Collapsitarian-ism is a new pass time and thing to blog about. Economics and terrorist systems disruptors are working together to end the world as we knew it. Like most, I worry and fret over this. Unlike many, I want the industrial to survive, and many institutions and ways of living to be purged from the world.
There are two such candidates for purging in New York Times articles. Here they are:
The university article muses about what's to be done, offering a paradigm busting restructuring as a solution. I attended undergraduate and graduate schools that were unconventional and created as antidotes to the op-ed author's critique. These schools still managed to cultivate a kind of irrelevance in a large swath of graduates. Social justice had taken on such a powerful a priori that lucid, creative, and innovative inquiry suffered. I am speaking of course about the Janus faced object called Postmodernism and also the New Left. They both are cognitive systems that first reference a history of Anglo-American success in subjugating or simply out-competing other cultures, then the same cognitive systems move on to color every hue of their epistemology and language game to symbolically aid anyone who died as a victim of Anglo-American abuse. Social justice is not served, and resulting epistemologies of the graduates (crap such as time being radial, mysticism superior to empiricism) deem them useless at anything other than psychological shell games. I will say the science programs at my undergraduate school, similar to what the op-ed described in the article, turned out a fine crop of graduates.
A sudden snap is probably needed for this, seeing how even alternative types of schools show a predominant tendency towards little value in their output.
The Worthless Class of the Upper Class is another thing entirely. I am not being a Marxist here, in a meritocracy an uneven living standard amongst citizens is not always social injustice, inequity of outcome is desired. It is a social injustice of the most extreme kind if, in a meritocracy, a Worthless Class is also an Upper Class. Which is exactly what Krugman is pointing out.
So what we need is more social justice within a meritocracy. The surest way for that to be accomplished is more turbulence and wild swings of scale in which zones become autonomous then global again in irregular punctuation. I am not hoping for violent chaos that hurts good people, I am hoping for long overdue network hygiene to remove the useless who sit at the dinner table of our economy.
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1 comment:
We don't need more "alternative" institutions to spread a sense of elitism in exchange for premium tuition, we need more communities that work with governments and businesses to provide mainstream education in a truly diverse environment where artists and soldiers and the sons and daughters of farm laborers, small business owners and corporate managers are all socialized together.
Our community colleges already do a great job of this for the first two years of college, and we can extend that to bachelors and masters degree programs by partnering with state universities to create satellite campuses. I see no reason we could not even someday have a satellite medical school in at least a 100 cities in the US.
Small schools on tight budgets with reasonable tuition. Administrative services and other efficiencies from partnership with larger institutions. Innovation comes from the agility of a smaller institution and the selection of faculty members from diverse academic, professional and national backgrounds (as opposed to trying to force innovation unnaturally through premium pricing and radical pedagogical dogmas.)
It also reduces the forced migration of people away from the communities, families and social networks that enable people to get into college in the first place.
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