"The Bell Curve" - A Bogus (Pseudo-scientific) Brief For Racism & Inequality

Protesters at Middlebury College in July, 2017, and  social pseudo-scientist Charles Murray, who marched his way into eugenics infamy with his (co-authored) academic farce, 'The Bell Curve'.


Let us concede we live in treacherous times with bastardized memes and subtle mind viruses regularly unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.  In this deformed mental and intellectual atmosphere, Donnie Dotard and his lame tweets is only the most obnoxious example.  More generally,  climate denial propaganda, economic misinformation and irrational conspiracy  ideations  - such as spawned by Q Anon - are a dime a dozen.  And sadly,  relatively few Americans possess the critical thinking skills to parse BS from fact and distinguish fake news from the genuine article..

Into this moral and intellectual vacuum any kind of poseur, dilettante, or crank can seemingly make an impression, especially if he or she can generate some facsimile of genuine academic work,  i.e. a veneer of actual scholarship.  No one has performed better in this ersatz scholarship category than Charles Murray co-author of 'The Bell Curve'.  Indeed that co-authored parody of scholarship  paved the way for his later work, 'Coming Apart'  wherein we learned that all those poor whites -  displaced from their jobs -  could have landed on their feet had their IQs only been high enough.  But sadly, they weren't, so they are left to pound sand and cry for government help - like those displaced, forlorn coal miners now scratching for aid in Kentucky.

So both books have merely served to advance Murray's pet general narrative that a certain segment of Americans are destined to be in the underclass-  by virtue of lower IQ, genetically traced--   and we ought to get used to it. Even writing (with his co-author Herrnstein) at the end of The Bell Curve.:

"It is time once again for America to try living with inequality, as life is lived..."

As "life is lived"?  Such a reprehensible statement smacks of Social Darwinism as promulgated by Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher who had no patience for such niceties as government assistance.  He deemed the poor and infirm “unfit” if they couldn’t compete for resources without state assistance and it was their lot to be eliminated if they couldn’t manage. As Spencer put it (Social Darwinism in American Thought, American Historical Association, 1955):

"The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.."

Author Richard Hofstadter points out (pp. 41-42) Spencer absolutely repudiated all state assistance to the poor, the needy, physically feeble, or infirm. In terms of the role of natural selection in “social evolution” such aid amounted to unwanted artificial interference in nature. Not to mention, meddling in the “natural development” of a superior society.  As Spencer put it (ibid.):

"If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die. "


Again, this could have been lifted right out of a Nazi Eugenics tract.  Just as Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve bilge.


So in perspective, taking  Messrs. Herrnstein and Murray's conclusion at face value, the Democratic candidates ought to just abandon their proposals to create a "wealth tax", i.e. to tax accumulated wealth instead of income. (WSJ, yesterday, p. A1).   As noted in the article:

"Liberals see extreme inequality as morally wrong  and socially divisive and regard the current system which taxes income generated by wealth more lightly than wages  as especially objectionable and  a contributor to wealth gaps such as between blacks and whites."

Whereas in Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve, one can simply lay the blame at a "genetic" disparity in IQ between blacks and whites.  Hence, how can a wealth tax or even a highly progressive income tax correct what nature has already pre-ordained?    That then leads to the authors' chapter on dysgenesis.

What is that all about?  Basically they use suspect research and citations, which they either mischaracterize or inflate, to attempt to make the case that blacks are intellectually inferior genetically to whites.  At the core of this dysgensis effort one beholds this skewed Bell curve:



How did they arrive at such a skewed graphic?  Well, they began by asking: "How do African-Americans compare with blacks in Africa on cognitive tests?"

Sounds simple enough, no?  But the devil as always is in the details.  The pair thus started with the null hypothesis that 'there should be no significant difference between the IQs of black Africans and African-Americans'.   This was based on testing the effects of discrimination (as African-Americans experience every day) and genes. Hence, black Africans - say in Cameroon - ought to have higher IQ scores  than African- Americans IF low IQ scores for the latter are a result of discrimination rather than genes.

To try to get to an answer the pair cite as their authority Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster.  So they cite a Lynn paper from 1991 in which he "estimated the median black African IQ to be 75... about 10 points lower than for American blacks."

Murray and Herrnstein then conclude that the difference cannot be accounted for by the "special circumstance" of African-Americans (i.e. discrimination), hence genetics must explain the difference. To try to bolster this view  (that African -Americans have higher IQs than black Africans) the pair then cite a Ken Owen paper from 1992. writing: "The IQ of coloured students in South Africa - of mixed racial background- has been found to be similar to that of American blacks."

Now note where this is going. All of a sudden we have the white genetic component entering via the "mixed" background of the South African students.   The implication almost doesn't have to be outright stated: The addition of Caucasian genes to African genes - in both S Africa and the U.S. - results in a 10 point higher IQ score over native Africans.  What accounts for the difference? Well, obviously the whities' higher IQ  genes have entered the picture!

But here's the bugbear:  In a footnote the pair cite the Owen 1992 paper as seeming to "prove" the IQ increment peculiar to both S. African mixed race students and American blacks. (Interestingly, the actual reference doesn't appear in The Bell Curve's bibliography. GO figure.)  Maybe the reason for non-inclusion is that Owen's work is not properly characterized.  For one thing, he used the nonverbal Ravens' Progressive Matrices (thought to be less culturally biased than standard IQ test)

Owen found that out of a possible maximum raw score of 60, whites scored 45, Indians scored 42, mixed race (coloreds) scored 37 and blacks scored 27.  Seems straightforward, no?   Not quite. The second bugbear was that the test's developer, John Raven, repeatedly insisted there could be no translation of his test into IQ scores. Hence, Herrnstein and Murray were confabulating IQs out of thin air.

Worse, the source for another  Lynn citation (accepted as valid by the Bell Curve pair)  that "Zambians had a lamentably low average IQ of 75" was given as Pons [1974]; Crawford -Nutt, 1978."

But in an astounding research misfire of stupendous proportions - one more likely for a green 1st year social science student- Herrnstein and Murray failed to note that Lynn had taken the Pons' data from Crawford-Nutt's paper and converted it into a bogus IQ average of 75.   At the same time the pair failed to recognize that Lynn chose to outright ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt's paper which reported that 228 Soweto black HS students scored an average of 45 on the matrices test, or higher than the 44 scored by same age whites.   Most appalling 5 of 6 studies were omitted from Lynn's 1991 summary - by which time the average African IQ had gone down to 69.  Selection bias on steroids, anyone?

As described by one book review of  The  Bell Curve in Scientific American  (Feb., 1995) from which the preceding graphic was obtained:

"Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity."

Adding pointedly:

"Lynn is widely known among academics to be an associate editor of the racist journal Mankind Quarterly and a major recipient of support from the nativist, eugenically oriented Pioneer Fund. It is a matter of shame and disgrace that two eminent social scientists- fully aware of the sensitivity of the issues they address - take Lynn as their scientific tutor and uncritically accept his surveys of research."

But, of course, given Murray and Herrnstein's conclusions, it is impossible to decouple their work from a clear and intentional agenda:  to attack affirmative action, .e.g.

"Affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul."

And argue for accepting inequality (see earlier quote) as a natural norm.

Indeed, the revealing quotes of this dysfunctional pair of academics  tells me they damned well knew the unsavory nature and pseudoscience underpinning Lynn's work, but used it anyway. They used it because it advanced their own deformed elitist agenda based on their pet prejudices and presumptions, i.e. that genetics  really does separate the human family by IQ, and we ought to accept inequality instead of fighting it.  Should we then be charitable to Murray and Herrnstein for possibly being over confident in giving so much sway to Lynn's research? Hell no! Examining this book as a scientific researcher it is clearly so full of blatant holes, slipshod methodology  and  questionable sourcing that if it was submitted to physics referees - in terms of a physics context (using similar regression analyses) - it would be rejected outright.  Much like the daft papers of climate deniers are by reputable climate journals.

For example, one of the first things the budding researcher learns in any science - when applying statistics - is  not to conflate or confuse correlation with causation. And yet the Bell Curve duo commit this fundamental transgression  in spades.  We see this in the ridiculously (and excessively) long section of their book featuring analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Survey Of Labor Market Experience of Youth (NLSY for short).  The data, even without doing a single regression analysis do show a correlation between IQ and socio-economic status.

But to besiege  the reader with a blizzard of charts, graphs, tables etc. to extrapolate to a conclusion that IQ (inherited of course) translates into better paying jobs and higher socioeconomic status is simply twaddle.  It posits that the correlations obtained are actually causative.  As the SciAm reviewer of the book put it (ibid.):

"The core of Herrnstein-Murray's message is phrased with a beguiling simplicity: 'Putting it all together, success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit."


So if you are a sanitation worker, or wait staff person, instead of say a high end investment banker or stock broker, then you have to blame your low IQ genes.  Interestingly, members of Mensa - to provide an example of an inversion of the above- are often asked: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?"

Well, for a lot of reasons!  Kudos here must go to Dr. Steven Mason in his article 'Let's Get Dumb' in one issue of Intertel's  Integra (October, p. 26, 2014). Mason, in about 5 pages,  shows that very often being smart isn't the asset so many believe, but an actual liability.  Especially in terms of 'making it in our money obsessed capitalist culture

 As Mason points out, in conjunction with this 'why aren't you rich' theme (p. 27):

"There are several reasons for this being the case. One is that employers don't especially like employees who are smarter than themselves. The result is that many of my friends belonging to high IQ societies wind up underemployed, working at jobs far below their potential."

Hey, Herrnstein and Murray, how do you process that?

Mason also notes that "kids hate those geeks who screw up the grading curve".  These kids, who aren't afraid to show their smarts are also the most victimized and bullied. No surprise then how back in 1978 my niece Vanessa expressed fear and shame at repeatedly outshining her classmates at St. Joseph Convent school in Trinidad, and asked advice. She was leaning to "dumbing down" her profile and being less conspicuous. I advised against it and told her to do it only if she felt it was critical to her ongoing emotional balance.

Perhaps the most provocative insight rendered by Dr. Mason concerns the communication gap between people of significantly different IQ. He writes (ibid.):

"It's been demonstrated, though not widely publicized in this PC culture, that complete and effective communication between those separated by more than fifteen IQ points is unlikely. It means there is no way, repeat NO WAY, that people with IQs of 115 are ever going to explain to people with IQs of 85 why it's important to graduate high school."

By the same token, it likely means a communication gap will exist between those of IQ 110-115 and those of Mensa or Intertel  IQ level (130-135) on matters of politics, including deep politics  (and I warrant most 115'ers don't even know what it means), science, philosophy, history and economics. The gap is simply too vast to be bridged.  Now carry this gap into the typical American work scenario and what do you see?  Likely enmity breaking out especially if the Mensan or Intertel member doesn't play sufficiently dumb over time. (Again explaining why  - if outed- they will not get that promotion and hence, well, remain at a lower socioeconomic station.  But this is not because of low IQ as the Bell Curve Bozos claim, but rather being enmeshed in an anti-intellectual culture .)

Taken at a more fundamental level, Mason's thesis indicates that the upper two or so IQ percentile of Americans will never be able to communicate effectively and completely with most of the rest of the population.  This gets most glaringly exposed in the political domain. Again, the need of so many voters to base their choices on atmospherics and optics ("Is he a guy I can have a beer with?") is downright disheartening. It makes me want to scream, "No you dummy! Don't worry about the damned beer but what he can do in office!"

And this  emotional tendency (often of swing voters) surely explains many of the puzzling election results over the years, from electing Gee Dumbya Bush in 2000, to the deranged semi-imbecile, criminal and grifter Donald Trump in 2016.  The takeaway?  The practical intelligence that helped put such losers into office has to be exceedingly low. So even if one is a top flight investment banker  or history professor and had voted Bush in 2000,  2004, and Trump in 2016, his working intellect can't be all that great irrespective of what Herrnstein-Murray claim.  Even Harvard Prof Harvey Mansfield attributed Trump's  election to the "lower half of the IQ curve."  And that includes all those business CEOs, market quants, and other "upper socioeconomic class" hotshots.  Oh sure, they got their tax cuts - but look what Trump's trade war has cost them, and we haven't gone beyond a technical recession yet.

Speaking of that:  the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted many criticisms of The Bell Curve, most notably Charles Lane’s thorough takedown in The New York Review of Books, have pointed out that Murray’s attempts to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist scientists. In an afterward to the book, Murray rejects criticisms that rest on the fact that “we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run by men who were "Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority.” Murray contends that the racist pseudo-scientists he cites “are some of the most respected psychologists of our time” and that “the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation."

To me, such woeful blindness and shoddy work is deliberate and totally disqualifies Murray (and Herrnstein)  from claiming any objective insight into socioeconomic status and its relation to IQ.   At  the same time it shows me that those students who protested his effort to spout racist, eugenic -based rubbish at Middlebury College  2 years ago were totally justified. Indeed, as critical thinking citizens it was incumbent on them to block the dissemination of toxic racist propaganda disguised as scholarly research.

Indeed, not to do so allows the proliferation of racist memes and the sort of degenerate codswallop recently put out in a WSJ op-ed by  Heather MacDonald ('Trump Isn't The One Dividing Us By Race',  August 19, p. A19)  Let us note this hack is the author of 'The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture'.    One can only imagine here that Ms. MacDonald is a firm acolyte of the Charles Murray Bell Curve cult. Especially when she argues (WSJ, ibid.) the racial divisiveness is the product of diversity acknowledgement and "its main propagation by the academic left and mass media".   To see her spouting her balderdash live on you tube (at Hillsdale College) check out this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE-_weLRLK4
  
Getting back to the authors of The Bell Curve, truth be told what these two have produced  is no more scholarly than Gerald Posner's 'Case Closed' which tried to finalize the specious Warren Report as the last word on the Kennedy assassination.  JFK Assassination experts document twelve of the most serious “Posnerisms” here:

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

See also:

"Coming Apart?" - Charles Murray's Arguments After..

The Liabilities of Intellect: More Pervasive Than You Think

It is very nearly an axiom that higher IQ people prevail and are most successful in multiple domains, from academia to business and politics. But this is not necessarily so, as pointed out by Dr. Steven Mason in his article 'Let's Get Dumb' in the most recent Intertel Integra (October, p. 26). Mason, in about 5 pages,  shows that very often being smart isn't the asset so many believe, but an actual liability.

For example, as he observes, to have a reasonable chance of being elected, a Presidential candidate: "must either appear to be a dummy, or as  more often the case, be a dummy. Compare Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, for example. The first was a university president while the latter (often called the 'great communicator') was someone who even his staunchest supporters would hardly call brilliant."

Indeed, and who can ever forget Reagan asking on one occasion, of one of his Joint Chiefs, if "nuclear missiles launched from submarines can be recalled."

Uh no, Ronnie! Once fired they are on their way! Just in case you had a mind to get trigger happy with the Russkies.

Another canard to do with intellect often expressed in various forums, is a variation on the question: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?"

The assumption here is if a person truly is a brain he or she ought to also be a rich brain. Why not? S/he ought to be able to outsmart everyone on the planet and make a bundle! Not quite. For one thing, we don't all aspire to be a Mark Zuckerberg who mostly swiped the code basis for Facebook from peers at Harvard - before he left that vaunted institution. Oh ok, he made some tweaks, but basically FB already existed in some form and Zuckerberg brought it a bit further. The idea for 'the Facebook', however, was not his originally.

Next, as Mason points out, in conjunction with this 'why aren't you rich' theme (p. 27):

"There are several reasons for this being the case. One is that employers don't especially like employees who are smarter than themselves. The result is that many of my friends belonging to high IQ societies wind up underemployed, working at jobs far below their potential."

Mason also notes that "kids hate those geeks who screw up the grading curve".  These kids, who aren't afraid to show their smarts are also the most victimized and bullied. No surprise then how back in 1978 my niece Vanessa expressed fear and shame at repeatedly outshining her classmates at St. Joseph Convent school in Trinidad, and asked advice. She was leaning to "dumbing down" her profile and being less conspicuous. I advised against it and told her to do it only if she felt it was critical to her ongoing emotional balance.

Perhaps the most provocative insight rendered by Dr. Mason concerns the communication gap between people of significantly different IQ. He writes (ibid.):

"It's been demonstrated, though not widely publicized in this PC culture, that complete and effective communication between those separated by more than fifteen IQ points is unlikely. It means there is no way, repeat NO WAY, that people with IQs of 115 are ever going to explain to people with IQs of 85 why it's important to graduate high school."

By the same token, it likely means a communication gap will exist between those of IQ 110-115 and those of Mensa or Intertel  IQ level (130-135) on matters of politics, including deep politics  (and I warrant most 115'ers don't even know what it means), science, philosophy, history and economics. The gap is simply too vast to be bridged. It therefore must not surprise us that many - say in discussing American history - will simply cite Larry Schweikart's "48 Liberal Lies" as opposed to entering an actual debate or argument with a person who possesses superior knowledge, insight. They have already ceded, by doing so, that they are not up to the challenge of intellectual engagement.

But taken at a more fundamental level, Mason's thesis indicates that the upper two or so IQ percentile of Americans will never be able to communicate effectively and completely with most of the rest of the population.  This gets most exposed in the political and elections domain. Again, the need of so many voters to base their choices on atmospherics and optics ("Is he a guy I can have a beer with?") is downright disheartening. It makes me want to scream, "No you dummy! Don't worry about the damned beer but what he can do in office!"

And again, Mason points this divergence out in comparing Bill Clinton to George Bush, while noting that the latter guy's followers "rarely refer to the selected hero's SAT scores".  He adds (ibid.):

"And who would have it otherwise with roughly half the voters having IQs below average (I know I am going to get letters from the mathematically challenged on that one!)"

And this surely explains many of the puzzling election results over the years, from electing Gee Dumbya Bush in 2000 (it shouldn't even have been close, though Al Gore did take the popular vote by over a half million), to the most recent farce that transpired Tuesday.  I refer to the following:

- Voters stupidly electing members of a party that: a) has the lowest approval rating ever (20%) and b) has not effected one single positive bit of legislation.

- Voters passing minimum wage ballot measures in five states, while at the same time electing Republican governors who are least likely to let them see the light of day.

I could go on and on, but a relevant point here concerns the general level of dumbing down of the electorate which, let's face it, must have something to do with Mason's observation of half being 'dummies' (below average intelligence).  This is critical given that misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. This is according to a new study published in Social Science Quarterly  which employed a “knowledge distortion index” and looked at two competing explanations for why this is so — one top-down, the other bottom-up.  The researchers used three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.

The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.

But IQ and education level likely have a role too, and as Mason indicates (p. 28), 

"Only a relatively small percent of the voting population is educated beyond the required minimum."

Does this sound amazing to you? Does it really? Then back up and consider how many actually support nonsense like Ken Ham's contention that dinosaurs shared Noah's Ark. Quite apart from the fable nature of the Ark story, did any of these bozos consider how even two of each - Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex- would sink the Ark? Hence the cover of Charles Pierce's book, 'Idiot America'.

But before you castigate these misguided folks, don't forget just as many are Larry Schweikart false history groupies and echo his zany, unhistorical claims, including that Reconstruction was still going on in the 1920s, and that the Pilgrims were Puritans (they were actually separatists), and also that it was a "lie" that the Indians bailed them out - providing enough food to eat for the first Thanksgiving (it wasn't). 

This elicits another question as to why Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are vastly more popular than say, Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes - to the point so many people can't even tolerate listening to or watching the latter while I can tolerate watching the former, although not for very long.  I suspect again, the answer inheres in Steve Mason's postulate concerning the 15 point IQ communication gap, i.e. Maddow and Hayes intellectually articulate positions which are going to be resonant only for those of IQ 115 or above (even leaving out any "liberal" overtones), while any dunderhead can listen to Limbaugh and get stoked, and most can also watch O'Reilly go into his histrionics and find abundant resonance. 

But the dismal take at the end is, as Mason points out, we are saddled with these lower IQ folks in perpetuity. They will keep on voting the way they have been and devil take the hindmost -or devil take America-  if they come out in 2016 in too high numbers.  They are unable, at root, to parse the way their own brains have been manipulated - by the likes of the Koch brothers and their phony Tea Party idiocy, or by Limbaugh,  O'Reilly or god forbid...Jim Inhofe - a total anti-global warming buffoon who now stands to inherit the environmental committee chair from Sen. Barbara Boxer.

From a high IQ woman, to a GOOP  27 IQ points behind her!  Meanwhile, some parting words from Dr. Mason:

"When taken in combination, the fact that high IQ humans are born less frequently and selected as world leaders less often, points toward a Space Age marked by a decrease in those same little gray cells that got us out of the Stone Age."

In other words, we all may still be here - planted on this little orb, having not spread our seed beyond - when that big, planet killer asteroid strikes. The 'dumb' dinosaurs had no way out when their killer asteroid struck 65 million years ago. But humans? Perhaps their excuse will be not enough bright people were generated to design the rockets to get us off world - as opposed to building rockets to deliver more nuclear bombs.

The Student Loan Debt Morass: Swallowing the Nation Whole

A Loyola University frosh (ca. 1966, note slide rule) tries to master a chapter in his Mechanics & Heat text. The average yearly total cost at Loyola then was $3,000/yr. (From Loyola WOLF Yearbook, 1967)

The news that student loan debt has metastasized to a cancerous fiscal dimension, cannot be sanguine for this nation. Along with the impending austerity, it likely means an accelerated slide into third world-ism and much greater inequality than ever seen before.

To fix ideas, the total student debt now stands at $966 billion as of the end of 2012, with a 70 percent increase in both the number of borrowers and the average balance per person. The overall number of borrowers past due on their student loan payments has also grown, from under 10 percent in 2004 to 17 percent in 2012.

The Huffington Post, referencing a recent New York Federal Reserve report, pointed out that the proliferation of indebted students and their families has knock -on effects on multiple other areas of the economy:

- Fewer people with student loans are buying homes

- Fewer people with student loans are able to secure and maintain decent credit ratings

- Delay in buying a car, hence having lower access to job availability

- Postponement of marriage

- Inability to rent because of high debt to income ratio, so having to live with parents


- Too many graduates (and even non-graduates) encumbered by student loans can't pay them off efficiently because they can't access the quality jobs to do so (half of all the grads are found in jobs that don't require a college degree). They may then be prey to loan sharks or having liens placed on accounts, property.


More worrisome, is the nature of the loan debt, which is radically unlike the mortgage debt crisis. The latter engendered a bubble which we always knew had the potential to burst with fallout we are still seeing. The student loan debt bubble has no such evident trip-wire for a massive burst and could go on for decades.

As Malcolm Harris has long pointed out, since most student loan debt is government- backed and can never be discharged, the type of meltdown the student loan explosion could precipitate will take a different shape than the mortgage crisis, with the victims (student borrowers) already in place and struggling.

Make no mistake that all the hallmarks of a bubble are there, including massive securitization and seemingly risk-free financial products. But, as the financial analysts remind us, the vast majority of this debt is government-backed. What’s the worst that could happen?

As far as investors are concerned, this line of thinking works just fine, but it should look less rosy for the Treasury. If it turns out the subsequent work of student debtors isn’t worth as much as the markets figured, another trillion-dollar bailout may be required, and the taxpayers can hardly afford it. Yet, strangley,  neither investors nor the Treasury seem particularly concerned. This may be because there’s no escape from student debt, and the government and financial markets both know it. This then, is the real plan for the education bubble: student debtors will be forced to fill it in come Hell or high water.

The unspoken meme here is that not only are student loans not a burden on the federal government, they’re a good investment. They mean securitization of gov't debt through bonds issued, with interest to cover other holes.  So, we've got a bubble set for unfettered expansion and it’s in neither the government’s nor investors’ interest to intervene. Strike Debt activist campaigns meanwhile have proposed collective debt resistance, but their efforts have not yet made a significant dent in the national or even New York City-wide picture.

As Malcolm Harris pointedly noted in the Boston Review last November, “Short of suicide, expatriation, or revolt, there’s not much 37 million American student debtors and counting can do about it.”

Can this really be true? Well, how about not getting into this morass of debt in the first place! The true fact, which too many Millennials and their parents may not wish to believe, is that the evidence shows most college (4-year) degrees aren't even worth the money paid anymore.   The book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, sadly highlights how students going into debt are getting screwed.   For example, gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills are " or either exceedingly small or non-existent for a large proportion of students". Many students haven't managed even minimal critical thinking skills by the end of their third semester! What the hell are they paying for? They'd do better to just go to a community college and graduate with an Associate degree!

Thirty -six percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning (as given by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over 4 years of education. This means these kids could have essentially saved their money and not gone into massive debt most will now take the rest of their lives to pay off.  No wonder government and financial markets are clucking at the prospect of never ending streams of debt!

During my college days, a core of subjects was required to be taken by all students, including: language and literature, philosophy, logic, calculus, one science course (physics, astronomy, biology or chemistry), one foreign language (e.g. German, Russian or French) and either macro-economics or political science. Meanwhile, a review of more than 1,000 colleges and universities today found that 29% of schools require two or fewer core subjects. That means there's been a quality decline in almost one third of the schools!

Do college students feel they're getting short changed? A Roper survey recently found that nearly 50% of graduates didn't feel they got their money's worth. That is a massive crisis by any definition. It shows that universities are not seriously doing the jobs for which they've been charged. Indeed, as the authors noted in a mass-circulated letter, those schools not demanding a rigorous curriculum "are actively contributing to the degradation of teaching and learning".

In his article, 'The Myth of Higher Education' Dr. Steven Mason in an issue of Integra (No. 9, Oct. 2009, the journal of Intertel), notes that a huge error of American education is orientating it explicitly for the utilitarian purpose of making money or getting a job. As he writes:


"the bottom line regarding a well -rounded education is that it has nothing to do with any kind of bottom line. Its value (non-monetary) is to be found in the quality it adds to one's life. It allows one to better appreciate music, art, history and literature. It contributes to a better understanding of language and culture, nature and philosophy. It expands rather than limits horizons and replaces faith and belief with reason and logic"


Mason adds that it "teaches a person to live - not to earn a living" and that living encompasses an impetus for further learning just for its own sake. If a fantastic, well-paying job also comes with it, that's icing on the cake. I totally agree. To me the measure of whether one obtained a degree worth the cost is how well one is motivated to use his learning as a base to expand it further: to delve into new or unfamiliar areas, or use the techniques mastered (say in a research area of one's specialty) to apply to other arenas. If these skills are only limited, and above all if one's fundamental working knowledge base is limited - whether in economics, American government, history, science or numerical literacy-  then one can rightly complain he or she didn't get one's money's worth.

It would appear self-evident then, that students seeking college entry first inquire as to their motives, or at least their primary objective to attend college. If it is only to "make money from a great job" they'd be better off downscaling their college choice, and even considering a community college, given that basically all the quality jobs they seek will have vanished, never to return. (In an austerity or low aggregate demand  environment, quality jobs must be kept to a minimum because of the high remuneration and benefits burdens.)

One has to therefore picture a jobs pyramid in this country. It will have an enormously vast base (likely the service sector where 1 in every 5 is stuck in some capacity) and only a tiny, micro-peak at the top where perhaps 1 of every 10,000 grads will find a home - say working at Google, or Facebook, Yahoo or maybe the CIA, NSA (Forget about scientific arenas, as the austerity programs to come will slice all of them bare bones dry.)

Is it really worth it to plow $50,000 or $100,000  into a dream that has about as much chance of being realized as me winning 100 grand at the Bellagio black jack table? Think about that!

If, on the other hand, the potential college candidate wants to use the degree to enhance his quality of life, her exposure to grand ideas, and the ability to learn further, that's a different matter. Go for it, by all means!

Even with a college sheepskin, people will not work all their lives. It's what they do with their time when they cease working that really indicates the quality of the higher education they received.

Prospective students of today and their parents need to think long and hard about that, before taking out thousands of dollars of loan debt for an expensive education that may not deliver all they expect.