The misuse of progress.

It’s rare to see any economist get this philosophical, but it is an essay by Brad DeLong:

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family’s annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith’s Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

No wonder Thomas Jefferson died essentially bankrupt.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer’s earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. Then there are all the commodities we consume that were essentially priceless in the past. If in 1786 you had wanted to listen to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in your house, you probably had to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, with a theater in your house—the Palace of Laxenberg. Today, the DVD costs $17.99 at amazon.com. (The multiplication factor for enjoying The Marriage of Figaro in your home is effectively infinite for those not named Josef von Habsburg.)

Today we still spend about one dollar in five on food—down from the half of income that Americans spent in 1776. The share hasn’t fallen more because some of us buy buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise cooked, served, and cleaned up by others rather than (or in addition to) oats in the gunnysack. One reason is that the oats-for-five-meals-out-of-six-diet of 18th Century Scots was monotonous, and we are glad to escape it. Another is we play status games: oats taste worse when you know somebody else is tasting petrale sole and, conversely, the fish tastes better to those of us with money and luck enough to dine at Chez Panisse.

Ultimately, I agree with DeLong’s point in all this:

We are simply not built to ever say “enough!” to stuff in general.

My fear is, however, that the extent of progress over the centuries can be used as a means to deny economic justice.* Can’t you just hear it now?:

“At least the poor don’t have to eat oats every day!”

“Poor people are much better off than they were 100 years ago!”

Of course they were, but that’s no excuse for letting the distribution of wealth revert to eighteenth century levels. Or to put it another way, everyone in America is not middle class (no matter how much we think otherwise).

* DeLong’s not doing this, but we all know what happens when good arguments get in the hands of the wrong people.

Andrew Zimmern is the man!

My wife finally cleared off some room on the the TIVO for me so that I could start watching back episodes of Bizarre Foods. This was the best part of the episode I got through tonight. He’s in Iceland eating rotten shark:

For the big pile near my reading chair: Tear Down This Myth

I am SO buying this book:

Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for story-telling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle class resentment of 1960s unrest.

His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the “malaise” of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: An economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge.

His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan’s real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy – even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so many time that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight — linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 papered over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Central America. The Iran-contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan’s presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect of future presidents for the Constitution — because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note – but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today’s conservatives.

It sounds like this might be a good antidote to why I don’t really hate Reagan as much as I did back in the day. I guess anyone looks better compared to Bush.

The face of industrialization today.

Dangerous radical that I am, I’ve convinced some students groups and other donors to bring Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee to our campus in April. After watching their introductory films, I wanted to share them. That’s when I discovered that they have their own YouTube channel. The following is a few years old now, but sadly it is not at all outdated.

Of course, I posted this over on our Walmart blog first, but I believe this video also has historical interest. What is today’s Bangladeshi sweatshop but a recreation of American sweatshops from a hundred years ago? Even then, there were groups that resembled today’s NLC that tried to bring awareness to the conditions created by unregulated industrial capitalism. Today, it’s completely out of sight, and therefore mostly out of mind. That’s why you should take the 34 minutes needed to watch this film.

“There’s no ideas in TIME Magazine. There’s just these facts.”

Media criticism from Bob Dylan:

Why does the New York Times think adjunct work at a community college is a “safe” job?

Imagine my surprise when I read in a story entitled “Bad Times Spur a Flight to Jobs Viewed as Safe” in my NYT this morning that:

Academics are migrating to community colleges, which are adding teachers as enrollment rises.

Really? Given an opportunity to choose between full time, tenure-track positions at a research university and a at a community college academics would prefer the community college because the community college job won’t go poof during a recession? I doubt it, but that’s the impression the Paper of Record is giving here.

Let’s look at the academic example in the story:

Community colleges are turning out to be a similar mecca as enrollment rises because of the recession. Laid-off workers are flocking to the schools to retrain for other occupations, and young people are enrolling in greater numbers to avoid the higher tuitions of a four-year college, said James Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich.

At 41,000 students, Macomb’s enrollment is up 10 percent from last year, Mr. Jacobs said. With the recession driving enrollment, he is adding to his staff of 220 full-time teachers and 750 adjuncts. Most of the new hires are adjuncts, though the courses they teach there and at another community college often add up to full-time work.

Since enrollment is rising, they are assured of work semester after semester, Mr. Jacobs said. The annual pay is $40,000 or less — usually less — and no benefits. Still, they are coming back.

If there are three times as many adjuncts there as tenure track faculty, doesn’t that blow the entire thesis of this article out of the water? If you’re an adjunct, your life wasn’t safe before the recession started and it’s not safe now either. You have no academic freedom. Your workload is through the roof and while you’re not starving, I have yet to hear of any community college that pays a wage that would justify the expense of earning a Ph.D. Maybe, just maybe, the recession will lower the number of people coming out of graduate school to compete with you for openings, but then again, don’t people go to graduate school in hard economic times in order to flee reality?

And the workload for tenure-track faculty at community colleges is no picnic either.

Where exactly is Marc Bousquet when we really need him?

Do all stories about Google Books have to be good news/bad news?

Robert Darnton has a long and thoughtful story about Google Books in the new New York Review of Books. Darnton suggests that:

An enterprise on such a scale is bound to elicit reactions of the two kinds that I have been discussing: on the one hand, utopian enthusiasm; on the other, jeremiads about the danger of concentrating power to control access to information.

Then he does precisely that. On the one hand, I’ve already experienced this feeling:

Who could not be moved by the prospect of bringing virtually all the books from America’s greatest research libraries within the reach of all Americans, and perhaps eventually to everyone in the world with access to the Internet? Not only will Google’s technological wizardry bring books to readers, it will also open up extraordinary opportunities for research, a whole gamut of possibilities from straightforward word searches to complex text mining. Under certain conditions, the participating libraries will be able to use the digitized copies of their books to create replacements for books that have been damaged or lost. Google will engineer the texts in ways to help readers with disabilities.

But on the other hand:

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

But to me, the good side is much, much more important than the bad. Indeed, without Google Books, I wouldn’t have any access to many of the works in these wonderful research libraries. Indeed, even if I could walk into one of them every day, I still might not know that I actually wanted to read a particular work. Digitization on this scale has made it possible to find a thousand needles in a thousand haystacks, and that’s an unalloyed good thing. In fact, it’s a great thing.

Therefore, I’m willing to cut Google an awful lot of slack.

Reading is fundamental.

There’s a very good article in this month’s Academe about the skills that high school students need to develop in order to do well in college. Naturally, I gravitated to the part about reading:

Being able to enjoy reading is often the result of a long engagement with books and the written word that cannot be replaced by “cramming” or taking special college preparatory classes. The students whom I have found to be most ready for college have loved books and loved to read. If you don’t love to read, you will probably be confused and frustrated while at college. Reading is perhaps the most paradigmatic activity of a liberal arts education. It is where learning begins at college. You have four years to learn to love to read.

[Emphasis added]

This seemed particularly fitting as I just got the dreaded “Do you expect us to read the entire book?” question the other day in class.

I am willing to make some allowances for the obvious cultural generation gap between those of us who grew up reading and those of us who didn’t. For example, I go out of my way to pick books for class that are well-written and relatively short. However, there are only so many compromises I can make. You can’t take a history class without reading because that’s how historical knowledge is usually conveyed. reading is also a prerequisite for writing well.

If you don’t read and read well going into an undergraduate history class you are destined to be confused and frustrated. So am I, because I’m not entirely sure I can help you. On the other hand, I’ve always found that the best way to improve one’s reading skills is to read so perhaps I am helping without knowing it.

The Final Report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (1916).

Google Books has it online.  Here’s the best thing I’ve found reading it over again:

Industrial Relations Final Report and Testimony, Submitted To Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations Created by the Act of August, 23, 1912 By United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Francis Patrick Walsh, Basil Maxwell Manly

To say that Frank Walsh had an agenda would be putting it mildly.

“Our Daily Bread” (1934).

King Vidor’s leftist masterpiece online in its entirety.

Why take an hour and thirteen minutes out of your life to watch it?

This is from Tom Zaniello’s review in Working Stiffs, Union Maid, Reds and Riffraff:

King Vidor’s film suggests that creating socialist farming co-ops was the only way out for the unemployed in the early Depression years.  Although there is a fairly unnecessary romantic subplot and even a blonde femme fatale, the heart of the film is the movement of numerous unemployed and underemployed workers (plumbers, carpenters, blacksmiths and so on) out of the city and into the countryside, where they accept the unlikely leadership of city dweller John Sims.  Many of the extras in the film were actual unemployed and other rioffraff who were recruited from the streets of Los Angeles, giving the film an authentic look.

I dare you to name another 1930s movie that’s this relevant to today.