Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu

I just read Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. It's an admirably compact read, taking only as many pages as it actually needs in order to make its case: The Professional-Managerial Class is full of neuroticism, insecurity, and hypocrisy. She focuses on three examples: Attitudes towards child-rearing (everything ever done by neurotic parents looking to get their kids into Ivies), books (a less convincing chapter), and sex (not gonna touch that). Her bigger point is that the PMC has largely tried to identify itself as being more virtuous than the lower economic classes so that they can justify having more. They want to justify it to everyone: Themselves (all that insecurity), the more affluent people for whom they work (again, they feel insecure), and those with less (to try to get the poor to strive rather than revolt).

Liu is far-left on economics, more lefty than I'll ever be, but you don't need to be lefty to (1) agree with her cultural critiques of the PMC and (2) think that actual material living conditions should be a bigger concern than whether somebody spoke about a social issue in precisely the right language. One could support reforms from any number of angles, left, right, or otherwise, and think that those reforms should concentrate on tangible economic issues instead of culture.

My most important takeaway from her book is from the intro: The contrast between the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th and the PMC of today. Educated professionals were prominent in that progressive movement as they are among today's self-styled progressives. However, the progressives of the earlier era were often in sympathy with the working classes, while today's PMC finds the working class appalling.

I'm not convinced her history is strong there. I'm hardly an expert on this, but labor movements were generally aligned with the Democrats, at least by the time of FDR, while many (not all) progressives were identified with the Republicans. Yes, FDR came after the days of the capital-P Progressives, and I'm no expert on that history, but it seems clear that the story was probably a bit more complicated than hinted at in Liu's intro. (I'm quite certain that historians will always agree with the statement "[Insert movement here] was more complicated than a short summary.")

Still, to the extent that she might be capturing some truth, it's worth noting (as Liu does) that the educated professionals of the PMC are largely salaried people working for bigger organizations. They don't own the means of their production (her wording, she's very proudly leftist) the way that many small-town professionals did a century ago. Hofstadter noted that the progressive movement of a century ago had plenty of professionals and businessmen (not normally a leftist bunch) who felt threatened by corporations. They had enough ownership of their jobs to feel threatened AND enough ownership to have some ability to push back. Today the educated professionals mostly work for someone else, not themselves.

I'm also reminded of Claudia Goldin's observations about how working for corporations closed gaps between male and female pharmacists. On one level this is unambiguously good: Of course we want to see men and women enjoy the same opportunities. And it is obviously something that the PMC would and should celebrate, both because of the wider gender implications and because it is in their self-interest. However, Liu would note that the victory doesn't necessarily trickle down to women working in other jobs (e.g. the low-paid cashiers in those pharmacies). A segment of the PMC gained equity in the sense of fairness by giving up their equity in the sense of ownership. Maybe it's a very good thing from many angles. Maybe it's better for patients, especially certain kinds of patients. If I traveled a lot I'd probably want to be able to go to any CVS in the country and get my prescription refill.

On the other hand, I know from family experience that certain specialty services seem to be easier to get at independent pharmacies.

But whatever the bigger-picture pros and cons of corporate vs independent pharmacies, the main point is that the PMC prioritizes certain social goals and has partly achieved some of those goals...at least for themselves...by accepting the economic power of larger entities. And so we can't really stand up to larger entities. I'm just a guy with an inconsequential blog. If I actually caused real trouble for a big entity I'd lose my job and health insurance. We all know this.

I think this is Liu's best point, separate from her critiques of various books and sexual politics.

Metzger, chapter 9: Universities and Big Business

In this chapter he focuses on big business's relationship with universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  He notes that whereas in the first half of the 19th century college presidents had sought donations based on their own assessments of institutional need, subsequently men of wealth decided what they wanted to support and offered those funds on their terms (a pattern that continues to this day).  Interestingly, he ties this with the concentration of wealth in the late 19th century and the unease that it inspired (as documented by Hofstadter in The Age of Reform). The plutocrats were not unaware of the unease, and they shared with many of the professors that quintessentially American optimism that an equal and democratic society can be sustained, that the masses can be lifted, and that all of this can be done without sacrifice of self-interest by finding a win-win solution through the application of science.  I'm reminded of the Gates Foundation.

Age of Reform, Chapters 5 and 6

I am part-way through chapter 6 and I don't have a lot to say.  These are chapters on how the mood of the elites turned against an even bigger elite.  While there are some meaningful parallels to be drawn between the Progressive Era and today, particularly regarding inequality, the mood also feels different in certain ways.  This key quote sticks out for me:

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.  In a large and striking measure the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale.  The Progressives, by creating a climate of opinion in which, over the long run, the comfortable public was disposed to be humane, did in the end succeed in fending off that battle of social extremes of which they were so afraid. (pages 241-242)

Something feels different today.  Although there is a feeling of precariousness among some in the upper-middle class, in the academic world where I have my best chance to feel the pulse it seems that the mood is more of downward benevolence rather than solidarity.  Now, solidarity can manifest in some pretty patronizing ways, but there's less a feeling of shared precariousness than a feeling that We can save Them. Credentialing is the solution.  Maybe that's a fearful response to precariousness, a belief that we have to make ourselves relevant and can best do that by offering ourselves as the solution to social ills.  I think that's part of it.  But there's something else along with it.  The interest in quick fixes, practices that academics would quietly shun for the sorts of schools that they'd want to send their own kids to, tells me that we don't really identify downward.  Not yet, anyway.

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.)

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.