapse have escaped all of the possible repercussions, from criminal charges to fines. That history really is bunk. Any budget fix that touches Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will turn more history into more bunk.

U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security, according to U.S. Education Department data.

Spending on administration has been rising faster than funds for instruction and research at 198 leading U.S. research universities, concluded a 2010 study by Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas.

“Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” Greene said in a telephone interview.

“Is Administrative Bloat Hurting Higher Ed? Number of College Administrators Up 60 Percent from 1993,” John Hechinger

After the election debacle, the Republican party is supposedly re-thinking it main aims and goals. I have real doubts about how far this will go but I sometimes try to imagine what a good solid conservative party would be like and what it’s goals ought to be. It would be great to have a party focused on administrative efficiency, for example, instead of that only sees pubic institutions as a potential bargain buy.

I’ve long thought that the conservatives ought to be leading the way in fighting for national health care. Wouldn’t it be easier to run any business, especially those beloved small businesses, if the businesses didn’t have to worry about health care? Wouldn’t be even better if we had a real national pension system, so that no business had to worry about retirement plans? What about a national day care system?

All of these programs are pro-business, benefit from a national scale, and could be watched over carefully by a conservative party concerned with the way we spend public money. I think conservatives ought to be even more upset about the administrative bloat in public universities, not simply because of the waste represented by misspent funds. They ought to be very concerned about the education of their workforce as well.

For many of the developers not working at traditional companies, moreover, “job” is a misnomer. Streaming Color Studios, a game developer, did a survey of game makers late last year. The 252 respondents, while not a scientifically valid sample and restricted to one segment of the app market, indicated what many people had suspected: the app world is an ecology weighted heavily toward a few winners.

“As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living,” David Streitfeld

Reading this article in the New York Times I had one of those Deja Vu moments that, well, I should probably be embarrassed about because it seems so obvious in retrospect: the so-called “app” economy is the same economic mode as the adjunct economy (and outsourcing and contract labor and the rest of the so-called post-modern casualized labor economy). Like, Duh, dude, what do you think they mean by post-industrial?

I think, in general, they mean the same thing that they meant by industrial. Or mostly, anyway. In Europe, the industrial revolution also meant the rise of the socialist state; to ameliorate the destructiveness of capitalist development, workers organized and won certain rights, including national health care and pension systems, a shortened work week, regulatory protections for people and the environment, and so on.

In the U.S. we were a lot less successful when it came to these goals. We got Medicare and Medicaid and now the ACA, instead of National Health Care; Social Security instead of a national pension system. We managed to shorten the work week– at least nominally– and we got regulations for people and the environment. In Europe, as well as here, thanks to the recession working people have had to once again fight for these gains.

I think the “app economy” is even more serious because it, like the adjunct economy in higher education, re-sets the economic clock to a point before we had any of the securities– and power– of mass organization. (It’s also a horribly ugly phrase, “app”– perhaps this is some sort of poetic justice.) This new economy is built on a kind of lottery myth: maybe I will be the one to design “this year’s model” and make it big. Very few will, of course.

The question, of course, is what the rest of us will do, given that so few get rich on apps (or become rock or sports stars or even tenured professors). How we will be able to keep the social gains of the last century or so, without huge labor organizations? It seems impossible. So in a real sense, Apple’s labor policies in the U.S. are not so different here than they are in China. The domestic labor exploitation is just hidden behind our favorite romantic myth.

We are not a loan. Strike Debt came from a coalition of Occupy groups looking to build popular resistance to all forms of debt imposed on us by the banks. Debt keeps us isolated, ashamed, and afraid. We are building a movement to challenge this system while creating alternatives and supporting each other. We want an economy where our debts are to our friends, families, and communities — and not to the 1%.

Strike Debt

I’m always trying to figure out ways that students can write about what matters to them; best of all, I’d like to find ways to use writing assignments to help students think though important issues, especially issues related to (their own) contemporary life. As an online teacher, of course, I am more than a little limited since I can’t re-design my course each session, much less offer new assignments that address new issues.

I can, however, point students to ideas and issues that are outside of their usual intellectual haunts and I can encourage them to take on research projects that might challenge some of their basic assumptions. This is the basis of teaching critical thinking skills. I just read a post by Doug Henwood on the Debt Resistor’s Operations Mnaual, and while I agree with most of his critique, I think it’s a text that nonetheless deserves a lot more attention.

The DROM is interesting for a lot of reasons. In terms of process, it’s a collectively edited project. Henwood argues– using examples– that the collective tamped down his rhetoric, trying to make it more palatable. The process of collective editing, and the traces it leaves on or in a text, is a subject that ought to be of intrinsic interest. A wiki would make it easier to understand how the text was edited and how the collective process worked.

The DROM is also interesting because it offers practical advice and touches on a subject that is a central aspect of American life. The study of debt, and the resistance to debt, could hardly be more relevant to students facing a long future of paying off loans. It also helps students to see connections among what might otherwise seem disparate issues, like personal and municipal debt and financial regulatory policies.