At the end of World War II, America stood as the unchallenged hegemon of industrial production, military supremacy, and technological progress, a fact that has only been further cemented by the post-Cold War realization that the competition the United States faced from the Soviet Union was more perceived than real. And while institutional segregation and the neurosis of strict gender roles continued to fester (a fact that should not be understated), it seemed that the United States had been the first nation to truly get it right: full employment, rising wages, accessible education, and property ownership came together in a "perfect storm" that created the world's first middle-class nation. And as saddening as it is to realize that it took humanity over 6,000 years to create an equitable and dynamic society, it is even more saddening to realize how far we have fallen since then.
According to most economists, the decline began in 1973. The oil shocks, the economic effects of the Vietnam War, and the rising productivity of Japan are all seen as causes, but the effect is singular: stagnant wages. That's right, as startling as it is to believe, real wages for average Americans have not improved in the last 33 years. Until 1973, wages for employees had generally followed productivity increases and corporate profits, a phenomenon reinforced by high rates of unionization, a favorable balance of trade, and an economic dependence on skilled labor. These forces, which had been the basis for post-war upward mobility, began to erode from that point on, particularly during the "trickle-down" madness of the 1980s. And now, most Americans would be hard-pressed to find a single to find a friend or family member belonging to a labor union, and the idea of an American trade surplus has become laughable. Worse still has been the general "de-skilling" of the American workforce, as a career flipping burgers, rather than work on an assembly line, has become the job of last resort for the working class. The political left has been, for the most part, unable to address these problems, drowned out as they are by what George Soros calls the "market fundamentalists" who believe every social need of man can be provided by the free market, despite the fact that much of corporate America was built on government subsidies. Apparently John Keynes and the New Deal never existed.
The results were as wrenching as they were predictable. As male wages stagnated, "the family crisis" emerged, and many of the gains African-American communities had made in the Civil Rights era were wiped out against a backdrop of post-industrial inner-city decay (with the notable and encouraging exception of black women). And now look where we are: with the exception of the idyllic suburbs, America has become a hollowed-out nation of declining wages, chaotic schools, and a burgeoning prison system. And while this Lou Dobbs-esque rant has been light on statistics and heavy on sweeping generalizations, I will leave you with one concrete piece of information. As you may or may not know, the Gini coefficient is an economic measurement of income inequality, and is measure in a value between 0 and 1, with 1 being absolute inequality. In 1970, America's Gini was .394; today, it is .469.
As the sun is setting on the American dream, Gini is rising.
We hear it all the time in regards to the American quagmire in Iraq: "We must see this through and make sure that the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform have not been for nothing." This same rational was used to defend continued American involvement in the Vietnam War, another foreign policy disaster. But as much as any American progressive respects the sacrifices that American soldiers and sailors (many of whom have been recruited from the besieged working class), have made for America over the last five years we, we cannot use their bloodshed to discharge responsibility for crafting a rational and responsible exit strategy from Iraq, for to do so would be to commit the sunk cost fallacy.
You would think that the neocons, so eager to evoke classical economic principles to justify their all-out assault on America's middle class, would be a little more familiar with this concept: for those that don't know, a sunk cost is an expenditure that, for a variety of reasons, cannot be recalled-- like purchasing non-refundable movie tickets to a film you no longer wish to see.
But rather than rationally identifying the fact that this expenditure is "sunk," most consumers magnify its cost by "sticking it out". Obviously this is circular reasoning: if you mistakenly bought tickets, wasting two more hours will not get you your money back. Yet most of us would still try to force ourselves into the theatre, using the rationalization that "we've come this far". In our emotional attempt to justify our actions, we ignore the fact that doubling down, reinvesting, or any other attempts to "stick it out" will not erase the past.
The same holds true in foreign wars: the fact that we are in Iraq now has nothing to do with what we should do going forward; the cost is sunk. The gruesome reality that 3,000 Americans have died half a world away will not be cushioned by sending 3,000 more to their deaths-- you don't honor the sacrifices of young men and women by sacrificing yet more men and women, you honor their sacrifice by objectively evaluating the best course for the future, in this case by re-evaluating American policy.
Dostoevsky famously remarked that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons". Seeing as the United States has over two million of its citizens behind bars, the largest prison population in the world, both in relative and absolute terms, Dostoevsky's famous maxim seems all the more important.
The American "prison-industrial complex," as many pundits refer to it, has become so large that it has not only been imprinted on our budget and legislature, but on our national consciousness.
HBO's Oz, Joseph Hallinan's Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, and Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete? all speak to the impact that the US prison system has had on the American experience. Moreover, the sheer price tag for supporting such an "incarceral state," is starting to garner attention from the middle class.
Much of this is attention and cost is due to the enormous growth in the US prison population. Over the last ten years, the population of US prisons has grown by 10% a year, well outpacing the growth in the general population. A multitude of factors have been linked to this "prison boom," including poverty, the War on Drugs, and institutional racism. But to understand the flaws of the prison system, we must understand the system itself.
The form and function of prisons in modern democracies is often taken for granted as being simple and peripheral. But prisons are both unique and essential to law and order. In any society, conflicts, disputes, and outright tragedies are bound to occur; such is life. But our democratic institutions, rather than reinforcing a police state, sectarian anarchy, or outright fear for one's safety, allows for our citizens to articulate and resolve their disputes in a court of law. Prisons are essential in this endeavor; they are the only legitimate means of isolating and detaining a citizen of the United States.
Unfortunately, our conscious perception of prison is that it is a simple, brutish institution where the dregs of society are quarantined from the productive citizenry. But to believe this is to ignore the complexities of criminal jurisprudence. Sometimes a citizen may have to be detained before he is found guilty (if he is deemed a flight risk or a danger to the community), sometimes wrongful arrests occur, and of course, a wrongful conviction is not beyond the realm of possibility (I'll pause to allow the CSI fans to groan in disagreement). With this in mind, I would like to examine the actual architecture of the US prison system.
The best source I can point you toward is the Human Rights Watch report on sexual assault in the American prison. Needless to say, prison rape is widespread and brutal. The report gives the indication that inmate rape is an accepted facet of prison life, and that its emotional and physical consequences are enormous; some inmates contract HIV from being raped, while others contemplate suicide from the stress and shame of the ordeal. You would think that the protection of the Eight Amendment would insulate inmates from such degradation, but the Supreme Court found in Hope v. Pelzer that prisoners cannot plead their case unless prison officials can be identified in committing or condoning the act. Needless to say, this is a difficult case to make.
Another structural flaw in our penal system is the remoteness of many prisons. Even though studies have shown that inmate rehabilitation and mental health are bolstered by visitation from family and friends, many state prisons are in isolated, rural locations, while federal prisons may house inmates in an entirely different state from where their crime occurred. While I agree that building prisons near major metropolitan areas presents a NIMBY problem (not in my backyard), the difficulties families face in communicating with their loved ones must somehow be reduced. But complicating this effort is the fact that economically stagnant cities and counties in middle America are all too eager to build prisons, hoping the construction and investment may create job growth.
But perhaps the greatest obstruction to a healthy, functional penal system is the American cultural attitude toward crime and punishment. The War on Drugs, "tough on crime" rhetoric, and a cultural caricature cementing an image that prisoners are evil, merciless thugs, effectively logjams any constructive discussion or prisoners rights. Even prison rape, clearly an intolerable evil, has become a common trope in American humor, with the new comedy Let's Go to Prison using it as a plot device.
All of this stems from a burdensome pathology in the American civic consciousness. In letting this phenomenon continue, we hurt only ourselves: in mocking the plight of America's prisoners, we ignore the connection between poverty and crime. When we write prisoners off as evil or wretched, we ignore the fact that any citizen is vulnerable to wrongful arrest and "testilying". When we allow such an immense amount of human suffering to continue, rather than damning criminals, we damn ourselves.
But the American prison system is by no means without hope. In 2003, the United States Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, but many in prison advocacy wait impatiently to see meaningful enforcement. At the forefront of this pressure is Stop Prison Rape, a UN-recognized NPO made famous by Stephen Donaldson who, while being jailed for a White House protest was arrested and imprisoned. During his stay, he was raped and subsequently contracted AIDS. This man, who was effectively given the death penalty for a minor crime, refused to let the misery of US prisoners go unnoticed. Donaldson died in 1996, and I hope that the next time you joke about the conditions of US prisoners, you think of him. Link Link
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Over 70,000 men and women were killed instantly, and countless others lived on as hibakusha, the Japanese term for long-term sufferers of cancer and radiation poisoning. After a second atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, World War II- the most destructive and far reaching conflict in history- came to a close. Historians claim that at least fifty million people died during the six years of war, while others claim that at least 100 million deaths were caused by the conflict and its related economic, political, and environmental disruptions. Any morally mature person and anyone interested in maintaining peace must wonder why so many people chose to engage in armed conflict with one another, must wonder what could justify the immense cruelty humans had dispensed on one another. The answer, it seems, is ideology.
If one had to identify the mechanism for the political, social, and environmental trauma that was a fact of life in the 1930s and 40s, one would choose ideology. Ideology, a term coined by Destutt de Tracy to describe "the science of ideas," that dominates social and political discourse, became the most powerful force in the world following the First World War. Political "isms," including Populism, Fascism, Capitalism, and Communism, reached new prominence in the hearts and minds of 20th Century men and women, becoming all-encompassing meta-narratives that turned European against European and Asian against Asian. Surely Nazi death squads were not slaughtering innocent Ukrainians; no, they were rooting out evils of Bolshevism. British pilots were not bombing German civilians; they were defending England from the menace of Fascism. Ideology, it seems, has an enormous capacity to redefine violence. But this is an illusion. Rather than curbing Fascism, Communism, or any other "ism," warfare is, in simplest terms, the tragic destruction of human life, and ideology will never change that.
But World War II, like all wars, eventually came to a close. To finally end the brutal conflict that had been destroying Asia for 12 years, the US opted to utilize atomic weapons. J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, while gazing upon the mushroom cloud that signaled the success of America's first nuclear test, said "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," a phrase borrowed from Indian descriptions of Shiva, the Hindu god of death. To Oppenheimer, atomic weapons were death incarnate, a monster he had unleashed upon the world. But the true monster of the 20th Century is not poison gas or atomic weapons. No, the monster of the 20th Century, the monster that justified World War II, Vietnam, and countless other conflicts, is ideology. When we allow ourselves to justify immense personal suffering for the sake of abstract "isms," when we discharge all moral responsibility for the sake of an ideology, we, not the weapons we deploy, become death, destroyer of worlds. Perhaps what is needed is an anti-ideology, a new "ism" that identifies the insanity of sacrificing countless men and women upon the altar of ideology, and declares that war, regardless of its intellectual trimmings, will always be the institutionalized death of one person at the hands of another. I leave you with a poem, entitled 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War, when the prevalence of ideology was at its height.
1936
Capitalism
Fascism
Communism
Ism
Ism
Ism
I am Become Ideology, Destroyer of Peace
The price of attending a private undergraduate university is no secret. Even here at AU, which is moderately priced in comparison to other private schools, the cost of attendance can be over $25,000 a year. Public universities are cheaper, but can still reach yearly costs of over $15,000. These high price tags, combined with federal aid programs that are failing to keep up with inflation, can make even the most financially stable family hesitate to send their children to college, even though everyone from high school counselors to developmental experts claim that college is the ideal choice for graduating seniors. But the best way to analyze the value of a college education by the testimony of experts or even its future earning potential (an argument often invoked by college recruiters), but by the volume and quality of services provided. With this standard in mind, I have come to believe that the American college experience is at best, highly inefficient. At worst, it is a fraud being perpetrated on the American student.
The first statistic worth analyzing is this: the maximum hour course load for most university students is 17 semester hours per week. This averages out to less than four hours a day of classroom instruction. And with Anderson's tuition at $19,990 a year (according to collegeboard.com), this means each hour of classroom instruction costs 588 dollars, and that's assuming you took a full 17 hours each semester (a rarity, to say the least, and many times a mathematical impossibility). Many attorneys and doctors don't charge that much. And compare this to public high schools, in which eight hours of classroom instruction a day were provided free of charge (at least as far as the student is concerned). Obviously there is a tremendous discrepancy between 17 hours a week for $19,990 and 40 hours a week for free.
American academia claims that this anemic amount of classroom instruction is made up by outside studying, in which students study 2-3 hours for each hour of actual class time. This claim is meaningless for three reasons. First of all, you would be hard-pressed to find a single student at any university in any major (with a few possible exceptions) that studies for 34-51 hours per week. Any claim to the contrary is laughable. Secondly, even if this were true, it does nothing to justify the cost per credit hour; outside studying is exactly, that, something done on your own. But we are not even allowed to do this free of charge, as annually-updated, over-priced textbooks are mandated for nearly every class, a fact that nullifies any cost-saving use of the university library or educational web sites. And thirdly, how can individual studying even compare to an organized, lecture-based classroom session that includes laboratories, quizzes, and exams? But of all of these questions are ignored by the gate-keepers of American academia, who seem to think that students learn more by going to class less.
Worse still is the all-encompassing nature of American universities that almost necessitates living on or near campus, forcing America's most cash-strapped demographic to pay higher-than-market prices for lackluster food, beverage, and residential services, particularly in the freshman and sophomore years, in which many students (including those at AU) are forced to live in residential dormitories. I am not trying to deride the quality of dorm life or college food, but I would argue that 6,000 dollars a year (the average cost of living on-campus during college) could rent you an apartment far nicer than a dorm (especially if you had a roommate) and buy you food vastly superior to that found in the industrial cafeterias of most campus dining halls. Moreover, the remote location of most colleges forces students to take long, gas-guzzling trips home to see their families, doctors, and high school friends
But what difference does any of this make? A college degree magnifies one's earning potential over their lifetime, doesn't it? And if not, it is a pre-requisite for almost any decent job nowadays, right? Wrong. My fellow scholars, I have some sobering information for you: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10 of the 20 the fastest-growing jobs over the next decade will be retail salespersons, customer service representatives, janitors, waiters and waitresses, food preparation workers, freight laborers, receptionists, landscaping workers, truck drivers, and maintenance workers, none of which require a college degree. And those fast-growing professions that do require a college degree are in teaching, business, computer science, and nursing, which leaves out the bulk of college majors.
All of this begs the following questions: are we paying something for nothing? Are we paying a tremendous of money that could be better spent elsewhere? Are we training for jobs, professions, and careers that no longer exist? I would argue, based on the preponderance of evidence that the answer is a resounding yes. Education is extremely important, whether it leads to financial success or not, but the tremendous economic burden that college entails, combined with a changing and unstable economy, force me to argue that post-secondary education, particularly its funding, operations, and purpose, needs to be critically reexamined. And if my fellow students disagree, I would invite them to call me six months after they graduate, when that first envelope from Sally Mae arrives.
I read an article earlier today about the psychological/biological concept of a "critical period." Most people are framiliar with it, but just in case, here's a definition: a "critical period" is a period in a child's life (usually pre-adolesence) when acquisition of a certain skill is most efficient. This concept is usually mentioned in reference to language acquisition, but I have read some interesting literature on its application to mathematics skills as well. In any case, I thought the following would be food for thought: Here in the US, we put a strong emphasis on university education, and fund it in kind. However, it seems to me that the socialization and education children recieve in elementary, middle, and high schools may have more of an impact on overall learning, especially if this "critical period," phenomenon is taken into account. Perhaps some funding should be redistributed towards bolstering primary and secondary ed, in an attempt to avoid the costly and (presumably) less efficient acquisition of math, science, and foreign language skills at the post-secondary level? Something to think about.
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