Sasquatch and Liberal Academe

I have spent thirty years in academia as a teacher and as a scholar. If you count the embarrassingly long periods I was a student, it adds up to much more time. After retiring, I am full of thoughts and ideas about academia. I feel almost no remorse at all but there is a lot of regret in my heart. It’s regret about what I did not do, mostly. Much of it is regret about the times I kept my mouth shut. I also feel retrospective curiosity. Strangely, the curiosity is growing with the years from my last day in academia. Much of the curiosity is about the following issue:

Why do very intelligent, cultured, well-informed people do and say strikingly stupid things?

Before I spout off anymore about academia, I must make clear my position about Sasquatch, the elusive, giant northern American forest ape. It’s sometimes quite unscientifically referred to as “Bigfoot,” or “Big Foot.” Worry not, the two lines of pondering in this essay will soon merge, I can assure you. At any rate, I think there is no Sasquatch. I am sorry that is what I think. I hope I am wrong. I would be glad to turn on a dime on that one, as soon as the evidence warrants.

I have a former colleague, a man younger than I who is a full professor in the best school of one of the best universities in the world. The man is pretty much an academic star. By the way, I am well-placed to know that his stardom is well deserved. It’s not always true of academic stardom. Some academic stars have skillfully manipulated themselves into their reknown on the basis of absurdly inflated modest intellectual achievements. Often, it’s absurdly inflated, thin achievements associated with a super-normal capacity for being seen at academic conferences. (I could name names but this time around, I won’t.) I can’t resist a digression here: It used to be said that Stalin became dictator of the Soviet Union because he would stay after the meetings to sweep the room when the Bolsheviks were illegal. The very fact that it’s possible to fake scholarly star quality at all is a potent sociological commentary on academia in itself.

In any case, I am well able to judge my former colleague’s real capacity, the soundness of his stardom, because he is also a former co-author. He and I produced something fairly difficult together which was published in a fairly good journal. Now the relationship between co-authors is one of the most intimate that there is. It reveals the other guy’s personality faster than does the married state, for example. When you collaborate with another scholar, you witness his hesitations, the unsuspected gaps in his knowledge, his lack of culture, his hesitancy, his inability to make decisions, sometimes his intellectual cowardice, often his private frivolousness. It’s a lot like seeing someone at 7 am after a night of drinking and smoking strange substances. Fortunately, co-authorship is also a front row from which to observe intellectual creativity unfolding.

So, I know for a fact my former colleague and former co-author. Prof. X, is an exceptionally bright person. His mind is full of surprises; his resources are bright and varied. He possesses research imagination, not a trait to be taken for granted, by the way. Unlike most academics in the disciplines with which I am familiar, he is also a man of broad culture. (This may come as a surprise but academics don’t seem to be willing to read except for a specific, instrumental purpose. Few of the academics I have known read novels, for instance. Even fewer read history.) Since he is an immigrant like me, his awareness of the wider world is much above the academic average. In his home country, he is a kind of aristocrat. Naturally, Prof. X is bilingual. (I keep insisting it’s like having two brains; that’s an exaggeration, perhaps but there is a kernel of truth to it.) Judged by normal academic standards, my former colleague’s record of scholarly productivity probably puts him in the top 5% worldwide. He is a predictable liberal like, I would guess, at least 95% of his colleagues at the university where he exercises his talents, also like 90% or more of American academics.

On that day, a common friend, another academic, has invited us to dinner, possibly driven by unhealthy curiosity. My former colleague, whom I had not seen for more than a year, greets me with taunts about Sarah Palin, the conservative ex-governor of Alaska and about Glenn Beck, for more than a year a political commentary star on the cable network Fox News.

This is a strange beginning for several reasons. First, Prof. X has no reason to believe that I am a devotee of either of these two tribunes of the plebe. He knows me well enough, and he knows my scholarly work well enough, to be able to guess that I am conversant with the more sophisticated exponents of conservatism and of libertarian ideas. He must know that I am in contact with high-brow conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Institute. I am pretty sure he is at least peripherally aware that my stories and essays have been published several times in the libertarian periodical “Liberty.” A single random dip into Liberty would show him that that publication is not itself short on intellectual sophistication.

What I am witnessing here is a mild form of instantaneous insanity: A man who knows me very well addresses me as if he were talking to someone else, perhaps to high-school student (and failing) Jacques Delacroix. He has not made the effort of imagination to consider the possibility that someone may be intelligent, well-informed, even fairly sophisticated, and yet subscribe to conservative ideas, libertarian wing. He could have entertained the thought during the drive over to the dinner party. I hope I may just be seeing simple laziness. I am not sure.

The second reason Prof. X ‘s greeting is disconcerting, you might have guessed: You could safely bet that he has heard very few words from Sarah Palin’s mouth, if any. You can be even more certain that he has read no words she has written. All the information he has about the sometimes-shrill, often aggravating ex-governor is second-hand or worse. The likelihood that he has any direct experience of Glenn Beck’s hectoring lecturing is even slimmer. Refined Prof. X simply does not have the patience to spend even one minute listening to the bombastic, grand-standing, usually exaggerating, chronically over-reaching, self-taught man so beloved of the great unwashed conservative masses with high-school diplomas (and shotguns hanging across the rear-windows of their pick-up trucks!)

Prof. X is made so irrational by the very idea of meeting conservatism in the flesh that he runs the serious risk of getting caught red-handed by someone whose esteem he probably values (me). After all, I might have asked him to repeat any statement, any statement at all ,Governor Palin has ever made, to replicate any of Glenn Beck’s key didactic affirmations. He would have failed both tests. Why take the risk to get busted, I wonder?

Later, at dinner, I ask Prof. X a few pointed questions about the economic achievements of Pres. Obama’s administration. I expect responses of the following form:

“OK, it does not look good but you must consider…..”

Instead, every loaded but simple question I advance triggers a longish and mostly irrelevant speech encompassing much more than one could reasonably consider relevant to the question. Prof. X wants to change the subject every time. He acts as if he believed that I could be distracted, like a child, from my own questions.

Overall, Prof. X, who has confronted many daunting intellectual challenges in his career, is not acting like a resourceful, intelligent man ready to face another intelligent, resourceful man of contrary political disposition. Instead, he behaves like a small child with a trembling lower-lip observing a bully in the school yard. The panic accounts for the inadequacy of his actions, an instance of the mystery I am trying to explain to myself: Intelligent people acting and talking stupidly.

The best explanation for this grotesque behavior I have right now comes straight from the conservative grab-bag: Competition works and pretty much nothing else works. This principle also applies to the full array of individual competences. Prof . X spends all his time ensconced among liberal and progressive academics. Probably he does not take the trouble to expose himself to material that would disrupt in the least his perspective. I am not thinking of the newsletter of “Almighty God Northwest White Militia” but of the Wall Street Journal, for example, that he could receive free of charge every day for the price of a phone call. Nothing ever challenges his liberal world-view. That leaves him incompetent before a challenge and, since he is intelligent enough to perceive this incompetence, it leaves him discombobulated, even fearful.

Even what I am tempted to call Prof. X’s “natural rationality” does not survive the anxiety of being challenged on unfamiliar ground. It runs out, it falls apart; so, it turns out it’s not that natural, in the sense of innate. Rationality too may depend on the presence of frequent contextual challenges. One may be rational in areas that are subject to periodic mental challenges and not be rational anywhere else at all. This, by the way, would explain the survival of ridiculous and childish beliefs in astrology among otherwise hard-as-nail Indian businessmen.

One week before this encounter with Prof. X, out of idle curiosity and immature hopefulness, I had driven twenty minutes to visit the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. It’s located among the redwoods, in Felton, California. It’s contained in a tiny house filled with exhibits. The owner, his wife and possibly, a part-time worker staff its map-covered tiny counter.

The owner-founder greets me. I don’t know what his educational background is. He expresses himself simply but clearly. He makes no mystery of the fact that he believes the Sasquatch tribe, the Bigfoot family itself, roams the Santa Cruz Mountains in fair numbers. For years, he has been collecting what he takes to be supportive evidence. More interestingly, he has taken the trouble to rate the evidence for credibility. I ask him several unavoidably skeptical questions. The man keeps his cool perfectly. He gives sensate answers to all my questions. He anticipates several of my objections and provides me with thoughtful counter-objections. I do not come out a convert but believing that there are some unanswered questions about Sasquatch worthy of more study. I would gladly contribute a small amount of money to such study. Mostly, I leave feeling that I have had a conversation with a knowledgeable adult who happens to have a disposition different from mine but who cares about facts as much as I do. I think of the Bigfoot museum director as a man who respects our common human rationality.

The Gulf Spill and the Hidden Vice of Capitalism

Here is one aspect of the Gulf spill no one seems to be talking about. It concerns the same thing that conservatives commentators, libertarian journals, and economists seldom take into consideration: Persons in the upper management of large corporations are not necessarily very intelligent and few are well-educated. That is the hidden vice of capitalism. For once, I am speaking as an expert. (Go ahead, check my vita linked to this blog and then, re-check the facts on Google. Make my day!)

The BP-caused oil spill – going on for more of a month as I write – is also a public relations disaster for the corporation. As I said earlier ( “The Louisiana Oil Disaster? Posted 5/21/10), we are still missing the moving photographs of thousands of dead, soiled aquatic birds. There is in and around Plaquemines parish a group of stake-holders that is becoming increasingly vocal: The fishermen. I heard some on NPR on 5/25/10 complaining that BP has mostly ignored their wishes to “volunteer” to help. It sounded true and it sounded incredible to me.

Whatever happens, BP is going to be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly for more than a billion dollars. The fishermen whose livelihood and whose future appears to be threatened by BP’s negligence number in the hundreds. I doubt that there are a thousand of them altogether. At the risk of sounding cynical, I will say that they are the only easily identifiable group of human victims who tug at ordinary Americans’ hearts. It’s easy to imagine that most Louisiana fishermen don’t have a doctorate in solar energy science, for instance; it’s easy to recognize that few can readily switch to another occupation. That they may want to transmit their legacy to their children is also understandable from an emotional standpoint. Finally, the tens of millions of American who fish recreationally will have no trouble grasping that the Louisiana fishermen may love their occupation and the lifestyle that goes with it. I am skeptical myself about the extensiveness of the damage. I don’t hope it will become Obama’s Katrina. Yet my heart goes out to those unknown fishermen deprived of both livelihood and, it seems right now, of a future.

That’s why I find it incomprehensible that BP has not taken the following simple measures: Gather everyone who claims to be a fisherman and is in a boat that moves under its own power. Give $100 a day to very crewman, $150 to every captain, and another $200 for the boat. I think the total cost would be under $200,000 a day or six million dollars for a month. And yes, there would be graft and cheating.

BP could simply tell the fishermen that they are “on call,” to be deployed at four hours’ notice as needed. Almost all would cooperate because the urge to do something in a crisis is irresistible. The shirkers would not be missed and they would be shunned by their neighbors. Tempers would subside. The locals would be turned from louder and louder claimants enjoying the world’s sympathy into allies of BP.

Why does not BP do anything so simple, you wonder? Back to my opening comments. The upper levels of big corporations are replete with people with mediocre minds. That this is not well-known is the fault of ignorant journalists and of devious business schools. (Disclosure: I taught in a business school for more than twenty years.) In fact, the evidence that CEOs of big corporations, for example, do anything that is both useful and important is slim and ill-founded. I mean by the latter that the empirical evidence in support does not begin to reach the level of rigor expected in the social sciences in general. The quality of the evidence does not even come close to what one expect routinely in the social sciences that concern themselves with business specifically. I know this because I refereed for such journals and submitted my own research to them for thirty years. ( There is a column on the technical topic of scholarly refereeing somewhere on this blog.) Warning: I stopped taking interest in that kind of research about three years ago. If some great, well-executed study has appeared on the topic since then, I might not know of it. If you know of one such, please, let me know that I may correct my ignorance. In summary” The myth of the god-like captain of industry prevails. It prevails without much successful challenge because it’s a myth, precisely, the founding myth of capitalism.

How can such a disturbing, dismal view of corporate governance be correct? There are two, explanations; they are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they overlap. First, academics in general don’t receive well innovations that may undermine scholarly reputations built over a life-time. There is some good in this because many innovations are, in fact, frivolous, the products of passing fads. Yet, scholarly innovations with impeccable credentials, the very credentials the fortress defenders claim to respect, also have difficulty gaining a foothold. Frequently, when they do gain a foothold, they are restricted to a ghetto for a generation or more. Evidence in favor of the idea that CEOs are omniscient and omnipotent need not exist. Any evidence that they are not is guilty until it proves itself innocent, over and over again.

The second explanation is crass: Most or all business schools derive a significant fraction of their revenue from private donations and endowments. Donations, other than bequeaths by the dead, are always decided on or reviewed by CEOs or by their creatures. The unspoken consensus in business schools is that there is no need to bite the hand that feeds you, even if it feeds you only dessert. Why antagonize the people with wallets in hand with research and publications that minimize their importance and suggest they may not be all that bright? This state of mind does not result from any conspiracy. It needs not be expressed. It’s part of the culture of business schools. In support of this thesis is the well-known fact that the richest business schools turn out the most iconoclastic research Stanford University comes to mind where the mindset goes like this: You want to bequeath us what? Thank you, we are busy right now. If you can call tomorrow, we will try to find you a spot in the line of donors.

Its’ chic nowadays to downplay the relevance of academia and academia has done much to earn this contempt. The fact however is that business schools teach vast numbers of undergraduates, and only slightly smaller numbers of MBA students. They instruct ordinary people, journalists, teachers and teaches of teachers. Almost anything anyone in America knows about business come from or is heavily influenced by this teaching. What business schools teach matters in the long run although in diffuse ways.

While it might be used that way, this short essay is not an argument for government intervention or supervision. The perception that government bureaucrats know anything at all is even more questionable. After all, they have been running the US Post Office for 230 years!

Health Care Reform: Paradise Lost

I have been struggling for three days to swim back to the surface and breathe again. Since the monstrous health care bill reform passed on Sunday, furor and something approaching despair have made me numb and mute. As people begin actually reading the 2700 pages, bad news cascade after bad news. I have been looking for the silver lining and found only one: It looks like the portability of health insurance will become a fact. That’s good. It was intolerable that people stayed in jobs they hated and refrained from entrepreneurship because they were too afraid to lose their health coverage. I think that’s all.

The rest of it is a disaster for our future. Note that every other political defeat does not make me feel the way I do now. Alternance in power is a good thing. When the other guys get their way with something I don’t want, I figure it’s the price I pay for stable and peaceful government. Certainly, I don’t want to live in a country where the losers routinely stage coups or start revolutions.

I don’t like most of what I know is in the law. I fear what else is in there that I will only discover later. I am sure the cost of the programs the law creates will undermine severely our future economic development. I suspect hardly anyone one will benefit. Instead, the overall quality of health care will decline. Most of all, I am aggrieved by the process by which the law became law, against clearly expressed majorities of opinion. The process smells of fascism and of the twisted parliamentary (ostensibly legal) methods by which the Communist Party gained control of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

My near-despair is rooted in two stream of personal experience: First, I saw it coming because I have inside track information, not secret information, mind you. President Obama is a second-rate academic. I know such people well. I have known them for more than thirty years. Improvements in our national health care delivery system based on market mechanisms were never in the cards. Few academics except economists know much about the market. Hardly a handful has read Adam Smith. They learn early in their careers that the idea of a market is a tricky myth designed to deceive the great unwashed masses. Then, they never give is another thought.

Academics in general are both intellectually limited and presumptuous. They know what they know and they don’t know what they don’t know. Successful academics, the minority who play the scholarship game, often become cured in time of heir presumptuousness. Anonymous scholarly peer review takes care of it. There is nothing like seeing the work of several years trashed from three different sides by strangers, and realizing that they are mostly right, to teach you humility. Barack Obama never had this salutatory experience. He never published anything scholarly, even when he was superbly placed to do so. Barack Obama had never accomplished anything in his life until last Sunday. He knows less about markets than a good undergraduate with three economics courses under his belt. Naturally, he and his ilk can only think of bureaucratic, and therefore, coercive and wasteful solutions.

The second root of my near-despair is the also the deepest: I have been there before. In 1981, Francois Mitterand, the head of the Socialist Party was elected President of France. His election inaugurated fifteen years of French decline and missed growth. After a decade of brisk economic development under conservative leadership, the country slowed down to very little. Nothing increased except government employment. The country went from one kind of decline to another. Unemployment remained around 10% , much of it long term and very long term unemployment. A whole generation of young French people grew up without the notion that work is normal. The bulk of the French educational system dropped from fairly good to quite bad. (Nearly everyone agree it’s bad now.)

The most interesting aspects of French decline under socialist administration are almost intangible, difficult to describe. Fortunately, I can depict them a little, even if in subjective terms because I knew the country well before and after. (I was born and reared in France. I know the language perfectly. I have spent much time in my native country before and after the Mitterrand regnum. )The public mood and the mood of ordinary people in the street became universally sullen. Socialist rulers claimed they gave he French more security but they killed their joie de vivre. Even more curiously, the advent of Socialist Party rule coincided with a massive dying-off of French cultural creativity. Things have improved some in the Sarkozy years but if you had visited France ten years ago, you would have found a cultural desert. There was no painting except hackneyed, inferior copies of 100-year old Impressionists. There was little fiction and it comprised mostly thin dry near-stories, stuff I had to force myself to read because it was boring. During the period, the French motion pictures industry went from one of the most productive in the world (though behind the American and the Indian) to one that turned out one or two good movies in five years at best. Most strikingly, there was no music of any interest produced in France except that of immigrants from North Africa, rai. (Of course, I joked that the French had become so lazy that they let immigrant workers do not only the menial work and the manufacturing work but even their popular music work!) In the socialist period, the French acquired many so-called “rights” and they lost their taste for living.

What we are facing in this country is worse than anything the Socialists were able to dish out in France. Mitterand had to govern most of the time without a majority in parliament. He had to compose and compromise with political coalitions opposed to his programs. Also, the powers of a French Presidents are somewhat less broad than those of an American President.

I think I have lost the country to which I emigrated forty years ago. I am in mourning for the vigorous, creative, free America I loved. I have never hoped to be wrong more than I am today. I hope someone will write and point out the errors of my analogy.

Watch this blog for more analysis and for calls to action.

Conservatives Unfair to Obama

Conservative commentators, led by Rush Limbaugh, keep referring to the President as a person with evil intentions, bent on implementing evil designs. What precipitated the torrent of right-wing invectives is the fact that it’s become obvious that every one of the President’s extravagant initiatives has failed or is failing.

Note that nothing I wrote above tells you anything about what I think the administration should have done, if anything. I usual, I am taking power at its own word. The President announced repeatedly that the many measures he pushed or tried to push through Congress would accomplish X,Y and Z. The so-called stimulus package is only one of those, of course. As I speak, his health care reform plan is half-dead and it has triggered open rebellion among “the masses.” (Yes, I know the President never actually used those words in public. I am just reading his mind.)

The only bright exception to the disaster that has met the Obama initiatives is the “cash for clunkers” programs. It turns out to be both a boondoggle and a demonstration of the validity of conservative approaches to economic problems: Give people their money back, they change their behavior. Rush Limbaugh reports that the beneficiaries are buying more Toyotas and Hondas than GM or Chrysler. I have not checked this assertion. It’s what the liberal press calls a rumor “too good to check.” Besides, Fox News said the same thing today at noon.

I believe the President is not very evil, much less than some past presidents, at any rate. The problem, as I have said several times on this blog, is that he is a man who has never accomplished anything in his life. He did nothing as a state legislator, nothing in the US Senate, nothing as a law school professor, and nothing he wishes to brag about as a “community organizer.” By the way, we still don’t know his grades.

Think of Mr Obama as a mediocre academic, a breed I know well. He never had to face the real world as long as enough of his students liked him. University administrators liked him too, as they like anyone with a black face who is not an object of embarrassment or of scandal. He was never tested, either in the real world or in the academic world.

Like many academics, including good ones, he knows what he knows and he does not know what he does not know. He views every problem as something that can be thought through, experience be damned, hard facts are secondary.

His entourage is something else. He did have very bad friends, and not only the race-baiting pastor and the aging, unrepentant terrorist. That’s what happens if you really love power and you have no particular talent. You have to try to chum up with all kinds of people, including scum.

Two things place the President at odds with many of the ordinary citizens whose compliance he seeks. They are his vision of how the world works and basic values.

Because I have known so many of his kind in my thirty years in academia, I think the President does not fundamentally understand the counterintuitive idea of the market. It’s not obvious he ever took a single economics course and if he did, whether he passed. It’s not that he is stupid; rather he dismissed the idea when he was young and has never given it another thought. He did not have to because he was surrounded by authoritarian collectivists. He is narrow-minded for the same reason many conservatives don’t know what they are talking about when they say, “socialist,” or “Marxist.”

His moral values also differ from those of I don’t know how many Americans, and they are inconsistent with the tradition embodied by the US Constitution, for example. I am pretty sure he dismisses the preamble to the Declaration of Independence as an interesting historical document of little contemporary relevance. So, he prefers equality to fairness, and comfort to liberty. He finds redneck vulgarity distasteful and the vulgarity of self-made rich men even worse. Culturally, he is barely American. (And I don’t care where he was born; that’s a dead horse, as far as I am concerned.)

There, you have it, irreconcilable differences with many of us! That’s serious enough. We don’t have to add evil. To do so is unfair.