FSMichaels.com

The ROI of Education

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:15:25 -0400

The ongoing conversation, brought to you by the Chronicle of Higher Education…

“There is a drumbeat to look at the value of higher education through the value of the short-term earning power of college graduates,” says John R. Kroger, president of Reed College. “The ROI argument is mainly looking at the return to the individual and the family. Another thing we ought to be measuring is the societal gain. When someone goes to college and decides, I am going to be a teacher instead of a patent lawyer, one of the things you might conclude is that even if the individual gain is rather limited, the societal gain is enormous.

An education that treats people just like economic actors and is concerned mostly with training them to be producers and consumers is really limited,” Mr. Kroger says. “No one has ever viewed that as the purpose of education.”

Until now.

The Decline of Wine

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:57:00 -0400

Read an interesting article on the BBC tonight about the decline of wine consumption in France. France! Where wine was once sacrosanct. (Decline, by the way, means that over half of French adults drank wine on a near-daily basis in 1980. Only 17% do today. And the proportion who don’t drink wine at all has doubled to 38%).

Two critics of the trend are Denis Saverot, editor of La Revue des Vins de France magazine, and French writer Theodore Zeldin. I thought both had an interesting take on where things have gone and are going, particularly in terms of the rise and effect of non-wine industries and what Zeldin calls the “business-style culture” that has taken hold in France.

Saverot says:

“It is our bourgeois, technocratic elite with their campaigns against drink-driving and alcoholism, lumping wine in with every other type of alcohol, even though it should be regarded as totally different,” he says.

“Recently I heard one senior health official saying that wine causes cancer ‘from the very first glass’. That coming from a Frenchman. I was flabbergasted. In hock with the health lobby and the politically correct, our elites prefer to keep the country on chemical anti-depressants and wean us off wine.

“Just look at the figures. In the 1960s, we were drinking 160 litres each a year and weren’t taking any pills. Today we consume 80 million packets of anti-depressants, and wine sales are collapsing. Wine is the subtlest, most civilised, most noble of anti-depressants. But look at our villages. The village bar has gone, replaced by a pharmacy.”

Veteran observer of his nation’s way of life, Oxford-based French writer Theodore Zeldin agrees that a business-style culture has made huge inroads into France - the bane of all those who prefer to take the time to savour things.

“Companionship has been replaced by networking. Business means busy-ness, and in that way we are becoming like everywhere else,” he says.

But Zeldin refuses to abandon hope.

“The old French art de vivre is still there. It’s an ideal. It’s a bit like the ideal of an English gentleman. You don’t often find an English gentleman, but the ideal is there and it informs society as a whole,” he says.

“It is the same with our art de vivre. Of course times have changed, but it still survives. It is that feeling you get in France that in human relations we need to do more than just conduct business. We have a duty to entertain, to converse. And in France - thanks to our education system - we still have that ability to converse in a general, universalist way that has been lost elsewhere.

“That is the art de vivre. It is about taking your time. And wine is part of it, because with wine you have to take your time.

Work vs. Parenting

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 13:44:00 -0500

I read this recent New York Times piece, An Overwhelmed Mother’s Departure Memo with interest. That overwhelmed mother in the article finally left Big Law to take care of her kids, because she couldn’t take the crazy work/life schedule anymore. What really makes for interesting reading, though, are the 144 comments (and counting) that other working parents have left in response.

Really, anyone who’s involved in giving care - whether to kids, your own parents, other family members, or whoever - seems to be struggling. I wrote about that a bit in Monoculture, noting that the decision to have children is increasingly viewed as an economic decision, because there’s a good chance that as a family, you’re going to take a financial hit. As the NYT article points out, if you’re a parent of young kids and you’re working fulltime, someone else is making that possible - your partner, a daycare, a nanny, a preschool, a babysitter, a cleaner, grandparents, whoever. And studies show that if both parents cut back on their career obligations, they both suffer career penalties. And that all assumes that you’re not a single parent.

My little guy is almost 13 months old, and while I’m lucky enough to be able to both stay at home with him right now while his dad works out of the house, and write at home (usually during his naps and then again in the evenings, assuming I’m caught up on other things like my own sleep, the cleaning, and the grocery shopping), I find myself wondering how other people are making it work. Because even with one child and the great situation I find myself in, it’s a challenge to keep all the balls in the air.

When I was in Phd-land, one of my fellow students was a mother of two. During our years in the program, she become a mother of four - and at the time, those four kids were all under the age of six. Her (male, father-of-adult-children) supervisor kept asking when she was going to get her kids into daycare fulltime.

Today, she works fulltime, her husband works fulltime, her kids are 10 and under, and she says they’re all heavily involved in about half-a-dozen extracurricular activities like track, piano, violin, and dance. I haven’t yet figured out a polite way to ask how she’s holding that all together. Does she have a nanny? A cleaner? A cook? A driver? Are the grandparents involved? How do they do it?

What sticks with me most from the research I did for the book on how the economic story is changing our family relationships is that the kind of individuality that’s espoused by the economic story means that we see this kind of work versus parenting problem as a problem of the individual - not a problem of the societal structures that we’ve set in place.

That means we’re all wandering around trying to solve the same problem idiosyncratically, meaning you solve it however you can using whatever resources you can find, and I solve it however I can, using whatever resources I can find. The economic story keeps us from imagining that this could be a societal problem - a problem of how our organizations are structured, a problem of how many hours we’re being asked to work (more and more all the time), a lack of recognition of how the shift from women-at-home to women-in-the-paid-workforce has not been addressed by corporations that assume that employees have someone at home looking after the domestic side of life.

Unfortunately, that individualistic approach suggests a whole lot of families are going to keep struggling. And a whole lot of families will keep addressing the problem individually - some leaving their jobs, some staying, some having fewer kids, some not having kids at all.

How to Outsource Your Life

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 12:11:52 -0400

Bloomberg Businessweek printed an interesting piece on the growing trend of outsourcing chores you don’t want to do (weeding your lawn, cleaning your car, getting your coffee from the coffee shop) to people who make up what’s called “the distributed workforce.” That “workforce” bids against each other for these odd jobs, where low bids tend to win of course, and venture capitalists are betting big on the companies involved.

It’s another example of how outsourcing every aspect of our lives is becoming more and more normal. But what ever happened to cleaning your room because you had to?

Big Trash

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:09:47 -0400

Here’s an example of the economic story in action that I hadn’t heard of before - Big Trash - but it makes sense. In the U.S., for-profit garbage collection is affecting what kind of garbage makes it to the curb.

In some states, compost (lawn clippings, kitchen waste, etc.) is saved from the landfill (yard waste bans are a good thing, because landfills are filling up), but in other states, Big Trash sees keeping compost out of the landfill as a threat to its business model: less garbage means less money. So Big Trash gets politically involved, influences some laws, and there you have it - more garbage for everyone.

You can read about it here, courtesy of Mother Jones.

I was part of the TED Global Talent Search in Vancouver in June...

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:08:59 -0400

I was part of the TED Global Talent Search in Vancouver in June and gave a brief 4-minute talk about the idea behind the book: how one story is changing everything. If you think the rise of the economic story and the development of the monoculture is an idea worth spreading at TED2013, please visit the TED site and vote. And then feel free to share the link with your networks. Thanks for your support.

myedol: Street Poetry by Robert Montgomery

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:14:31 -0400

myedol:

Street Poetry by Robert Montgomery

Meeting TED

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 19:36:16 -0400

Last week, I had a chance to be part of the TED@Vancouver segment of the 14-city TED Global Talent Search as a speaker.

What a fantastic venue (the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Center). And it was great to see so many interesting people and ideas lined up in one space. I didn’t get much of a chance to actually watch anybody perform outside of a couple of rehearsals, as I had my 7-month-old on the road with me and kept having to slip away for baby duties, but the bios and research looked incredible.

I was particularly impressed by the teenagers who are getting themselves up on stage, saying their piece, and doing their part. Plus people solving cancer! Plus poets! Plus gardeners!

If all you read is the news, you’d think the world is falling into decay and despair. And yes, while some of that is definitely going on, all the big and little acts of creativity and original thought and kindness are stitching that world back up, over and over again, and growing it whole.

See for yourself - here are some of the people who were there. (Videos of the Talent Search will be posted once the whole tour is done, and then people will be voting for who they’d like to see at TED2013. But since TED2013 won’t be able to host everybody who participated, check out these ideas on your own too.)

Shailja Patel: Internationally acclaimed Kenyan poet, playwright, and activist whose work has been translated into eight languages.

Ron Finley: Gardener and community activist in South Central LA.

Padina Pezeshki: Biomedical Engineering PhD candidate working on developing and validating (patent-pending) novel techniques, using radio-frequency, to help patients with bone cancer.

Rupinder Bains: 16-year old diagnosed with Crohn’s disease last year who has been on a mission ever since to put a face to the illness.

Miranda Wang & Jeanny Yao: Teenage finalists competing for Canada’s top student biotech award, the 2012 Sanofa BioGENEius Challenge Canada. These two have identified soil bacteria found in the Fraser River Estuary that naturally breaks down phthalates, a fossil fuel-based additive found in many plastics, from baby bottles to food wrap.

The Creative Economy

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:16:15 -0400

Thanks to a reader for the heads-up on the continued shift in how we talk about creativity - moving to understanding the creative force as an economic force, and addressing creative issues from an economic angle so government and society think it’s worthwhile to pay attention to.

Here in British Columbia, where I live, they’re holding conferences about it, describing creativity as “a new and dynamic business sector.” A main objective is “to sensitize the creative sector to the contribution of the creative economy to job creation and overall economic growth.”

And so it goes.

When free, public education becomes...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:06:37 -0400

When free, public education becomes not-so-free…

good:

Pencil Pushers: How School Budget Cuts Have Turned Students (and Parents) Into Fundraisers

When I sent my eldest son, Olinga, off to his first day of prekindergarten in 2005, I imagined I’d spend the next 14 years reviewing his homework, helping with science fair projects, and celebrating stellar report cards.

I did not picture myself begging my friends, family members, colleagues, and perfect strangers to buy wrapping paper, poinsettias, magazines, scented candles, scented pencils, cheesecake, cookies, Christmas trees, and every kind of chocolate bar—crispy, crunchy, nut filled, plain, semisweet.

Read the story on GOOD.is→

All Those Incs.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:58:35 -0400

A few weeks ago, I came across a book in my public library called Parenting, Inc., which is about the commercialization of parenting. The title reminded me of another Inc-book that ended up in the bibliography of Monoculture, called Culture, Inc, which broadly, was about the commercialization of culture.

That started me wondering just how many Inc. books there are, which gives you some kind of idea of just how many things have been commercialized, or commoditized, or changed from their original in some way to become more market-oriented.

So I did a quick search on Amazon.

And this is what I found.

Self Help, Inc.
Propaganda, Inc.
Power, Inc.
India, Inc.
Identity Theft, Inc.
Downtown, Inc.
Earth, Inc.
Sports, Inc.
CIA, Inc.
Martha, Inc.
Me, Inc.
Prison, Inc.
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.
Brides, Inc.
University, Inc.
Escape from Church, Inc.
Future, Inc.
Holy War, Inc.
Family, Inc.
You, Inc.
Creative, Inc.
Dog, Inc.
Life, Inc.
Outlaws, Inc.
Craft, Inc.
China, Inc.
Fun, Inc.
Mission, Inc.
Organic, Inc.
Pink Ribbons, Inc.
Arts, Inc.
Creativity, Inc.
Human Rights, Inc.
Barack, Inc.
Activism, Inc.
Rome, Inc.
Black Power, Inc.
Your Idea, Inc.
Generations, Inc.
Militainment, Inc.
USA, Inc.
Bud, Inc.
Another Food, INc.
Pot, Inc.
Japan, Inc.
Social Innovation, Inc.
Immigrant, Inc.
Higher Education, Inc.
Lincoln, Inc.
Freedom, Inc.

Two Stories About Libraries

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:03:00 -0500

From today’s National Post, one of Canada’s big newspapers: two competing stories about what libraries are about.

Here’s one side:

The Toronto Public Library Board is seriously considering having the TPL become the first major library system in Canada or the U.S. to slather itself in advertising. As per a report from their staff, possible vehicles for advertising may include: “In-branch posters and brochure displays; Online text and display ads on the Library’s website; Networked computer screens including the Library’s in-branch wireless network, public computers and LCD screens; The Library’s truck fleet, excluding the Bookmobiles.” But first, they’re going to begin by selling ads on the backs of due-date slips.

And the other side:

It’s not hard to imagine how advertising in libraries could be tacky and annoying, but it’s equally possible to imagine a system being in place that raises some modest amount of money for the library system and stops short of pasting flyers for Vincenzeo’s Pizza Joint over pages of literary classics. I take the following position — extra revenue is good. Not good at any price (so to speak), but all things being equal, good. Every buck the library can raise for itself is another buck it has, and another buck the city has free to devote to another worthy cause. And I make the following prediction — the overwhelming majority of people won’t be any more bothered by an ad on their due-date slip than they are any of the other places they see advertising.

(This discussion is happening because city council is talking about privatizing Toronto’s public library system - one of the busiest in North America. Librarians are talking about work stoppages, and apparently LSSI, the big private library management company that is eyeing Toronto’s libraries, has hired lobbyists with ties to Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Who, incidentally, said he wouldn’t know Margaret Atwood, one of his better known constituents, if he passed her on the street.)

A great example of economic reasoning applied to nonmarket work...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:48:26 -0500

A great example of economic reasoning applied to nonmarket work (work that used to happen inside the family and outside the market and so was hard to price). The article, from GOOD magazine, argues that for economic reasons, we should be outsourcing more of our household work. Why? Because it’s efficient, or so the argument goes.

Which makes me wonder about the great parts of life that are absolutely inefficient: meandering streams, wandering conversations, scenic drives.

good:

A Modern-Day Downton? Why Servant Work May Be On the Rise

Technology and changing economic incentives make hiring someone to do our housework seem like an inefficient proposition. But we might all be making the same transition soon—not out of a sense of noblesse oblige, but because it might start making good financial sense.

Read the story on GOOD.is→

Fresh, the Movie

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:34:00 -0500

One of the areas in which the economic story and its assumptions of efficiency, productivity, scales of economy, individualism, etc. are particularly well-documented is in food production.

Watch the food documentary FRESH if you get a chance for a good explanation of what’s happening to what’s on our plates in the name of the economic story.

Is Child Care Your Problem or Our Problem?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:18:53 -0500

I was in the doctor’s office today, waiting with a sleeping baby for his four-month checkup, and came across an interesting article in the March 2012 issue of Canadian Family.

The article was about Canada’s lack of a national child-care program, where “lack” means we’re tied with Ireland for last place out of 24 economically advanced countries in early childhood education and care, according to a 2008 UN report called The Child Care Transition.

What’s interesting is that in Canada, child care is thought of as a private individual problem, and not a structural one. (That assumption represents a basic assumption of the economic story, of course, where people are understood primarily as individuals and not as group members with group responsibilities.) That means that some people argue that those who decided to have children are the ones who ought to pay for them.

Nancy Folbre, a nonmarket economist who looks at work that isn’t directly paid for and so is hard to price, is the author of The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. She points out that people used to raise children who then went to work for the family. In that kind of situation, the “private problem” of child care at least stays in the family - meaning that the time and effort you put into raising your children has a chance to come back to you, so to speak.

But today, Folbre says, we tend to raise children who grow up and go to work for someone else. She says, “Parents subsidized capitalists, producing workers that employers could hire without paying the actual cost of producing and training them.”

The author of the magazine piece, Ann Douglas, argues that child care is a social responsibility, like education and health care, because society has a vested interest in quality care.

So two things -

First, given that our kids are going to grow up to become solid members of society (or not) and good contributors in that society (or not), even if you think the issue of child care should be handled privately, the issue will eventually become societal. If you create low quality child care that is damaging to the child, those “private” problems will eventually become societal problems as the child moves from the family out into the world. And by then it’s probably a tremendous amount of work to do much about it.

And second, lest we still think that fields like education are still perceived as social goods, the argument that public goods are actually private goods is also happening in those arenas. There, the argument underlying the withdrawal of government support is that those who benefit from education personally should pay for it personally, which sees dwindling government dollars, deregulation of professional programs like law and medicine, rising tuition rates, and greater access to student debt (personal debt) to pay for the whole thing. And that goes against the idea we once had that educated citizens are good for our society as a whole, which is why we once supported education with public tax dollars to begin with.

So - what we’re really up against with the child care policy debate is what we’re up against with the education policy debate, and any number of other policy debates; namely, the larger cultural trend that sees the assumptions of the economic story taking hold across so many of our institutions and undermining our other values.

Ann’s article ends with a quote from someone who hits the crux of the problem exactly: “‘We need to ask ourselves ‘What kind of country do we want to be?’ A question like ‘What is Canada’s place in the world?’ is very much related to whether Canadian parents get good child care.”

And, I would add, that question is very much related to whether Canadians get high quality, publicly supported education, and high quality, publicly supported health care too.

I’m the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (Red Clover, 2011) -...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:40:00 -0500

I’m the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (Red Clover, 2011) - winner of the 2011 NCTE George Orwell Award for outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse, and one of The Atlantic’s top 11 philosophy/psychology books of 2011.

I write about big ideas, culture, creativity, and the interaction of complex systems.

Q&A: Moral theory and the Monoculture

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A reader asked:

“Do you think that there is there a relationship between utilitarianism and the economic monoculture? It seems to me that utilitarianism is the default ethical framework and it seems to fit well within the assumptions of the economic story.”

Well, I agree that it does seem that there’s a relationship between utilitarianism and the economic story, but I don’t think it’s the default ethical framework, even though some of its assumptions fit within the economic story.

Utilitarianism is a moral theory with a lot of variations, but in general, it’s a theory about what’s right, where the only good thing is utility, or wellbeing, and where wellbeing is pleasure, versus pain. The theory says that wellbeing should be maximized, and that’s similar to the economic story’s general emphasis on maximization. But utilitarianism and the economic story differ in what is supposed to be maximized.

Utilitarianism says you should be neutral about whether it’s your own wellbeing that’s being maximized, compared to other people and even other sentient beings (like animals) - that it’s the greatest total welfare that should be maximized, even if your own happens not to come into it. It’s a kind of cost-benefit analysis, and that’s similar to the economic story of course. And it focuses on outcomes, rather than on process, which the economic story does too.

The economic story, though, says that individuals are interested in maximizing their own self-interest - not anybody else’s, and certainly not anybody else’s at your own expense. So that’s one big difference.

Utilitarianism assumes that wellbeing can be directly compared across different people’s lives, and the economic story gives us a way to do that by measuring wellbeing in terms of how well your preferences (whatever your preferences happen to be) are being satisfied. When no one individual can be more satisfied without someone else being less satisfied, the economic arrangement in play is said to be efficient (that’s called Pareto optimality).

So it seems like utilitarianism and the economic story play off of each other, in part - but overall, I’d argue that utilitarianism is in fact not the default ethical framework in the monoculture.

Why not?

Well, if you think of ethics as a system of values, I’d argue that the economic story is its own system of values. That means it’s its own ethic, and its own ethical framework. It gives us a version of human nature, a version of what the world is like, and a version of how you and the world interact. What is good and right is what is efficient and effective. The answer to the question, “What should we do?” is “Whatever is efficient.” And efficiency has a particular definition in the economic story: whatever course of action costs you the least of your (scarce) resources.

That’s it for now. I’m happy to answer reader questions, so ask away.

The Wisdom of the Moment

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve got a guest post up at The School of Life today, so head over there if you’re interested in reading more:

A.C. Grayling’s The Good Book: A Humanist Bible is a compilation of Western and Eastern insight from thought and literature that’s derived from over a thousand texts. It collects our best musings about what it means to be human from hundreds of authors who have come before us, down through the centuries.

As I’ve been reading, I’ve been particularly struck by the gap between the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the moment.

read more

Headline News

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:08:00 -0500

As a lot of people already know, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are two American bills before Congress that are opposed by many because of Net censorship issues.

Google’s take on the whole thing demonstrates how the economic story typically gets referenced as an ultimate justification for why something should or shouldn’t happen.

The bold type headline:

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.