"certain codes of conduct"

[Frank Wimberly-2]

p.s.  She and Irene Lee would have been in the same class at Chicago.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:42 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Wow, your son did very well, Merle I hope your other son will return to righteous pursuit.

After my daughter was admitted to Chicago I received a call from their admissions office.  The caller said that they were surprised that they hadn't heard from her.  I apologized for not having answered yet but said that we had decided that she would go to Michigan because we wanted her to have a more well-rounded college experience.  She said  incredulously that she was amazed that we would consider sending her there when she had been admitted to Chicago.  Money wasn't the issue since Carnegie Mellon would pay the majority of the tuition in either case.  She was and is very happy with her Michigan education.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:23 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, I never gave a gift to M.I.T. either, and my youngest son was not accepted.   He went on to graduate from UCSD with a 4.0 average and sold the GIS company he co-founded to Kodak when he was 23 years old.  I have always assumed he was turned down because he went to a public high school in the South and came from a middle class background.  

My oldest son got into grad school at the U. of Chicago because a friend of mine who was a Chicago alum and well-known politician wrote a letter. Milton ("There's no such thing as a free lunch") Friedman adopted my son as a protage and turned him away from righteous pursuit.  I've never forgiven that wicked business school.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:05 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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emergentdiplomacy.org

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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[jon zingale]

Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
requirements were written by White men."

One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?



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[David Eric Smith]

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist.  

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric

> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
> --
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[Eric Charles-2]

Merle, 

Once you are a tiered as a student in the admissions process, there is a hell of a lot of chance involved.  The best college rejection letter I received was from Stanford. It was two pages. The first was the standard F-off letter. The second were stats on the other applicants they told to F-off. X thousand valedictorians, X thousand people who were captains of multiple varsity sports teams, X thousand National Merit Scholars, etc. It actually did make me feel better. 

MIT has to have similar stats. It is quite likely that they had a target number of people from your Southern State or region for every entering class, to create geographic diversity, and once they decided your son was good enough to admit, it was basically a roll of the dice to see who actually got in. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:23 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, I never gave a gift to M.I.T. either, and my youngest son was not accepted.   He went on to graduate from UCSD with a 4.0 average and sold the GIS company he co-founded to Kodak when he was 23 years old.  I have always assumed he was turned down because he went to a public high school in the South and came from a middle class background.  

My oldest son got into grad school at the U. of Chicago because a friend of mine who was a Chicago alum and well-known politician wrote a letter. Milton ("There's no such thing as a free lunch") Friedman adopted my son as a protage and turned him away from righteous pursuit.  I've never forgiven that wicked business school.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:05 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
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On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
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140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
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505 670-9918
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[Eric Charles-2]

Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/ 

As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.

There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
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[David Eric Smith]

That’s very useful, Eric, thank you.

On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/ 

As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.

There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
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[Angel Edward]

Frank,

There a lot to said for targeted gifts that focus on support  for a variety of under represented groups.

Modest gifts are pretty much irrelevant to getting one's kid into an elite school. Recall that Jared Kushner’s father gave Harvard $2.5M to get him in. Harvard is so well endowed that even trying to give them a building doesn’t always work.

But I think the discussion misses some of the reality of what's going in nationally, especially in state schools. Here’s two key factors.

State colleges are terribly underfunded. One of the many consequences is that there are fewer slots available and the cost is higher. The University of California has been under stress for many years. One simple measure is that the available slots have not kept up with the population growth in CA. Another aspect of this problem is that amount the college gets for in-state students has been an increasingly smaller fraction of the real cost. However, tuition for out-of-state students reflects the real cost. Consequently, there is a real incentive for state colleges to recruit out of state students often at the expense of in-state students. While this might not affect the most financially challenged students who often qualify for aid, it has a major impact on middle-class families. 

Many of the observations some of you have made about the number of highly-paid administrators is often a consequence of the funding problem. Most public universities have responded to funding problem by becoming research institutions to a large degree because they profit off of research contacts. But with the money comes more administrators (many for “compliance testing whatever that is), competition for researchers who can bring in contracts and lower teaching loads.

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem.

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]
505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 30, 2020, at 3:46 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

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[thompnickson2]

On the other hand, I do know somebody who poured $$$$$ into Harvard until their son floated to the top. 

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 4:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Merle, 

Once you are a tiered as a student in the admissions process, there is a hell of a lot of chance involved.  The best college rejection letter I received was from Stanford. It was two pages. The first was the standard F-off letter. The second were stats on the other applicants they told to F-off. X thousand valedictorians, X thousand people who were captains of multiple varsity sports teams, X thousand National Merit Scholars, etc. It actually did make me feel better. 

 

MIT has to have similar stats. It is quite likely that they had a target number of people from your Southern State or region for every entering class, to create geographic diversity, and once they decided your son was good enough to admit, it was basically a roll of the dice to see who actually got in. 

 

 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:23 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, I never gave a gift to M.I.T. either, and my youngest son was not accepted.   He went on to graduate from UCSD with a 4.0 average and sold the GIS company he co-founded to Kodak when he was 23 years old.  I have always assumed he was turned down because he went to a public high school in the South and came from a middle class background.  

 

My oldest son got into grad school at the U. of Chicago because a friend of mine who was a Chicago alum and well-known politician wrote a letter. Milton ("There's no such thing as a free lunch") Friedman adopted my son as a protage and turned him away from righteous pursuit.  I've never forgiven that wicked business school.

 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:05 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

 

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

 

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

 

 

 

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Yep.  We are raising an 8 year old but he goes to private school. 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

Well, you and Debbie are late bloomers.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep.  We are raising an 8 year old but he goes to private school. 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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140 Calle Ojo Feliz
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505 670-9918

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[Edward Angel]

Gary,

Does temporally past the age of direct involvement  imply we’ll be more involved when we’re 80? or 90?

Seriously though, I believe a lot can be accomplished by us old farts by being willing to get out of our comfort zones. A few years ago I would have never thought I’d be involved working with 4th-6th graders in the worst performing school in Santa Fe. But here I am making videos about CS ideas for the closed schools. Anyone who is willing to help can work with us through the SF Alliance for Science.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 31, 2020, at 12:24 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, you and Debbie are late bloomers.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep.  We are raising an 8 year old but he goes to private school. 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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[Gary Schiltz-4]

When speaking of "temporally past", I assumed that for the majority of us young whipper snappers who haven't yet reached 80 or 90 (I'm just shy of 62), that those ages would be in our temporal future. Of course with all the quantum woo floating around the list, I hate to make any absolute statements about what is the future, the past, or any other notion of time. :-)

I applaud you for making the effort to volunteer to help teach kids in schools that, I assume, perform poorly because of lack of resources and motivated, creative teachers. I would be very interested to see what you are doing. I have considered trying to do something here in rural Ecuador, where I get the feeling that much of education is largely rote memorization. 

The first project I had in mind is to teach a bit about the solar system, and how it relates to earth science. It has struck me that most kids, and even a lot of adults here, have no understanding of seasonality or the reason for it (Earth's tilt). Here on the equator, the main thing that changes during the course of the year is the amount of rainfall. The amount of light per day seems to vary only about 15 minutes over the course of the year (the maxima being the Spring and Fall equinox, and the minima being the Summer and Winter equinox). The difference between a daily high temperature and the low for most days is about 5-10 degrees C, and this is greater than the difference between the mean daily temperatures over the course of a year. Unless a person here has either had a very good education, or has lived in temperate regions, they think I'm joking when I speak of daylight varying between 6 and 18 hours during the year, or temperatures varying between -30 and +30 C between Winter and Summer. To be fair, I suppose most of us from the temperate regions take the opposite for granted.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:39 PM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Gary,

Does temporally past the age of direct involvement  imply we’ll be more involved when we’re 80? or 90?

Seriously though, I believe a lot can be accomplished by us old farts by being willing to get out of our comfort zones. A few years ago I would have never thought I’d be involved working with 4th-6th graders in the worst performing school in Santa Fe. But here I am making videos about CS ideas for the closed schools. Anyone who is willing to help can work with us through the SF Alliance for Science.

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 31, 2020, at 12:24 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, you and Debbie are late bloomers.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep.  We are raising an 8 year old but he goes to private school. 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
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505 670-9918

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[thompnickson2]

Hi, Gary, 

 

There are lots of things that “people like us” don’t know about celestial mechanics.  Like the moon traverses the sky from its northern most point to its southern most point EVERY MONTH.  More over, now a days, the Full moon is high in the winter and low in the summer.  Some years down the road, it will be low in the winter and high in the summer.  I think it’s better this way.  I like having the extra light in the winter.  Where you are  the moon must track from the northern sky to the southern sky every month, right? 

 

Why can’t I get my mind around that?

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 4:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

When speaking of "temporally past", I assumed that for the majority of us young whipper snappers who haven't yet reached 80 or 90 (I'm just shy of 62), that those ages would be in our temporal future. Of course with all the quantum woo floating around the list, I hate to make any absolute statements about what is the future, the past, or any other notion of time. :-)

 

I applaud you for making the effort to volunteer to help teach kids in schools that, I assume, perform poorly because of lack of resources and motivated, creative teachers. I would be very interested to see what you are doing. I have considered trying to do something here in rural Ecuador, where I get the feeling that much of education is largely rote memorization. 

 

The first project I had in mind is to teach a bit about the solar system, and how it relates to earth science. It has struck me that most kids, and even a lot of adults here, have no understanding of seasonality or the reason for it (Earth's tilt). Here on the equator, the main thing that changes during the course of the year is the amount of rainfall. The amount of light per day seems to vary only about 15 minutes over the course of the year (the maxima being the Spring and Fall equinox, and the minima being the Summer and Winter equinox). The difference between a daily high temperature and the low for most days is about 5-10 degrees C, and this is greater than the difference between the mean daily temperatures over the course of a year. Unless a person here has either had a very good education, or has lived in temperate regions, they think I'm joking when I speak of daylight varying between 6 and 18 hours during the year, or temperatures varying between -30 and +30 C between Winter and Summer. To be fair, I suppose most of us from the temperate regions take the opposite for granted.

 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:39 PM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Gary,

 

Does temporally past the age of direct involvement  imply we’ll be more involved when we’re 80? or 90?

 

Seriously though, I believe a lot can be accomplished by us old farts by being willing to get out of our comfort zones. A few years ago I would have never thought I’d be involved working with 4th-6th graders in the worst performing school in Santa Fe. But here I am making videos about CS ideas for the closed schools. Anyone who is willing to help can work with us through the SF Alliance for Science.

 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 31, 2020, at 12:24 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Well, you and Debbie are late bloomers.

 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep.  We are raising an 8 year old but he goes to private school. 

 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Probably the reason K-12 underfunding isn't addressed much here has to do with the fact that the list is populated by a high proportion of us old farts and fartesses :-) who are temporally past the age of direct involvement with K-12 and kids in general. I suspect that the more politically left-leaning, as well as many of the centrist-leaning inhabitants would support significantly higher and more evenly distributed funding of K-12 public education. I would make the same claim for health care spending. Ultimately, a modern society depends on a well-educated, healthy citizenry, which the USA seems determined to make a luxury.

 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 11:11 AM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Nevertheless, what I see as the overriding issue that doesn’t get addressed on this list is the underfunding of public K-12 schools. Whatever position any of us might have as what we’d like to see at the college level, it isn’t going to happen with the present situation of the public schools.  As long as the public schools can’t provide an equal education for all its students, we can’t expect the colleges to solve the educational problem. 

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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[David Eric Smith]

So, Eric, at risk of asking a question I am not willing to make the effort to follow up (for the reason that I really _should_ be working and am over deadlines, but also too half-hearted), 

But I sort of would like to explore this question a little on the list.

Here is the same woman who write the NYT piece.  This time in the Guardian; I haven’t read this one, but given her theme, I expect I will find similar content.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Here was the NYT piece that I did read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html

I know why you say the US isn’t a caste system, and in the sense that it isn’t like India’s, yes, agreed.

But I also understand what Wilkerson wants from the term.  She wants to say the society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power, and preferably a relatively predictable group.  That if our system as currently set up doesn’t have those, if it has fairer bargaining and less predictability, it can’t operate because it needs too much on unfair terms to support the structural commitments to wealth concentration, certain wasteful or profligate expenses, etc.  

And if I come back to caste, I think: how essential is it that a caste system be as well developed and as rigid as India’s has been for a long time?

Nominally, Bali has the Hindu cast system copying the Indian form.  If you go to a wedding, it looks like it does too.  Husband can’t eat from the wife’s family’s table if it is a “marry up”, but the reverse is okay.  So they have to have two ceremonies.  And marrying up is allowed one for women, but not for met.  And so forth.

But I was in extended communication with Steve Lansing when he was doing Balinese genetic studies, having similars for India, and his result was that they are massively different.  You can see caste lines respected strongly in Indian genetics.  In Balinese, little, and if you didn’t constantly re-divide the population to keep track of short-term changes, you wouldn’t have a partition to track.  So when push comes to shove, the Balinese marry who they want to marry, and they keep the caste system to some degree and with context dependence.

For mobility data, I wish I had a record of the various talks I have attended or articles I have read claiming that social mobility has dropped severely over the past five decades.  I am glad to have your Brookings data below, and should have looked it up myself.  But what then is the data source for people making the claim that it has been dropping?  I don’t think they are nuts or liars.  Maybe ideological to some degree, but short of ideologues.  

I also tried to do some work with Duncan Foley a few years ago (like 15) on income distributions, and where the exponential x powerlaw form in the US and elsewhere comes from.  An easy explanation would be random mixing from an output stream (income-generating capacity)  with a constraint for wage earners, and some less obvious multiplicative process for the investor class (though that is not conceptually simple, despite hack approaches that treat it that way).  I was interested to not only match the distribution, but also track mobility figures, to make a “Green’s function” for the diffusion process that underlies that kind of mixing model.  Duncan put a student on it for maybe a year, and reported back that the diffusion model that would fit the stationary distribution was wildly inconsistent with the time-trajectories of family portfolios, because they were much too sticky.  We didn’t publish it, because it was never a thorough enough result, and we couldn’t get a model that _did_ account for both aspects of the data.  But again it was a claim that the apparent mixing by one signature was larger than what could be directly observed.

I have the impression — now admitting that I have no method to be careful — that there were a few decades from the mid-60s through the early 80s, when many programs created an escape hatch for a significant segment of the black population into the middle class.  This is Michelle Obama’s generation, and as I read her memoire I see the combination of the various programs I went through in all the same years, with various specific programs that made them available to her in Chicago where otherwise they would not have been.  I feel like that window has significantly closed.  The ones who got through it are today’s relatively comfortable, relatively safe middle class (such as it survives secondo E. Warren), and the ones who didn’t as it started to close are the growing precariat.  Am I completely wrong in having this impression?  The shouting is so loud from the shouters that I don’t know what a balanced reading is.

I thought I caught an echo of that in the McWhorter book review that Glen forwarded, which I liked, and I have read McWhorter on linguistics since probably 15 years ago and liked him.  Somewhere in there, and I forget on exactly which point, he objects to the arguments that are part of his larger claim of condescension, that they provide cover to those who want to claim affirmative action doesn’t work.  I think he came up through my generation too, and I wonder if his awareness of the detailed results of opportunity programs is one of the things we are hearing.

Anyway, one could stop and make this a career, and I won’t and can’t.  But it would be nice to resolve what seem to me like considerably contradictory claims around mobility.

Thanks,

Eric

On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/ 

As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.

There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
> --
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[gepr]

As always, I'm incompetent to respond. But I will anyway, of course, because the Iron Front flag I've been flying has started 1 argument and received 3 compliments (one back-handed), as well as 10s of perplexed dog-walkers who stop, point, and flap their gums at each other. And I'd like to understand a little more about the recent encroachment of fascism and state-communism and the (more apparent lately) flaws in "late stage capitalism".

EricS's gesture toward a deeper conception of "caste" smacks of the flailing conversation I had with SteveS about "means of production". EricC's mobility data (and his inferences therefrom) seem to me to wash away the particularity of individuals, making an argument about replacability of workers, one with another [♩], worker-into-owner [♪], owner-into-worker [♫], etc.

It strikes me that the stickiness of income distributions and economic class mobility could suffer (or be, entirely) the *side-effects* of some deeper underlying dynamic. Lansing's kinship calculus might have been an interesting tack. But my intuition matches what EricS suggests Wilkerson might be looking for, that *our* system relies on an underclass of interchangeable units/workers. To this extent, it IS the economic mobility that allows it to persist even as the relative size of the pool of workers has shrunk [♭]. I.e. because we're mobile, because we can change roles so fluidly, as the pool of workers shrinks, the upperclass can get it's victims elsewhere. And this seems to beg for some model like Turchin's cliodynamics [♮].

The sense that I have, with technology understood as some sort of *extended phenotype*, is that our technological landscape co-evolves with our culture (and with our biology, but the biology might move more slowly [♯]). So, could the stickiness of the distribution(s) be a result of something like the technological landscape? The emergence of something like airplanes or supercomputers-in-one's-pocket might change the quality of the stickiness entirely, right? I.e. the derived stats abstract out any information about the underlying dynamic?

And, of course, this goes right back to the thread that Whiteness is not (merely) systemic racism. Perhaps it's more like "if you understand the game, you can play it well", i.e. Whiteness is a technology, a tactic for winning some near-zero-sum game. A black friend of mine is a master at it. When we get drunk together, his game eventually breaks down and he feels the need to *remind* me that he's black ... I think because sometimes he loses himself in the game. I'm always ashamed because we always play *my* game ... even though he's got more access to (and more facility with) the upperclass than I'll ever  have. That he's so much better at the game suggests maybe the *only* reason I'm allowed to play at all is because of the color of my skin.


[♩] Thanks for the term "precariat"!
[♪] E.g. some of my programmer friends lucky enough to have excess income, buying a new house to live in, then renting out their old house ... becoming landlords. Or my psych prof friend who opened a brewery and hopes to graduate from running everything to some sort of passive income.
[♫] Anyone with a near-significant portfolio who suffers a health crisis and values life over assets, spends a huge sum to stay alive, then has to keep working until they die.
[♭] Albeit with competing dimensions of population growth, automation, more opportunity for the worker-to-owner path, more risk of the owner-to-worker path, etc.
[♮] Though I doubt cliodynamics in its particulars.
[♯] And it may not, maybe the fast-evolving microorganisms (in our gut, on our skin, in the soil, virii, etc.) actually dominate. It certainly seems like it under this pandemic.

On 7/31/20 11:01 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:

> So, Eric, at risk of asking a question I am not willing to make the effort to follow up (for the reason that I really _should_ be working and am over deadlines, but also too half-hearted), 
>
> But I sort of would like to explore this question a little on the list.
>
> Here is the same woman who write the NYT piece.  This time in the Guardian; I haven’t read this one, but given her theme, I expect I will find similar content.
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india?utm_source=pocket-newtab
>
> Here was the NYT piece that I did read:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html
>
> I know why you say the US isn’t a caste system, and in the sense that it isn’t like India’s, yes, agreed.
>
> But I also understand what Wilkerson wants from the term.  She wants to say the society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power, and preferably a relatively predictable group.  That if our system as currently set up doesn’t have those, if it has fairer bargaining and less predictability, it can’t operate because it needs too much on unfair terms to support the structural commitments to wealth concentration, certain wasteful or profligate expenses, etc.  
>
> And if I come back to caste, I think: how essential is it that a caste system be as well developed and as rigid as India’s has been for a long time?
>
> Nominally, Bali has the Hindu cast system copying the Indian form.  If you go to a wedding, it looks like it does too.  Husband can’t eat from the wife’s family’s table if it is a “marry up”, but the reverse is okay.  So they have to have two ceremonies.  And marrying up is allowed one for women, but not for met.  And so forth.
>
> But I was in extended communication with Steve Lansing when he was doing Balinese genetic studies, having similars for India, and his result was that they are massively different.  You can see caste lines respected strongly in Indian genetics.  In Balinese, little, and if you didn’t constantly re-divide the population to keep track of short-term changes, you wouldn’t have a partition to track.  So when push comes to shove, the Balinese marry who they want to marry, and they keep the caste system to some degree and with context dependence.
>
> For mobility data, I wish I had a record of the various talks I have attended or articles I have read claiming that social mobility has dropped severely over the past five decades.  I am glad to have your Brookings data below, and should have looked it up myself.  But what then is the data source for people making the claim that it has been dropping?  I don’t think they are nuts or liars.  Maybe ideological to some degree, but short of ideologues.  
>
> I also tried to do some work with Duncan Foley a few years ago (like 15) on income distributions, and where the exponential x powerlaw form in the US and elsewhere comes from.  An easy explanation would be random mixing from an output stream (income-generating capacity)  with a constraint for wage earners, and some less obvious multiplicative process for the investor class (though that is not conceptually simple, despite hack approaches that treat it that way).  I was interested to not only match the distribution, but also track mobility figures, to make a “Green’s function” for the diffusion process that underlies that kind of mixing model.  Duncan put a student on it for maybe a year, and reported back that the diffusion model that would fit the stationary distribution was wildly inconsistent with the time-trajectories of family portfolios, because they were much too sticky.  We didn’t publish it, because it was never a thorough enough result, and we couldn’t get a model
> that _did_ account for both aspects of the data.  But again it was a claim that the apparent mixing by one signature was larger than what could be directly observed.
>
> I have the impression — now admitting that I have no method to be careful — that there were a few decades from the mid-60s through the early 80s, when many programs created an escape hatch for a significant segment of the black population into the middle class.  This is Michelle Obama’s generation, and as I read her memoire I see the combination of the various programs I went through in all the same years, with various specific programs that made them available to her in Chicago where otherwise they would not have been.  I feel like that window has significantly closed.  The ones who got through it are today’s relatively comfortable, relatively safe middle class (such as it survives secondo E. Warren), and the ones who didn’t as it started to close are the growing precariat.  Am I completely wrong in having this impression?  The shouting is so loud from the shouters that I don’t know what a balanced reading is.
>
> I thought I caught an echo of that in the McWhorter book review that Glen forwarded, which I liked, and I have read McWhorter on linguistics since probably 15 years ago and liked him.  Somewhere in there, and I forget on exactly which point, he objects to the arguments that are part of his larger claim of condescension, that they provide cover to those who want to claim affirmative action doesn’t work.  I think he came up through my generation too, and I wonder if his awareness of the detailed results of opportunity programs is one of the things we are hearing.
>
> Anyway, one could stop and make this a career, and I won’t and can’t.  But it would be nice to resolve what seem to me like considerably contradictory claims around mobility.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fsocial-mobility-memos%2f2016%2f01%2f12%2fhow-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want%2f&c=E,1,wARI_Rqqmjsngze-BCXF4KQDiF733j4KuqciluS8XPutBUIXdS_fVNj1wthNnK1s-k6yHVmIh8LbT_IDtcBGQ84ea9OolTDdjXs-Zuddzjc,&typo=1> 
>>
>> As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.
>>
>> There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fup-front%2f2019%2f02%2f14%2fno-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility%2f&c=E,1,jgCmupDNPtblowoirtdwRknBZ-uxnjh2mXu2LQunKxCCbTmGtRZ9jGsjBpITdXYcccmbqzpMz6abD05eVhuJ1clDpPGDRMQhJzvUB-l_NckM99o,&typo=1>   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African
>> American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>
>>     Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.
>>
>>     One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.
>>
>>     The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.
>>
>>     There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 
>>
>>     However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.
>>
>>     Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.
>>
>>     Eric

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[David Eric Smith]

So this is at least one I can point to, which is concrete, and which comes from a fairly widely-checkable source:

https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-fading-american-dream/

EricS

On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/ 

As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.

There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
> --
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[David Eric Smith]

Thanks Glen,

Yes, so mobility is going to be another problem word, since up, down, and sideways all contribute to how access to income works as a system.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Eric

> On Aug 3, 2020, at 11:30 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> As always, I'm incompetent to respond. But I will anyway, of course, because the Iron Front flag I've been flying has started 1 argument and received 3 compliments (one back-handed), as well as 10s of perplexed dog-walkers who stop, point, and flap their gums at each other. And I'd like to understand a little more about the recent encroachment of fascism and state-communism and the (more apparent lately) flaws in "late stage capitalism".
>
> EricS's gesture toward a deeper conception of "caste" smacks of the flailing conversation I had with SteveS about "means of production". EricC's mobility data (and his inferences therefrom) seem to me to wash away the particularity of individuals, making an argument about replacability of workers, one with another [♩], worker-into-owner [♪], owner-into-worker [♫], etc.
>
> It strikes me that the stickiness of income distributions and economic class mobility could suffer (or be, entirely) the *side-effects* of some deeper underlying dynamic. Lansing's kinship calculus might have been an interesting tack. But my intuition matches what EricS suggests Wilkerson might be looking for, that *our* system relies on an underclass of interchangeable units/workers. To this extent, it IS the economic mobility that allows it to persist even as the relative size of the pool of workers has shrunk [♭]. I.e. because we're mobile, because we can change roles so fluidly, as the pool of workers shrinks, the upperclass can get it's victims elsewhere. And this seems to beg for some model like Turchin's cliodynamics [♮].
>
> The sense that I have, with technology understood as some sort of *extended phenotype*, is that our technological landscape co-evolves with our culture (and with our biology, but the biology might move more slowly [♯]). So, could the stickiness of the distribution(s) be a result of something like the technological landscape? The emergence of something like airplanes or supercomputers-in-one's-pocket might change the quality of the stickiness entirely, right? I.e. the derived stats abstract out any information about the underlying dynamic?
>
> And, of course, this goes right back to the thread that Whiteness is not (merely) systemic racism. Perhaps it's more like "if you understand the game, you can play it well", i.e. Whiteness is a technology, a tactic for winning some near-zero-sum game. A black friend of mine is a master at it. When we get drunk together, his game eventually breaks down and he feels the need to *remind* me that he's black ... I think because sometimes he loses himself in the game. I'm always ashamed because we always play *my* game ... even though he's got more access to (and more facility with) the upperclass than I'll ever  have. That he's so much better at the game suggests maybe the *only* reason I'm allowed to play at all is because of the color of my skin.
>
>
> [♩] Thanks for the term "precariat"!
> [♪] E.g. some of my programmer friends lucky enough to have excess income, buying a new house to live in, then renting out their old house ... becoming landlords. Or my psych prof friend who opened a brewery and hopes to graduate from running everything to some sort of passive income.
> [♫] Anyone with a near-significant portfolio who suffers a health crisis and values life over assets, spends a huge sum to stay alive, then has to keep working until they die.
> [♭] Albeit with competing dimensions of population growth, automation, more opportunity for the worker-to-owner path, more risk of the owner-to-worker path, etc.
> [♮] Though I doubt cliodynamics in its particulars.
> [♯] And it may not, maybe the fast-evolving microorganisms (in our gut, on our skin, in the soil, virii, etc.) actually dominate. It certainly seems like it under this pandemic.
>
> On 7/31/20 11:01 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> So, Eric, at risk of asking a question I am not willing to make the effort to follow up (for the reason that I really _should_ be working and am over deadlines, but also too half-hearted),
>>
>> But I sort of would like to explore this question a little on the list.
>>
>> Here is the same woman who write the NYT piece.  This time in the Guardian; I haven’t read this one, but given her theme, I expect I will find similar content.
>>
>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2fworld%2f2020%2fjul%2f28%2funtouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india%3futm_source%3dpocket-newtab&c=E,1,fmgmY16uEmUAckXPOl-6jYYcG9tQp2IrdGsYHr0y6U5V9tm0KRizn-jsKau2UZxrNHGM9eVaLuyLVNrhYSYlwVg2dCpRCTXM27bIZQiLqoFd9YE,&typo=1
>>
>> Here was the NYT piece that I did read:
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html
>>
>> I know why you say the US isn’t a caste system, and in the sense that it isn’t like India’s, yes, agreed.
>>
>> But I also understand what Wilkerson wants from the term.  She wants to say the society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power, and preferably a relatively predictable group.  That if our system as currently set up doesn’t have those, if it has fairer bargaining and less predictability, it can’t operate because it needs too much on unfair terms to support the structural commitments to wealth concentration, certain wasteful or profligate expenses, etc.  
>>
>> And if I come back to caste, I think: how essential is it that a caste system be as well developed and as rigid as India’s has been for a long time?
>>
>> Nominally, Bali has the Hindu cast system copying the Indian form.  If you go to a wedding, it looks like it does too.  Husband can’t eat from the wife’s family’s table if it is a “marry up”, but the reverse is okay.  So they have to have two ceremonies.  And marrying up is allowed one for women, but not for met.  And so forth.
>>
>> But I was in extended communication with Steve Lansing when he was doing Balinese genetic studies, having similars for India, and his result was that they are massively different.  You can see caste lines respected strongly in Indian genetics.  In Balinese, little, and if you didn’t constantly re-divide the population to keep track of short-term changes, you wouldn’t have a partition to track.  So when push comes to shove, the Balinese marry who they want to marry, and they keep the caste system to some degree and with context dependence.
>>
>> For mobility data, I wish I had a record of the various talks I have attended or articles I have read claiming that social mobility has dropped severely over the past five decades.  I am glad to have your Brookings data below, and should have looked it up myself.  But what then is the data source for people making the claim that it has been dropping?  I don’t think they are nuts or liars.  Maybe ideological to some degree, but short of ideologues.  
>>
>> I also tried to do some work with Duncan Foley a few years ago (like 15) on income distributions, and where the exponential x powerlaw form in the US and elsewhere comes from.  An easy explanation would be random mixing from an output stream (income-generating capacity)  with a constraint for wage earners, and some less obvious multiplicative process for the investor class (though that is not conceptually simple, despite hack approaches that treat it that way).  I was interested to not only match the distribution, but also track mobility figures, to make a “Green’s function” for the diffusion process that underlies that kind of mixing model.  Duncan put a student on it for maybe a year, and reported back that the diffusion model that would fit the stationary distribution was wildly inconsistent with the time-trajectories of family portfolios, because they were much too sticky.  We didn’t publish it, because it was never a thorough enough result, and we couldn’t get a model
>> that _did_ account for both aspects of the data.  But again it was a claim that the apparent mixing by one signature was larger than what could be directly observed.
>>
>> I have the impression — now admitting that I have no method to be careful — that there were a few decades from the mid-60s through the early 80s, when many programs created an escape hatch for a significant segment of the black population into the middle class.  This is Michelle Obama’s generation, and as I read her memoire I see the combination of the various programs I went through in all the same years, with various specific programs that made them available to her in Chicago where otherwise they would not have been.  I feel like that window has significantly closed.  The ones who got through it are today’s relatively comfortable, relatively safe middle class (such as it survives secondo E. Warren), and the ones who didn’t as it started to close are the growing precariat.  Am I completely wrong in having this impression?  The shouting is so loud from the shouters that I don’t know what a balanced reading is.
>>
>> I thought I caught an echo of that in the McWhorter book review that Glen forwarded, which I liked, and I have read McWhorter on linguistics since probably 15 years ago and liked him.  Somewhere in there, and I forget on exactly which point, he objects to the arguments that are part of his larger claim of condescension, that they provide cover to those who want to claim affirmative action doesn’t work.  I think he came up through my generation too, and I wonder if his awareness of the detailed results of opportunity programs is one of the things we are hearing.
>>
>> Anyway, one could stop and make this a career, and I won’t and can’t.  But it would be nice to resolve what seem to me like considerably contradictory claims around mobility.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fsocial-mobility-memos%2f2016%2f01%2f12%2fhow-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want%2f&c=E,1,kj3n0AfEj1mn1qnXawVdaOw4yPPnHyLKxnjxkc2mHsE89qvnProST3jGKe3ULoeBwev_0dxOu7GVCyGELW2RSFX8hQ-NZshdy9kZJh00WU_s5O-ESgWXKKuc4g,,&typo=1
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fsocial-mobility-memos%2f2016%2f01%2f12%2fhow-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want%2f&c=E,1,wARI_Rqqmjsngze-BCXF4KQDiF733j4KuqciluS8XPutBUIXdS_fVNj1wthNnK1s-k6yHVmIh8LbT_IDtcBGQ84ea9OolTDdjXs-Zuddzjc,&typo=1>
>>>
>>> As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.
>>>
>>> There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fup-front%2f2019%2f02%2f14%2fno-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility%2f&c=E,1,SlInuonkKU34qLsjErzPXuU7bNbsBPbOkLFt1WR2bom9RYJEr0d-qMpZnKiS5t_XXrWEhavVaiK2SwH0Zt7NAD4mSP5xe80XU0O3rfcwNSV59xfMlKK1EFzjZQ,,&typo=1 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fup-front%2f2019%2f02%2f14%2fno-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility%2f&c=E,1,jgCmupDNPtblowoirtdwRknBZ-uxnjh2mXu2LQunKxCCbTmGtRZ9jGsjBpITdXYcccmbqzpMz6abD05eVhuJ1clDpPGDRMQhJzvUB-l_NckM99o,&typo=1>   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African
>>> American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>>
>>>    Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.
>>>
>>>    One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.
>>>
>>>    The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.
>>>
>>>    There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist.
>>>
>>>    However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.
>>>
>>>    Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.
>>>
>>>    Eric
>
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[Eric Charles-2]

Other Eric adds some interesting layers to add to the discussion!

"society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power"

 

I agree with this.  Societies could be set up in lots of ways, but ours is designed to have a chunk of the population at severe bargaining disadvantage at any given time. In that sense, there is permanently-an-underclass. My only contention would be that (outside the current apocalypse) membership in that underclass is more dynamic than most give it credit for. So there is not a-permanent-underclass, in the sense of multi-generational poverty being ubiquitous. 

I remember being surprised, for example, by the data showing "Between the ages of 25 and 60, over 60% of the population at some point sees an annual income that puts them in the bottom 20% of earners. About 40% will live for a year or more in the bottom 10%..... 70% of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 20% of income by the time they are 60.": https://money.com/six-in-ten-americans-will-experience-poverty/ . Personally, that seems to me like a staggeringly high percentage of people to have at least one really bad year and at least one really good year. (Caveat on the limits of induction: Of course, a chunk of that data is looking at people who are 60+ now, and there is no guarantee that those numbers give a good prediction for people who are 25 now.)

It is certainly interesting to know that some societies with ostensible caste systems are much more rigid than others. 

The power curve thing is also interesting. The larger and richer society the larger the disparities, even if on that basis alone. Similarly, the larger the poker tournament, the larger the gap in earnings between first place and all the rest. 

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 2:01 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, Eric, at risk of asking a question I am not willing to make the effort to follow up (for the reason that I really _should_ be working and am over deadlines, but also too half-hearted), 

But I sort of would like to explore this question a little on the list.

Here is the same woman who write the NYT piece.  This time in the Guardian; I haven’t read this one, but given her theme, I expect I will find similar content.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Here was the NYT piece that I did read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html

I know why you say the US isn’t a caste system, and in the sense that it isn’t like India’s, yes, agreed.

But I also understand what Wilkerson wants from the term.  She wants to say the society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power, and preferably a relatively predictable group.  That if our system as currently set up doesn’t have those, if it has fairer bargaining and less predictability, it can’t operate because it needs too much on unfair terms to support the structural commitments to wealth concentration, certain wasteful or profligate expenses, etc.  

And if I come back to caste, I think: how essential is it that a caste system be as well developed and as rigid as India’s has been for a long time?

Nominally, Bali has the Hindu cast system copying the Indian form.  If you go to a wedding, it looks like it does too.  Husband can’t eat from the wife’s family’s table if it is a “marry up”, but the reverse is okay.  So they have to have two ceremonies.  And marrying up is allowed one for women, but not for met.  And so forth.

But I was in extended communication with Steve Lansing when he was doing Balinese genetic studies, having similars for India, and his result was that they are massively different.  You can see caste lines respected strongly in Indian genetics.  In Balinese, little, and if you didn’t constantly re-divide the population to keep track of short-term changes, you wouldn’t have a partition to track.  So when push comes to shove, the Balinese marry who they want to marry, and they keep the caste system to some degree and with context dependence.

For mobility data, I wish I had a record of the various talks I have attended or articles I have read claiming that social mobility has dropped severely over the past five decades.  I am glad to have your Brookings data below, and should have looked it up myself.  But what then is the data source for people making the claim that it has been dropping?  I don’t think they are nuts or liars.  Maybe ideological to some degree, but short of ideologues.  

I also tried to do some work with Duncan Foley a few years ago (like 15) on income distributions, and where the exponential x powerlaw form in the US and elsewhere comes from.  An easy explanation would be random mixing from an output stream (income-generating capacity)  with a constraint for wage earners, and some less obvious multiplicative process for the investor class (though that is not conceptually simple, despite hack approaches that treat it that way).  I was interested to not only match the distribution, but also track mobility figures, to make a “Green’s function” for the diffusion process that underlies that kind of mixing model.  Duncan put a student on it for maybe a year, and reported back that the diffusion model that would fit the stationary distribution was wildly inconsistent with the time-trajectories of family portfolios, because they were much too sticky.  We didn’t publish it, because it was never a thorough enough result, and we couldn’t get a model that _did_ account for both aspects of the data.  But again it was a claim that the apparent mixing by one signature was larger than what could be directly observed.

I have the impression — now admitting that I have no method to be careful — that there were a few decades from the mid-60s through the early 80s, when many programs created an escape hatch for a significant segment of the black population into the middle class.  This is Michelle Obama’s generation, and as I read her memoire I see the combination of the various programs I went through in all the same years, with various specific programs that made them available to her in Chicago where otherwise they would not have been.  I feel like that window has significantly closed.  The ones who got through it are today’s relatively comfortable, relatively safe middle class (such as it survives secondo E. Warren), and the ones who didn’t as it started to close are the growing precariat.  Am I completely wrong in having this impression?  The shouting is so loud from the shouters that I don’t know what a balanced reading is.

I thought I caught an echo of that in the McWhorter book review that Glen forwarded, which I liked, and I have read McWhorter on linguistics since probably 15 years ago and liked him.  Somewhere in there, and I forget on exactly which point, he objects to the arguments that are part of his larger claim of condescension, that they provide cover to those who want to claim affirmative action doesn’t work.  I think he came up through my generation too, and I wonder if his awareness of the detailed results of opportunity programs is one of the things we are hearing.

Anyway, one could stop and make this a career, and I won’t and can’t.  But it would be nice to resolve what seem to me like considerably contradictory claims around mobility.

Thanks,

Eric

On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/ 

As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.

There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
>
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
>
>
>
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