I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is trying to make sense of things - so many instances where we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot socially, economically, and politically - yet given my background I may come at this with a different approach than what others are trying. So, let me begin with the following paragraph, which is from a post I wrote almost a decade ago called Is reasoning taking a beating?
In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view. Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence. The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it. The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under. With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position. It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed. Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter. When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view. A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural. There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective. There is leadership in helping students make the transition.
Just to be clear on the little physics experiment in that paragraph, the instructor holds a string with a weighted object at the end. Then the instructor tells the students, I will swing this over my head to get the object to travel in a circle. Then I will let go of the string. The instructor then asks the students what the path of the object will be after the instructor lets go of the string. The Aristotelian view is that the object will continue traveling in a circle. The Newtonian view is that the object will travel in a straight line that is tangent to the circle at the time the instructor lets go of the string. As near as I can tell, which view of this experiment the student has doesn't correlate with the student's political preference or preference about other societal issues. We should recognize that people hold contrary perspectives, even in socially benign situations. But in the rest of this piece I will concentrate on situations of social consequence.
So, the question I want to use to frame this post is whether learning where the evidence contradicts the prior held world view can happen in outside-the-classroom settings. Might it be that a significant purpose of a college education is to encourage the graduate to learn in such situations? Alas, I fear that is wishful thinking. Instead, might it be that leaders on social issues help citizen/learners work through those issues so they can gain a new perspective? One might hope so. Before getting to that with a concrete example, I want to give a few of my own parallel experiences.
Recently, I was required to change my NetID password for the University of Illinois. They insist that it be changed annually (really more like every 11.5 months). They are the only provider that does this. Many other providers do two-factor authentication and with that the password stays fixed over time. This includes the various financial institutions I use. The requirement for password change predates the use of two-factor authentication and I believe it persists for that reason. In any event, I now dread the time immediately after a password change, fearful that something will break as a consequence. As it turns out, for my home computer there was no problem at all. Everything worked fine. But now on my iPhone, the mail program doesn't seem to remember the password for the Exchange server, which is the new NetID password. It's not the end of the world to type in the password, but it is a bit of a pain. I really wish that I didn't have to change this password in the first place. There is some irony in this, since I was a technology guy for the second half of my academic career and in that capacity enjoyed experimenting with new toys (software applications). But now I'm a geezer, grumpier in general than I was earlier in life, and somewhat resistant to change. I think I'm typical this way, at least for folks my age, even when the change is not of social consequence.
The next two experiences come from my teaching. Neither of them is uplifting. But I think they are illuminating regarding the constraints in place that block real learning. The first one happened in fall 2017, the penultimate time I taught. This was in an upper-level undergraduate course called, The Economics of Organizations. I take a dual approach in teach this course, part storytelling and part math modelling. The former is better able for me to integrate my experience as an administrator. The latter allows me to teach economics the way I learned it in graduate school, albeit with simpler math, mainly high school algebra and analytic geometry. The reality, unfortunately, is that even though there is a calculus prerequisite for the econ major and all the students in my class have met the prerequisite, many of them are nonetheless not competent in the high school math I mentioned, and the math modeling becomes a struggle for some of them. So, there is real issue whether the dual approach continues to make sense. Indeed, I'm aware of quite a few econ instructors who have dumbed down the math (for example, not teaching indifference curves in intermediate microeconomics) because the students are not up to it and doing so would simply be an exercise in frustration. I understand that completely. Yet I can be incredibly stubborn. And the reality is that before I made the switch to ed tech as an administrator, I was a math model guy with the economic theory. If the students are to get from me some of what made the Economics Department higher me in the first place, the math modeling needs to remain as part of the course.
Mainly I've handled the instruction for math modeling via videos of animated graphs in Excel, along with homework designed in Excel that feature both auto grading and a blend of presentations of the economics ideas and assessment of student understanding, which I believe is the natural way to do homework. Yet on one topic during the course, the students seemed even more befuddled than usual. So, I opted to do in class what I used to do full time, but had long since abandoned almost entirely. I gave a chalkboard lecture on the subject for about 15 or 20 minutes, at the tail end of one class session. After it was over, one student walked up to me and said, don't ever do that again. I gather that he got nothing out of the math lecture and felt it an imposition for me to spend class time that way as a consequence. But that he felt empowered to speak for his classmates as well as himself, indicated something more than that.
He projected his own experience onto his classmates and then felt empowered to let me know about it. I don't believe I had yet to hear about trigger warnings then. And even now, a trigger warning about a math lecture in an econ class sounds a bit preposterous. Yet given the student's reaction it makes one ask the following. How is one to distinguish a situation that is overblown in the student's psyche from another situation that truly deserves a trigger warning? A half dozen years ago I wrote a post, Boundaries Are Always Harder to Define, where I was reacting to a then campus report on Racial Microaggressions. I will only observe here that the student reaction itself is not sufficient to determine whether a trigger warning is warranted or not. Perhaps many students reacting in the same way is sufficient, although the requirement probably still needs to be sterner than that.
The other experience happened a couple of years later, the last time I taught. (I did not teach in fall 2018.) A feature of the class is that students do weekly blogging according to a prompt I provide. This is quite unusual for an economics class. Perhaps it is unusual for any class outside of those that have a principal aim of teaching writing. In this case the dual goals are (a) for students to try to tie their prior experiences at work, at school, or elsewhere to the concepts we discuss in the course and then (b) for me to give some individual coaching of the student thinking via my comments on their posts. The students are uncomfortable with this at the start of the semester. It takes about a month for them to get used to it. By the end of the semester, many report that it is the best feature of the class.
The particular incident happened as we began our study of Transaction Costs, a matter of critical importance for the economics of organizations. A significant cause of transaction costs is that some parties to the transaction may behave opportunistically. Doing so would make the transaction ineffective or worse for other parties involved in the transaction. So, the transaction cost in this case entails whatever is necessary to do to prevent the opportunistic behavior. The prompt for that week used the word opportunistic and asked students to recall prior experiences where they either behaved opportunistically or had the chance to do so yet refrained from such behavior. I should note that I've used the prompt in previous offerings of the class and never had a problem with it. But this time around, several students wrote posts that ignored the ethical dimension of opportunistic behavior and instead simply considered situations where opportunities presented themselves and then taking advantage of them. In so doing, they entirely missed the point of the exercise.
I became angry with this outcome rather than take it as a sign of the times in undergraduate economics education at Illinois. I spent a good deal of the next class session in scolding the students, not usually thought of as effective pedagogy. As part of that, I did a show and tell with a look up of opportunism at Dictionary.com. Then I followed up with what seemed to me as simple and sensible advice. If the student isn't sure of the meaning of a word in the prompt, one that itself isn't economics jargon, then the right thing to do is look it up online. One of the students responded that instead I should provide the definition along with the prompt. Several other students agreed with that. I don't recall what I did to indicate my displeasure with that response. But I can report that while on the syllabus attendance was strongly encouraged, it was not required, and that attendance fell precipitously after that class session and remained low for the rest of the semester.
There is some irony in that it was the same person, me, who authored that paragraph quoted near the top of this piece, yet who became extremely irritated with students who seemingly put in such little effort doing the work for my class. The leadership described in that early paragraph may not be present for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that ahead of time it wasn't obvious that any leadership was needed. But one thing that did become apparent that semester is that many students in the class were struggling emotionally, with anxiety and depression, and some of them told me about it. The blogging probably enabled them to feel more open in communicating about their situation, in email or in a response to one of my comments. Then it came to light for me that this was a national problem, from reading the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. And this was pre-pandemic. Things have almost surely gotten worse since on that score.
I took a hiatus in the writing here, perhaps for three weeks or so. It's hard for me to tell because I did think about the piece away from the keyboard, but I wasn't able to resolve my main concerns, which focused on two points. Are the incidents that I claim are parallel really parallel? I'll let the reader be the judge of that. Then, I wondered if I was being tone deaf in coming up with this approach, ignoring sensitive and emotional issues that need to be accounted for, and hence being offensive in the recommendations I have to offer. Ultimately, I decided to get the ideas out as best as I could and hope that, as with the other posts I write, this one provokes some reflection by the reader. That would be the best possible outcome.
I've been asking myself as of late whether in regard to identity issues, racism for example, am I like the student whose worldview still clings to an Aristotelian view of circular motion, or am I one of the choir, so when I read Charles Blow's columns, as I do with a fair amount of regularity, it is that like preaching to the choir for me. Or might there be some gray area in between that is worth discussing? Let me assume there is without discussing it, but then think of Charles Blow as a teacher for us regular readers of NY Times Opinion pieces. What does the teacher want his students to be learning? Are we students learning anything close to those objectives? Might the learning objectives be better facilitated by a different approach in the writing or by having a different writer make the arguments?
I likewise have asked myself with regard to sexism whether I did a lot of mansplaining when I was working or if I was able to treat colleagues on an equal level regardless of gender. And here I want to make an additional distinction as to whether the relationship is horizontal or vertical. Here, horizontal means the other person works in a different unit on campus or at a different university, while vertical means we are in the same organization and one of us reports to the other, directly or indirectly. The professor-student relationship also has a vertical element. Of course, mansplaining may only be the tip of the iceberg regarding sexual harassment, where an array of other behaviors should be considered to give the complete picture.
I won't do that here, but instead will note my experiences with identity issues as an adult that have been painful to me have been more indirect. In the classroom, face to face or virtual, a student commits an evident microaggression. In my role as instructor, what responsibility do I have in to remedy the situation? This one has happened on a few occasions. Likewise, when I was an ed tech administrator, I had one experience where a female direct report had been the victim of sexual harassment by her previous boss. After learning about this, I found myself stupefied and treated it as if the past should be dead and buried, then ignored. But this was avoidance by me only, not active decision making.
The identity issues, which are intense and justified to be brought to our attention, are almost always brought forward from the victims' perspective. The framing of the issues and the suggested cures that result from this approach are considered by the victims themselves as to whether they would demonstrate sensitivity by others and restore fairness, should the cures be implemented in full. It may be self-evident to the victims that this is the right approach to take, for those very reasons. Yet if my parallels are indeed on the mark, it might be that this approach does not facilitate learning by others. Indeed, it may create pushback only, nothing more. Let me illustrate with particular parallels for the experiences I've described.
On resisting change that is suggested/mandated institutionally, consider the pushback about defunding the police. There is a logic to the recommendation as video capture of police violence against Blacks that is shared via social media makes evident that there is and has been a huge problem this way. So, doing something to fix the problem makes a lot of sense. But violence is on the rise more broadly and many people who don't feel safe as a consequence think that the police provide needed protection. So, there is a reason to resist the suggested change. And it seems to be having political consequences, with voters moving from the Democratic to the Republican party. Could this have been anticipated in advance? If so, would defunding the police have emerged as the answer nonetheless?
On my delivering/not delivering mini-lectures in my economics class, I thought of that episode while reading this column by John McWhorter, with leftist fictions the parallel of using math models in undergraduate economics. Here I have to say I'm personally conflicted, on the teaching part of the parallel. The math models are ingrained in me and what I feel gives the essence of the economics. Of course, this means not just understanding the math, but also applying the right model in context and thereby getting some insight into what is going on. Maybe it's too much to expect typical undergraduate students to be able to learn that so I end up teaching an elite few and not teaching the vast majority. That's been the pattern. Yet I've not been able to let go of teaching that way. Perhaps the leftist fictions emerge similarly, with the ideals ingrained so much so as to make light of the practical realities.
Then, on the misunderstanding of a word or expression and leveraging that misunderstanding for political gain, there now seems to be a cottage industry for that, with Critical Race Theory the most recent prominent case. In my living memory, there have always been soundbites in politics. But over time there has been a change from spin, to propaganda, to brainwashing. The deliberate misuse of language for political purposes seems to me a huge problem. It blocks learning instead of encouraging it. Instead, it reinforces stereotypes and makes people very angry in the process.
Is there some alternative approach that would actually educate ordinary people, so they eventually change their worldview to embrace tolerance and fairness for all?
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Partly because I don't feel on terra firma when considering the above question as applied to identity issues and partly because I've written a fair amount about this before, I want to focus on income inequality and consider an education approach in that context. Of course, the identity issues are wrapped up in the economic issues, so there is something artificial about looking only at the one and not the others. Yet I think I can make more headway this way, so I will proceed accordingly. My focus will be on income inequality and on educating those in the top ten percent to voluntarily participate in income redistribution that reduces their own income for the benefit of society as a whole.
Let me begin with this recent opinion piece by Zeynep Tufekci, which is mainly a postmortem on America's poor handling of the pandemic. Our dysfunctional healthcare system gets a good chunk of the blame and with that income inequality is taken to task. Near the end of the piece she writes:
After the horrors of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression between them, there was rebuilding of democracies, including constructing a public sphere geared toward preventing the rise of fascism, an expanded safety net and great reductions in income inequality. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t what you’d guess would come next, looking at the smoldering ruins of 1945.
That is followed a couple of paragraphs later with:
Fixing all this requires an interconnected effort that unleashes a virtuous cycle. Rebuilding the public health infrastructure and creating a sane, sensible health care system in which we don’t keep spending more than any other developed nation for poorer results will help restore trust and improve our lives. Fair taxation policies would reduce income inequality and generate resources to execute these measures. We can investigate what went wrong, with an eye to actually fixing it instead of simply finding scapegoats. Regulation and oversight can better align the incentives of social media platforms with that of a healthier public sphere. We’ve done that before with transformative technologies.
In other words, we should fix the economy now the way we did after World War II. We know we can do it now because we did it before. There is no recognition here that maybe the parallels are not perfect and our political divisions now make this much harder to accomplish.
Next, do a Google search on - raise my taxes, please. The hits you get show there are wealthy people who understand the need to contribute more in taxes for the good of the order. Yet it is not a mainstream idea at this time among the wealthy. One might wonder why.
Some other pieces explain that, with particular focus on those in the income distribution from the 90th to the 99th percentile. For starters, consider this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich. According to Reeves:
So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.
If this is right, there is a good deal of denial going on coupled with intense gaming of the system among this sub-population. Both of those factors might block a willingness to have one's own taxes raised for the good of the order. In a more recent piece, an interview with the philosopher Matthew Stewart author of the recent book, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture. According to Stewart, the underlying cause for the behavior is fear. (Presumably this is fear that they themselves or their offspring will fall precipitously in the income distribution.) This results in behaviors that are harmful to others and to themselves. One might reasonably hypothesize that the mental health crisis among college students, which still exists but preceded the pandemic, is an indirect consequence of these harmful behaviors by the new aristocracy. I do want to note here that in identifying the underlying cause, the author's discipline might matter a lot. Instead of fear, behavioral economists might focus on confirmation bias as why the new aristocracy clings to the belief in meritocracy, while also noting that these people are largely shielded from significant interactions with others who are of more modest means.
In my own way of thinking I find it helpful to envision that these people are stuck in their own peculiar Prisoner's Dilemma. They are aware of what is to be decent and humane to fellow citizens. But that is a dominated strategy. The gaming of the system helps to ensure high income for the offspring, even if it is a form of selling one's soul to the devil. Having gone fairly far down this path, it is very unlikely for them to retrace their steps and start all over again with a different approach. Yet an effective education program to embrace fairness in the income distribution would seem to require the participants to do just that.
Now I want to get to my own writing. There are a series of 6 posts written under the tag, Socialism Reconsidered. The first four were written in early 2017, before the Reeves piece appeared. The most recent of these was written in early 2019, so there was quite a time gap before it was written, meaning my thinking had to evolve enough to consider the ideas in that post. It is the most relevant for what is being considered here, as it conjectures about what would be needed for an education program of the type we're considering here to be effective. However, it was written well before anyone had heard of Covid, so it doesn't contemplate what accommodations to the ideas would need to be made to still be functional in the pandemic world in which we now live.
I will give a brief recap of that 6th post and then encourage interested readers to read it in full, along with the earlier pieces in the series. In a nutshell, I considered this learning as diffusion of an innovation. I cut my teeth as a promoter and administrator for educational technology in the early days where the Internet was used in teaching. The idea was to imagine pilot projects run by early adopters and study those intensively, so that other could learn from those experiences. It is also important to do extensive evaluation of how things are before the pilot projects occur, so there are clear benchmarks about where things are. And then there needs to be a way to make these results highly visible, so they become part of the vernacular.
For this to be even modestly effective, the evaluation must expose some of the myths that the new aristocracy cling to. But, I would argue this must be done in a non-punitive way or it won't work. How might it be possible to do that?
Note that above we've talked about percentiles in the income distribution but not about the levels of income to which those percentiles associate. People who are at median income or below in the distribution surely do care about their income level as they struggle to make ends meet. But above a certain point that concern vanishes and instead where they stand in the distribution becomes the more important factor. This, in essence, is the idea behind the Relative Income Hypothesis of James Duesenberry. Flattening the upper tail of the income distribution can still preserve the notion of merit without it requiring obscene income levels to reward that merit.
So the question I'll close with is this. Can we find an education program where a good chunk of those in the upper decile of the income distribution willingly embrace higher levels of taxation as long it their position in the income distribution is preserved? I'm sure it will be quite a heavy lift to get a yes answer to that question. But I'm hopeful that it is still possible.
