The Silicon Valley Bros of their time

On page 141 of The Age of Reform, Hofstadter quotes Progressive journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd as saying:

Our great moneymakers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know.  The forces and the wealth are new, and have been the opportunity of new men.  Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them.  To them science is but a never-ending repertoire of investments stored by by nature for the syndicates, governments but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth written for them.  They claim a power without control, exercised through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual.

This reads like a condemnation of the arrogance of hyper-macho Silicon Valley types talking about disruption.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The Age of Reform, Chapter 4: Making connections

I'm party way through chapter 4.  The argument of Chapter 4 thus far is that the Progressives of the late 19th/early 20th centuries were mostly small-town or urban upper-middle class people who picked up the causes of the rural/agrarian Populists and put them in more genteel form.  The upper-middle class was enjoying comfort in this time, but they knew that they were being eclipsed by the growing industrial interests, and that while they were comfortable they were suddenly less important than they had been.  They felt this keenly.  This dovetails to some extent with a point that Hofstadter made in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:  That in the late 19th century giant new commercial interests emerged and had little use for the formally educated.  In that book Hofstadter focused mostly on the self-made industrialists who had little education.  Here he gives a more nuanced take, noting that plenty of the men who made money in that era were from comfortable classes, but they took positions in massive commercial interests of national prominence when the country was becoming more integrated, and these national interests eclipsed the upper-middle class professionals who had formed a sort of social glue.  While he doesn't specifically address education here, certainly the traditional elites are going to be more traditionally educated and have more traditional sympathies than the titans of new industries.

We see some of this today, in an era of increasing economic inequality. We see the rise of tech companies founded by college dropouts, so people start talking about how nobody needs college, they just need MOOCs. And even the upper-middle class now feels precarious, as evidenced by the profile of the support for Bernie Sanders or the number of private college grads in Occupy Wall Street.  Whatever you think of the merits of their proposals (I will not claim to be a big fan of all of Sanders' policy proposals) the precariousness felt by certain classes is reminiscent of the forces that Hofstadter identified as giving rise to the Progressive Era.  It might also explain why a physics professor has felt the need to spend more than a year blogging about the curiously low respect for expert voices in our current culture...

(Incidentally, many of my economic sympathies are somewhat conservative/free market.  One might wonder why I care about economic inequality.  My answer is that in competitive markets competition tends to reduce the returns to all sellers, to the benefit of buyers.  It is therefore strange that the sellers of certain categories of labor are making more and more money in an allegedly competitive era.  There is something amiss in our society and economy, but it is not something that higher education can fix. This is outside our bailiwick, not the least because we are in the business of naming things after the fantastically wealthy. Also, parents are better predictors of academic success than anything that professors might do.)

"This One Quick Trick!" didn't replicate

I haven't had time to digest this article, but the latest PNAS has a report of a failure to replicate a study that supposedly showed that simple little tweaks of wording could increase voter turnout.  Since the modern zeitgeist is big on the idea that tiny little linguistic nudges matter, it is satisfying to see this sort of research out there.

The Age of Reform, Chapter 3

Blah, boring.  The partisan politics and economics of late 19th century farmers.

Chapters 4-6 hold promise, though.  Chapter 4 is titled "The Status Revolution and Progressive Leaders" and the sections are titled "The plutocracy and the mugwump type", The Alienation of the professionals", and "From the mugwump to the progressive."  Sounds more like ideas and psychology than agricultural economics.

The Age of Reform, Chapters 1-2

Not much to say here. Chapter 1 is spent debunking the myth of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer. Hofstadter argues that for most of US history, and certainly by the early 19th century, farming was a capitalistic enterprise, where families were not farming merely to produce for their own table but to produce a surplus that they could sell for profit.  The idea of a farm where people grew all of their own foods, raised the sheep or plants that produced their clothing, did their own blacksmithing, etc., was largely a myth.  Of course, since farming was a for-profit endeavor in a wider economy it was subject to ups and downs, bubbles of land speculation, and all of the other risks that come when rewards go up.

He also spends a lot of time in the first two chapters arguing that the myth of the virtuous farmer as some simpler, purer being than city folk came from a lot of romantic speculation that never matched reality, including speculation by plantation owner Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson could only be considered "self-sufficient" if (1) you ignore the fact that he used slave labor and (2) had 300 people working on his plantation, i.e. enough people that they could specialize in different things, so what he had was less a model of self-sufficiency than a model of a diversified and specialized (though thoroughly unfree) local economy.  The myth of the self-sufficient and virtuous farmer only grew larger as family farming declined, the industrial economy rose, and farmers and immigrants alike left their homes for American cities.  That era saw a lot of xenophobia, and a lot of militarism in isolationist guise:

On the surface there was a strong note of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism in the Populist movement and Bryan democracy.  Populists were opposed to large standing armies and large naval establishments; most of them supported Bryan's resistance to the acquisition of the Philippines.  They looked upon the military as a threat to democracy, upon imperialist acquisitions as gains only to financiers and "monarchists", not to the people.  But what they chiefly objected to was institutional militarism rather than war itself, imperialism rather than jingoism.  Under a patina of pacifist rhetoric they were profoundly nationalistic and bellicose.  What the nativist mind most resolutely opposed was not so much war itself as co-operation with European governments for any ends at all. (page 85)

I didn't intend to use this blog to talk about Brexit or Trump, but all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Next Book: The Age of Reform

Since I love Richard Hofstadter so much, my next read will be The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter.  This book is, on the surface, not about education at all, but about the Progressive Era and (to a lesser extent) the New Deal Era.  The book is not offered as a detailed account of policy-making and the associated negotiations among players, much less a detailed and quantitative account of the consequences of those policies.  Rather, it is a story of the ideas that were popular in the broad middle of American culture, to get a sense of Americans as a people.

Already, just in the introduction, I can tell that I will like this book.  I shall quote from page 16:

A great part of both the strength and the weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life.  We are forever restlessly pitting against them, demanding changes, improvements, remedies, but not often with sufficient sense of the limits that the human condition will in the end insistently impose upon us. This restlessness is most valuable and has its most successful consequences wherever dealing with things is involved, in technology and invention, in productivity, in the ability to meet needs and provide comforts. In this sphere we have surpassed all other peoples. But in dealing with human beings and institutions, in matters of morals and politics, the limits of this undying, absolutist restlessness quickly become evidence.  At the so-called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe--I hasten to add that the majority of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency--that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs", the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment. It is widely assumed that some technique can be found that will really do this, though there is always likely to be a good deal of argument as to what that technique is.

Indeed, am I not myself pitting myself against the perceived great evil of edufads?  What could be more American than for me to go off on this crusade?

Edufads come, of course, from our adorably earnest belief that there is some secret trick that will surely fix our social problems.  We need only find it and adopt it whole-heartedly and it will be great, and if it isn't it will be because some insufficiently dedicated professors didn't really adopt them with the proper enthusiasm.  It was our selfishness and conservatism that kept us from fixing timeless problems.  But if we had just adopted the fad then we could have made American schools great again and there would have been so much winning on the international comparisons that we'd frankly get bored of it.

Anyway, it occurs to me that not only do edufads come from this restless desire to fix problems, but also that the particular form of edufads these days arises from the determination to personify the stubbornness of educational problems.  There are many things that one can do to improve the structure of a course and help students learn more, including more frequent tests and checkpoints (as noted in the book Make It Stick), and better-crafted assignments, but education reformers in higher ed mostly aim their fire at professors for their manner of presenting and interacting and discussing.  I am more personified in my presentations and Q&A's than I am in my assignments, so that is what physics education reformers largely focus on.  Interestingly, the physics education community has put a lot of effort into developing online homework systems, and there's even a buzzword called "Just In Time Teaching" (JITT) which involves a lot of pre-lecture quizzes to help the professor make better use of class time and incentivize students to prepare (and also echoes a buzzword in business management), but most education reformers aim most of their rhetoric at the professor for being a "sage on a stage."  It fulfills our need to personify the perceived obstacles to achieving universal success.

(A tempting rejoinder to my contention that edufads fit this cultural strain identified by Hofstadter might be that some of the most enthusiastic adopters and promoters of edufads are immigrants, but, as I have said before, immigrants are Americans par excellence. If even the immigrants are playing along that's just another way of saying that you're tapping deep into the American psyche.)

Finally, I continue to find comfort in the fact that the things that frustrate me have happened before and will happen again.

Who knew?

I normally hate NYT articles that mention This One Program, but here's an article with 3 examples of This One Program, and at least two of them involve financial support and incentives to get students to attend school full-time.  Who knew that focusing full-time on school would lead to greater academic success than dividing your attention between school and a job?

(The only exception to that observation is students who have internships in their fields:   Many of those students do better than students who are only focused on school, but that's a bit different from working a job unrelated to your major.)