The sense of an ending:
As George Steiner once put it in conversation, “The humanities have had 23 good centuries — don’t get greedy or upset that it happens to be coming to an end.” Let’s no longer say, “How can we save the humanities?” Instead, let us admit, “Liberal education is over. What do we do now?”
American higher education is “primed for creative destruction” notes The Futurist:
Student loan debt has tripled in a decade, even while many universities now see no problem in departing from their primary mission of education, and have drifted into a priority of ideological brainwashing and factories of propaganda. Combine all these factors, and you have a generation of young people who may have student debt larger than the mortgage on a median American house (meaning they will not be the first-time home purchasers that the housing market depends on to survive), while having their head filled with indoctrination that carries zero or even negative value in the private sector workforce.
rkhs put up a link to this (on Twitter). I suspect it will irritate almost everyone reading this, but it’s worth pushing past that. Even the irritation has significance. The world it introduces, of Internet-era marketing culture, is of self-evident importance to anyone seeking to understand our times — and what they’re tilting into.
Attention Economics is a thing. Wikipedia is (of course) itself a remarkable node in the new economy of attention, packaging information in a way that adapts it to a continuous current of distraction. Its indispensable specialism is low-concentration research resources. Whatever its failings, it’s already all-but impossible to imagine the world working without it.
On Attention Economics, Wikipedia quotes a precursor essay by Herbert A. Simon (1971): “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Attention is the social reciprocal of information, and arguably merits an equally-intense investigative engagement. Insofar as information has become a dominating socio-historical category, attention has also been (at least implicitly) foregrounded.
Attention Economics is inescapably practical, or micro-pragmatic. Anyone reading this is already dealing with it. The information explosion is an invasion of attention. Those hunting for zones of crisis can easily find them here, cutting to the quick of their own lives.
Charles Ponzi, call your IP lawyer. This is the kind of argument that makes sense when pursued without the distractions of STEM training:
… the humanities crisis is largely a positive feedback loop created by stressing out over economic outcomes. Research by government bureaus held that people who studied STEM disciplines had better employment prospects. As a result, state and federal education budgets consistently made these subjects a priority. Enrollment in the humanities slumped, and this made it more difficult for budding humanists and artists to succeed, not least because fewer and fewer jobs were available in the academy.
Humanists are being educated to teach the humanities in higher-education, why can’t anybody see there’s a model there that, like, could totally work?
Garett Jones on the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem:
Why isn’t Chamley-Judd more central to economic discussion? Why isn’t it part of the canon that all economists breathe in? Why isn’t it in our freshman textbooks? Part of the reason is surely mood affiliation — it’s an uncomfortable result for some to talk about as evidenced by the handwringing I see in most textbook treatments (exception here, big PDF, p.451). The result can’t be waved away as driven by absurd assumptions: It’s not too fragile, it’s too solid. It’s OK to teach Real Business Cycles since we all know (or “know”) that the Federal Reserve and aggregate demand really drive things in the short run. But to tell people that if we care about the long run, the tax on capital income — on interest, profits, dividends — should be zero? And to have only “exotic” counterarguments? Let’s just leave that for the more advanced courses …
(Thanks to Jim for the pointer. “The Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility theorem is economists admitting Ayn Rand was right while trying to sound as if they are not admitting it.”)
“… if the people that are supposedly running the country aren’t actually performing any of the functions of governing, who is?” asks Foseti. Anybody who follows his writing will recognize where this is coming from. It belongs to a consistent (and thus informal) critique of formalist illusion. To confuse government with constitutional structures, legislation, or political offices, is to be blind to the real machinery of power.
Steve Sailor offers a pointed example of this reality in the field of higher educational administration, whose authorities are adamant in the determination to pursue systematic racial discrimination against Asian candidates (in particular). ‘Constraining’ legislation, which explicitly criminalizes these practices, is treated as a formal obstacle course, rather than a prohibition. It complicates anti-meritocratic racial profiling, but is utterly incapable of preventing it.