Month: December 2004

Oxblog and Matt Yglesias are wondering about the idea of making college education near-universal, and particularly the ramifications of such a move for the American workforce — i.e., would you have over-educated people slumming it in menial jobs, or would we end up with a European-style system, with high unemployment and immigrants imported to do the work that well-educated Americans look down on? (The latter sounds a lot like California to me . . .)

I’d pose a different question, though. Suppose you tried to universalize college education — how many people would actually go for it? At present, a little over a quarter of all Americans have college degrees, and around half try college for a while but never graduate. No doubt a lot of these people drop out, or never go, for financial reasons, and having government-subsidized college tuition would certainly raise both matriculation and graduation rates appreciably. But I’m not sure the rates would be raised to anywhere near universal levels. I think that many, many people drop out or don’t go to college because they don’t want to go . . . because they’ve spent a dozen years in school, they don’t like school, and they want to get out into the world and start making money.

I saw a fair amount of this urge even among my friends and neighbors, and I come from a culture where the necessity of “going-to-college” is hammered into you starting in the cradle, if not earlier. I guess you could try to replicate the obsessed-with-admissions climate of East Coast suburbia in working class communities around the country, but I’m not sure that’s either feasible or desirable. Or you could get around it by mandating college attendance, they way we mandate elementary and secondary school. But given that college-aged kids are generally considered adults, not minors (except for that pesky alcohol prohibition), I’m not sure forcing them to attend school is going to fly — at least not in the freedom-loving U.S.A.

Finally, a faintly politically incorrect question: Isn’t it possible that there’s a significant segment of the American population that simply wouldn’t benefit from going to college? I’m no IQ-determinist, but it seems like forcing some people into an extra four years of schooling might run, rather quickly, into a problem of diminishing returns. (Especially since I suspect that what America really needs are better elementary schools, not more emphasis on higher education.)

— Ross Douthat

“A Kerry presidency would’ve been an unmitigated disaster, with a hostile congress, budget woes, the mess in Iraq, etc.” – Daily Kos, today.
– Andrew

Ukrainian etiquette tips for the holiday season . . .

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE THE SUN ALSO RISES: A Visit from Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner), by James Thurber . . . and yep, it’s more or less as hilarious as it sounds.

(both via MaudNewton)

— Ross Douthat

David Ignatius seems to be missing something about the debate over Rumsfeld’s future, calling him “a convenient scapegoat” for the administration’s mistakes in Iraq. But why, on the heels of an electoral victory that vindicated the president’s Iraq policy, would Republicans be trying to save face? For the victors, post-election recriminations are about the future rather than the past — and Rumsfeld is associated with a particular post-election agenda. As Bill Kristol, who initiated the anti-Rumsfeld movement, said of the secretary: “His theory about the military is at odds with the president’s geopolitical strategy. He wants this light, transformed military, but we’ve got to win a real war, which involves using a lot of troops and building a nation, and that’s at the core of the president’s strategy for rebuilding the Middle East.” As Ignatius sees it, the debate over troop levels “is partly a rear-action battle against Rumseld’s ideas about military ‘transformation.’ Advocates of the old, heavyweight Army have never forgiven Rummy for advocating lighter, more mobile forces, but Rumsfeld was correct.” Evidently, however, not everyone agrees. As Andrew put it:

Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon with an admirable agenda of forcing the military to become leaner, to maximise the use of technology and to move away from the large numbers and heavy armaments of the past. But his wars showed that the old methods were still valid.

So Rumsfeld’s critics “see a clear mismatch between America’s goals and its means” and “recognize in Rumsfeld an obstacle to victory rather than an asset.” Whatever the details regarding armor in Iraq, the fact remains that Rumsfeld favors air power and light forces rather than large numbers of armored troops. This leads, some argue, to American deployments unprepared for the security situation on the ground. But it also means an American military ill-equipped for political reconstruction and nation-building, the sort of democracy-promoting missions Rumsfeld doesn’t like. “Donald Rumsfeld has articulated a strategy of nation-building ‘lite,’ involving a rapid transition to local control and a tough-love policy that leaves locals to find their own way toward good government and democracy,” Francis Fukuyama has written. “This is a dubious approach, at least if one cares about the final outcome.” So it’s not surprising that those who want the U.S. to promote democracy or rebuild failing states would like a future administration Rumsfeld-free. And it also explains why Rumsfeld isn’t simply a scapegoat for the president: On nation-building and democracy, Bush and Rumsfeld disagree.

P.S. Matt Yglesias suggests that liberals might want to join what has been, until now, a debate among conservatives about the future of the military and U.S. foreign policy. Otherwise, they cede the issues to the right.
–Steven Menashi

“Google makes it harder than ever to escape the past,” Lawrence Lessig told the New York Times a while back, noting that “we haven’t developed effective norms yet for all the relationships that develop” because of Google and the Internet. Now Jeffrey Rosen writes that “an etiquette is beginning to emerge” regarding the sharing of personal information online. “I would never reveal the identity of a date — it violates the honor among bloggers,” one blogger told Rosen. As personal bloggers proliferate, a stigma against revealing others’ personal information may be the only way to reclaim an expectation of privacy. Rosen suggests that the “blogging community” police itself by shaming unscrupulous bloggers. But Simson Garfinkel thinks the problem isn’t so serious.

THE MIND OF GOD: In related news, both the Boston Globe and the New York Times run editorials today on Google’s book-scanning project. One of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin, has said that the perfect search engine “would be the mind of God,” all-knowing and able to “give you back exactly what you need.” Well, Google is at least adding the inventories of five great libraries (Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library) to its wealth of information. The Globe opines, “Trying to access the world’s overflow of information can be like trying to take a drink from Niagara Falls. This project should tame the flow.” But doesn’t Googlizing libraries seem more like opening the floodgates, letting loose an undifferentiated mass of information without the organization that a library (or a physical book) typically provides? Just as the web demanded portals, directories, and blogs, some digital equivalent of the Dewey decimal system is bound to arise. Still, Boolean searches seem a far cry from the mind of God.
–Steven Menashi

The conventional wisdom has long been that the Bush administration “disengaged” from the Middle East peace process. As the New York Times editorialized, “the administration has allowed the situation in Israel to turn into a stalemate.” Back in August, Aluf Benn, diplomatic correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, challenged this cliche. “The Bush administration, which appears indifferent, has been far more involved than any previous administrations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Benn wrote. Now, David Brooks reports on the fruits of Bush’s approach:

It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don’t know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now. It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them. His judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back. Bush concluded that peace would never come as long as Palestine was an undemocratic tyranny, and that the Palestinians needed to see their intifada would never bring triumph.

If that’s disengagement, it’s not half-bad.
–Steven Menashi

The evidence mounts for “The End of the Jewish Vote.” Here’s The Forward on the White House’s ties to Orthodox Jews: “Both supporters and detractors of the president said the events showed that Bush was rewarding the religiously traditional elements of the community that supported his re-election and sending a message to the more liberal segments that did not.” Last month, Peter Beinart wrote that “Religion is eclipsing ethnicity as a force in American politics.” When Rick Santorum is a favored guest at the Novominsker Yeshiva in Brooklyn, who can disagree?
–Steven Menashi

I can certainly see why many intelligent people wouldn’t want George W. Bush in charge of making science policy. What I’m less clear on is why anyone would want these people in charge instead.

— Ross Douthat

An excellent post from one of the better religion blogs out there, GetReligion, takes on Charles Krauthammer’s take on Christmas:

. . . Many of this year’s Christmas culture war skirmishes have nothing to do with tolerance and very little to do with the separation of church and state. They are simply cat fights between armies of liberal fundamentalists and conservative fundamentalists. [Krauthammer] chose to pick on the anti-Christmas left, but pick up almost any newspaper these days and there will be a story in it somewhere about the latest outbreaks on the right . . .

Then again, the cultural steamroller called “The Holidays” has done almost as much damage to the actual religious traditions of Hanukkah as it has to the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Once upon a time, Hanukkah was a smaller Jewish holiday reminding Jews not to compromise their faith when facing pressures to assimilate into a dominant culture. Today, Hanukkah is a giant, major holiday because it is close to the holiday previously known as Christmas. Religious history doesn’t get any more ironic than that.

Read the whole thing.

— Ross Douthat

Reihan is much, much too kind. I don’t pay him enough — especially given the slings and arrows being hurled our way. He’s so kind, in fact, that I will take up the gauntlet thrown down by Jonah Goldberg and defend Reihan’s view that affirmative action at elite universities is essentially a “sideshow,” and one that’s useless to disadvantaged minorities, because it only “affect[s] the miniscule segment of the population that has the chance to attend any selective school.”

Goldberg retorts that “I don’t think you can call the fight for how our leading civilizing, culture-transferring and, yes, wealth conferring institutions pick and choose their students a ‘sideshow.'” Now, I’d be the last to disagree, for obvious reasons. But the point that Reihan is making, I think, is that for all intents and purposes, “our leading civilizing, culture-transferring” institutions pick and choose their black students from the exact same pool as their white students — i.e. the meritocratic haute-bourgeoisie. (This article, I suspect, could have been written about the black population at almost any top-flight school.) With rare exceptions, the people that affirmative action is supposed to benefit don’t see any returns from Michigan Law School et. al. giving minority applicants a few extra points on the ol’ application score sheet. All those extra points do is churn the waters of the upper-middle-class a little.

POINTLESS PREFERENCES: So the affirmative-action-at-elite-schools debate is a “sideshow,” because it has no serious impact on how race, and more importantly class, are lived in America. This suggests, first of all, that liberals should stop racing to the barricades every time somebody hints that racial preferences might not be a good idea — at least if they really want to reduce racial inequality, rather than just feel good about how diverse the Brown student body looks in its Yearbook photo shoots. But it also suggests that there might be more profitable ways for the Right to spend its time than railing against the injustice of Stanford Law daring to pick a black kid with a 3.6 GPA instead of a white kid with a 3.8. Sure, it’s unjust . . . but it’s also not that important. And pointing out how unimportant it is, and how ineffective such programs are, might be a better way to the hearts and minds of minority voters than just repeating the “color-blind society” mantra and waiting for Sandra Day O’Connor to retire.

— Ross Douthat