The Real Class War
Average pre-tax incomes in 2006 jumped by about $60,000 (5.8 percent) for the top 1 percent of households, but just $430 (1.4 percent) for the bottom 90 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to a new update in the groundbreaking series on income inequality by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Their analysis of newly released IRS data shows that in 2006, the shares of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were higher than in any year since 1928.
Average Income in 2006 up $60,000 for Top 1 Percent of Households, Just $430 for Bottom 90 Percent. Chye-Ching Huang and Chad Stone, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
I was watching Fox News on Saturday, after Senator Obama’s vice-presidential announcement, and William Crystal, that weird rolly-polly gnome of the right, called Senator Biden the perfect candidate to start the class war. They mean, of course, that Biden is pro-union and pro-women, generally speaking, and can start hammering away at McCain’s “welfare for the rich” economic programs.
It’s classic right-wing rhetorical Judo, as Huang and Stone’s work shows. You take the truth– that there’s been a radical shift of wealth from the poor, working, and middle-classes to the rich– and you insist on the opposite. If you repeat it often enough, it starts to sound like the truth. The farther you get from the actual truth, you more you need to exaggerate. Thus, “The Audacity of Socialism.”
Cheating 2.0
Academic integrity is the cornerstone of the best we have to offer in higher education. Integrity flourishes in an environment that encourages mutual respect, fairness, trust, responsibility, and a love of learning and that is maintained by safeguards like clear expectations, fair and relevant assessments, and vigilant course management (McCabe and Pavela 2004). Compelling evidence of widespread academic dishonesty among Net-Generation students threatens to undermine both the environment of trust that nourishes integrity and the safeguards that ensure it.
“The Net Generation Cheating Challenge,” Valerie Milliron and Kent Sandoe, Innovate, August/September 2008
There is almost too much to say about this article. On the one hand, I think it seems strangely naive to imagine a pre-net world in which students rarely cheated. So maybe there’s no real change at all. On the other hand, this problem is the Achilles heal of online education, and I am not sure if there’s a solution.
The author’s proposals are both vague and common-commonsensical: create a culture of learning that makes cheating the least attraction option, use technology and smartly designed assignments to make cheating more difficult. It’s exactly the same thing strategy used pre-net.
What goes unacknowledged in the article is that communication technologies are beginning to break down the old educational meritocracy itself, with it’s close links among property, learning, and grades. These breakdowns make the machinery visible.
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today