The Free Thinker

"What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?"

The question that is the title of this post may seem an innocent one.  To some extent it is, and some hostile reflections on it which occurred to me today may seem, may be, eccentric and exaggerated.  And yet I think the question expresses a way that our culture indoctrinates youth, which is false, and has a high cost.  In Plato's Republic, he proposes that the citizens of his ideal state be taught to believe a "noble lie."  Is our society based on a "noble lie," too?  The lie I have in mind is difficult to express, but the words you can be anything you want to be might capture it.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"  The question implies (a) that a kid should have some idea, at an age of ten or eleven, of his future career, and (b) that his future career can and/or should depend on his wishes, his inclinations, his daydreams ("want").  The trouble with (a) is that the economy is so complex that a kid won't know a hundredth part of the careers that exist, and to encourage such early planning might lead to a surplus of aspirants to a handful of careers that kids know about, e.g., teachers, movie stars, soldiers, president of the United States.  But of course, kids aren't making any hard-and-fast commitments when they respond to grown-ups' small talk, and some careers do require long advance planning.  So (a) is all right.

No, my problem is with (b).  Suppose grown-ups asked a different question: "What do you think you might be useful for, when you're grown up?"  This is a more wholesome question because it doesn't invite a kid to project his self-indulgent wishes and daydreams onto his plans for the future, but, instead, invites him to think of others, of service, of how he can help.  It doesn't suggest that the world owes him an interesting, exciting, or entertaining job, but that he'll owe the world valuable services in return for his room and board.  It encourages him to appraise, not his desires, but his capacities.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"  The question suggests that it matters what one wants to be, that one can choose, that you can be anything you want to be.  The truth is that the career paths that will open up to a person are a tiny fraction of those he can imagine.  It depends partly on aptitude: that is relatively easy to understand.  A tone-deaf person can't be a musician; a stupid person can't be an MIT professor.  More subtly, it depends on a thousand accidents of social connections and circumstances and which resume strikes whose fancy and whether one happened to have a good day on this or that test or interview.  Try your utmost to realize your childhood dreams, and you'll probably fail; you may waste much effort and sacrifice personal ties and innocent pleasures in the process; and, worse, you may be corrupted.  There are a thousand subtle moral compromises to which the path to success may tempt you.

And yet, for all that, for boys, it might still be right to encourage the pursuit of dreams.  It's in men's nature to take risks.  Courage is stereotypically a masculine virtue, and while the stereotype is partly false-- marriage and childbirth may require as much courage from women as battle does from men-- the occasions that call for courage in women tend to be more a matter of accepting one's lot and less a matter of going out to seek adventure.  Risk-taking has a basis in masculine biology-- in nature, males are more expendable than females-- and this biological factor is etherealized in men into cultural manifestations of honor and bravado.  And from a rational point of view, too, men can better afford to take risks, for the simple reason that a man has more time: men usually marry younger women, and they can beget children for much longer than women can bear them.  A man can pursue his dreams and fail and pick himself up and be richer for the experience.

It is in girls that I think the attitude you can be what you want to be causes the greatest unhappiness.  Our society seems to be engaged in a conspiracy not to tell girls when they are young that they may have to choose between marriage and career, or if not that, at least between the dream career that strikes their fancy, with all the complex and urgent demands it will make on them, and the settled life and strong responsibilities of motherhood.  Political correctness can prevent grown-ups from talking to kids about this but it can't change the stubborn facts that female desirability as a marriage partner tends to peak in the 20s, well before investments in high-powered careers have had time to pay off, and that there aren't enough hours in the day to spend 50 hours a week in the office and pick one's kids up after school.

All in all, though, I think we would do better not to encourage self-indulgent personal ambition in men or women.  America is indeed a land of opportunity, but the best opportunities usually come as surprises.  We should be alert for opportunities to be of use, and able to appreciate the chances that time tosses in our path.  Meanwhile, the question we should focus on is not what we want to be, but what we ought to be.

"Warning: The deficits are coming!" (John Fund, WSJ):

David Walker sounds like a modern-day Paul Revere as he warns about the country's perilous future. "We suffer from a fiscal cancer," he tells a meeting of the National Taxpayers Union, the nation's oldest anti-tax lobby. "Our off balance sheet obligations associated with Social Security and Medicare put us in a $56 trillion financial hole—and that's before the recession was officially declared last year. America now owes more than Americans are worth—and the gap is growing!"

His audience sits in rapt attention. A few years ago these antitax activists would have been polite but a tad restless listening to the former head of the Government Accountability Office, the nation's auditor-in-chief. Higher taxes is what hikes their blood pressure the most, but the profligate spending of the Bush and Obama administrations has put them in a mood to listen to this green-eyeshade Cassandra. "He's so unlike most politicians," says Sharron Angle, a former state legislator from Nevada, "his message is clear, detailed and with no varnish."

This historical analogy is crazy in most ways, but in two respects America today bears a weird resemblance to France before the 1789 Revolution: (a) it is being paralyzed by an unmanageable debt burden, and (b) status-seeking. In pre-Revolutionary France, the status symbol du jour was public office, and I've read that people would buy offices for more than the value of the bribes they would recover, just for the prestige. Today, the status symbol du jour is education. My hunch is that what the country really needs is for less people to go to lots of school and for more people to start businesses. (I realize the irony of my saying this.) And I actually suspect people might even learn more (more about life, more building of character) that way.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the deficit and the status-seeking problems may be related. Why start a business if a mind-bogglingly indebted government seems likely, sooner or later, to confiscate whatever wealth you create if you succeed? Even if an education is worth less than the money and foregone income you spend to get it, at least the government can't take it away!

The Resume Padder's Angst

This is a hilarious conversation:

President Barack Obama says Arizona State University officials aren't the only ones who think he needs to accomplish more to earn an honorary degree.

Add his wife Michelle to that list.

"I come here not to dispute the suggestion that I haven't yet achieved enough in my life," Obama said in a commencement speech Wednesday. With a smile he added: "First of all, Michelle (Obama) concurs with that assessment. She has a long list of things that I have not yet done waiting for me when I get home."

"But more than that I come to embrace the notion that I haven't done enough in my life. I heartily concur. I come to affirm that one's title, even a title like 'president of the United States,' says very little about how well one's life has been led."

Though he's superficially joking, the nature of the joke suggests that he still has a chip on his shoulder.  He's the reductio ad absurdum of the ethos of the value system created by the college application process in the past generation: programmed to pursue "achievement," defined as padding the resume, he can never be satiated.

The American Jizya

"Catholic schools save US $19.8 billion annually, education group says"

Washington DC, Dec 14, 2008 / 04:25 am (CNA).- The National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) claims that Catholic schools save $19.8 billion to the U.S. annually in savings by serving children who would otherwise be educated at taxpayer expense.

The NCEA reports that the nation’s almost 7,400 Catholic schools enroll more than 2.2 million students, who would have been educated in public schools at an average cost of $8,701 per student.

"Catholic schools are a gift to the church - and to the nation," said Dr. Karen Ristau, President of NCEA, in a December 11 press release. "The enormity of this gift is more striking during these challenging economic times."

"Our graduates have a strong commitment to community service because that is a foundation of our schools," continued Ristau. "Just this past year Catholic school students performed 2.2 million hours of public service in honor of Pope Benedict's visit. That kind of involvement is a gift to the country that cannot be measured in dollars alone."

It's generous to think of it as a gift.  But misleading.  Since these parents are coerced to pay for schools they don't use for religious reasons, it's really a tax.  That Catholics have to make financial sacrifices to educate their children after their religion, while secularists get it for free, is rank discrimination, and ought to be considered a violation of the First Amendment.  There's no such thing as a religiously neutral education.

I used to like David Brooks, but he's become too statist.  But I like this suggestion (from Michael Porter, endorsed by Brooks). albeit partly for selfish reasons: 

Send federal money to the states, but make sure a lot of it goes to state universities. There’s going to be increased demand for their services at the same time their budgets are cut. We can’t weaken that link in the social mobility chain.

Since I'm going to be finishing my PhD, hopefully, in 2010, it would be nice for me if state universities have enough money to keep hiring.  That aside, it makes sense to me to partially federalize university funding, since any positive externalities from financing education are probably as much national as local.  But if the federal government is going to channel money to state schools, it should have one condition: Reduce out-of-state tuition.  Price discrimination against out-of-state students makes sense in political terms, but it distorts competition in the university system, and creates weird forms of inequality of opportunity.  The Feds might offer matching grants for new state funding to universities, conditional on reducing out-of-state tuition to 150% of in-state tuition.  That would improve the universities by forcing them to compete more for students, and it would improve the university/student matching process, giving rise to a better education system overall.

You Can't Pick Up Water With a Sieve...

It's time for education reform (John McCain, 8/3/2008):

These days, the cause of education reform crosses all boundaries of party, race and financial means. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have taken up the cause of reform, as have many others, including the Rev. Al Sharpton. These men are strong supporters of the Education Equality Project, a group dedicated to finally changing the status quo in our education system.

This group of leaders is no longer willing to accept a public school system in which many students never even graduate or learn the basics of math, science and English. As Chancellor Klein puts it, "In large urban areas the culture of public education is broken. If you don't fix this culture, then you are not going to be able to make the kind of changes that are needed."

The chancellor speaks for many, and especially for parents who cannot afford a private school. Consider the example of the Opportunity Scholarship program in Washington, D.C., which serves more than 1,900 children from families with an average income of $23,000 a year. More than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all share is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Yet Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, Sen. Obama, oppose this program. Not long ago, addressing the American Federation of Teachers, he dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." That went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave children who are stuck in failing schools?

Parents ask only for safe schools, competent teachers and diplomas that open doors of opportunity. When a public school fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children. No entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity.

If I am elected President, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform. We will pay bonuses to teachers working in our most troubled schools because we need their fine minds and good hearts to help turn those schools around.

We will award bonuses as well to our highest-achieving teachers. And instead of measuring teacher achievement by conformity to process, we will measure it by the success of their students. Moreover, the funds for these bonuses will not be controlled by faraway officials. Under my reforms, we will put the money and the responsibilities where they belong - in the office of the school principal. One reason charter schools are so successful is that principals have spending discretion.

... and you don't achieve sustained improvement in any field through Soviet-style bureaucratic central planning that excludes the operation of market forces.  McCain is right, as usual.

Oh yes, and public education is also discriminatory against religion.  An education system that isn't allowed to teach the most important text in Western civilization-- the Bible-- can't deliver real education.  Publicly-funded schools can teach the Bible without unconstitutionally endorsing religion, provided that it's parents and students who choose the schools.  Like banks and newspapers, schools have to be private to do their job properly.

Culture and Development

I got in a debate the other day with a friend about whether culture is a reason for low (economic) development, generally and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular.  I tend to suspect that arguments about this consist largely of posturing, that any intelligent person who has seriously thought about it knows, really, that culture is a major factor in keeping some countries poor, but since this insight is politically incorrect, some people think it's necessary to mask it.  Thus Jeff Sachs blames poverty on geography, and Dani Rodrik blames it on "institutions."

No doubt there are some on the left who have the opposite impression.  It's clear that all cultures are equal, or if anything the cultures of poorer countries are better, and the gap between rich and poor is a result of "exploitation," and people like me who think that culture has something to do with it are just making excuses for the rich and blaming the victim.  They would, I suppose, have the same sense of bad faith listening to me as I have listening to serious development scholars who dodge the issue of culture.  And it's partly because those serious development scholars know how vulnerable they are to attacks if they sound like they're blaming the victim for poverty, that they've learned to steer clear of cultural explanations of poverty.

However, there's a more legitimate objection that is offered.  If it's culture that makes countries poor, how is it that the "Confucian" countries of East Asia, once regarded as benighted, are now surging from strength to strength?  Did their Confucian culture hold them back before, and now it's powering them forward?  What is culture, anyway?  Can we measure it, empirically?  Can we model it?  Economists ordinarily regard culture as something outside their sphere.  One of my economics professors said that for him to say culture is the explanation for development is simply to give up, to say that his tools don't work.  If there's no way for economists to model culture, then they, at least-- and they are the most prominent of those who try to understand the reasons for economic development-- have an excuse not to accept it as an explanation for the level of development.

With that in mind, let me offer some ideas of how "culture" could be stylized and made suitable for economic modeling.

Education: Enhancement of Hedonic Capacities

Greg Mankiw:

Here you can buy 10 economics lectures for $1.60 per lecture.

By contrast, Harvard tuition is about $30K (not counting room and board). Assuming 4 courses each of the two 12-week semesters and 3 class hours a week in each course, one finds that each hour class at Harvard costs about $100--roughly the same price as a good ticket to a Broadway show.

I suppose there is something special about live performances.

(Thanks to Arnold Kling for the link.)  This reminds me of a comment I made on EconLog a while back that I thought deserved cross-posting, where I reflected on the purposes education: