What is higher education worth?

Colleges and universities, whether public or private, receive substantial financial aid from cities, states, and the federal government. In Boston, someone has calculated that Northeastern University receives $182 million in public support. In these days of budget constraints for all levels of government, someone is bound to come around and ask: is this money well spent?

In response, Northeastern studied its contributions to the greater Boston area. The study concludes that Northeastern's contribution is at least $340 million. Its list of benefits includes: "public open space, better informed citizens, higher voter turnout, free facilities for the public, job creation, social and economic mobility, scientific breakthroughs, educating the workforce and developing the community."

I am sure that officials at Northeastern University are well aware that a college or university education has many other benefits, which are, however, not so easily measured in dollars and cents. It is not possible to put a money value on people having better lives because they are more articulate, more self-aware, and better informed about what goes on in the world. Well educated people are better able to find answers to questions. If they encounter problems, it is easier for them to either find solutions themselves or consult someone who will be able to help them out. Educated people are capable of being more thoughtful about their lives. They are likely to make better choices for themselves, their families and the community.

The educated tend to be more politically active; they are better informed and, thus, likely to make better choices.

Education offers many sources of pleasure. Being acquainted with literature and music and the arts expands one's awareness of the world and expands the sources of satisfaction. It provides new avenues for self-expression.

One cannot put a dollar value on any of that.

Northeastern's account of its contribution to community well-being illustrates a very negative trend in our world: every day the values of things are more likely to be expressed in money terms. Values that cannot be translated into dollars and cents tend to be left aside or forgotten. We tend to say that they are "subjective" and then not pay any attention to them. More and more, the things that can be bought and sold are considered important. What cannot be paid for in the official currency is overlooked.

Our outlook on the world is thereby seriously impoverished. People go to college to get a better job, to earn more money. No one talks about college as opening wider perspectives on life's possibilities. No one seeks to provide students with a better work life – that satisfies, that strengthens pride and self-esteem, that yields more productive community members and earns them the respect of their neighbors.

How long will it be before people calculate whether it is economically preferable to have children or to remain childless, whether it is economically efficient to place your aging parents in a nursing home or to take care of them at home? How long before parents will realize that they do not profit from spending money on a good education for their children, and then refuse to finance college or graduate school? Soon citizens may decide that there is no money in voting or participating in their communities, that going to church is a waste of your time which would be better spent earning money. We have been saying for a long time that "time is money" and now we are taking this more and more seriously.

No wonder many people are depressed, aimless, and addicted to some chemical or another, or to some public entertainment or another. Because, after all, as we also have been saying for a long time, “money doesn't buy happiness.”

Reflections about Violence

Twelve people die, killed by a heavily armed gunmen in a Colorado movie theater, the latest in a series of random shootings that have become commonplace in our country. The president and his opponent suspend their acrimonious campaign and express their deep sorrow. But they have no suggestions for what the government might do to lower the level of violence. They are prepared to accept the recurrence of mass murder as a regular feature of our life.

Pundits are quick to call for more gun control. But it is not obvious that gun control is what we need to be talking about. Perhaps the more pressing question is: "why is gun control such an incendiary issue?" Millions of Americans believe that they need to be armed in order to be safe. The gruesome evidence that being armed does not protect you against a mass shooter in a darkened movie theater has no weight for them. They live in a world of imminent mortal threats where they believe that only the weapons in their hand will allow them to survive.

Most people deplore mass shootings, a high murder rate – close to 17,000 in 2011--, but these are not the only manifestations of violence in our society. 

 

At least half of the daily news stories report death and destruction. Violence sells newspapers and tv news. Television entertainment, year in, year out, has a heavy dose of police and spy dramas; computer games allow us to be humans or super-humans with enormously bulky weapons blasting everything in sight. Even sports are popular for the players' violence. 

 

Here are some quotes from a review of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises—the film showing during the Aurora CO massacre: “Fight sequences between Batman and Bane were awesome. Loved every second of it.” (http://www.comicbookmovie.com/news/?a=64274)

Americans love violence. 

 

They also live in a world where many are prepared to inflict bodily or psychological harm on others to get what they want.

The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, estimates that 19,000 women in uniform were victims of sexual assaults last year. Among civilians, one in four women suffers sexual assaults. 22% of women and 7% of men report having suffered violence in intimate relationships. In 2008 – 2009 28% of children in schools reported having been bullied. 6% were subject to cyber-bullying.

We barely extricated ourselves from the Iraq war and seem still unable to leave Afghanistan. While all that is going on we participated in a bombing campaign in Libya and the foreign policy experts in Washington are thinking seriously of a military attack on Iran. The US Navy has moved more ships into the waters around Iran.

The budget of the US govt for 2012 amounts to $3.7 trillion. $900 billion of that—about a quarter-- is budgeted for defense. We spend 5 times as much on defense as China (with a population many multiples of ours) and 10 times as much as Russia, 11 times as much as France and England. 

 

Who are we defending ourselves against?

And, coming back to the beginning of this reflection, no one speaks of the pervasive violence—both loved and abhorred by us-- that is the backdrop of daily life in the US. No one seems to regard these facts as unacceptable. Violence is accepted as a fact of national life. 

 

Gun violence is only one form violence takes in America. Focusing on gun control is to ignore the much larger problem that is the American love-hate relation to violence. We are ambivalent about violence. We glorify military violence but do not know what to think when a rising number of soldiers turn their weapons on themselves. We deplore violence done to us and those we love but are fascinated by news stories about violence. We spend $60 billion a year for Homeland Security to protect ourselves from the bloody mayhem we engage in playing computer games.

The first step in trying to overcome an addiction is to acknowledge it. America will not overcome its addiction to violence without first recognizing its existence. Nothing short of an extended national conversation about violence in American life will help. 

 

Will such a conversation purge us of the desire to inflict bodily and mental pain on others? No one knows the answer to that.

But obviously accepting violence, as we do today, will not make us into a more peaceful nation.

Private Enterprise endangers Public Safety

A report from a Japanese investigation, just out, reminds us how dangerous privately owned nuclear power plants are and how private industry corrupts government supervision.

Here are bits and pieces of the story: the Fukushima nuclear plant was owned and run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Many Japanese had good reasons for being distrustful of the company. In 2002, the company was caught falsifying records of nuclear power plant inspections. After a 2007 earthquake damaged a TEPCO nuclear generating plant, it emerged that the company was totally unprepared for earthquakes, even though Japan is of all countries the most prone to serious quakes.

The plant was built by General Electric and serviced by one of its divisions. One of their engineers who inspected the power plant found many safety violations. When he reported his observations, General Electric terminated him. The American company was as careless with public safety as its Japanese customer. The Japanese government did nothing; the power generation was allowed to continue in spite of serious threats to the integrity of the plant.

As in the US, Japanese government officials have a cozy relationships to private industry. When government officials retire they are often rewarded with employment in private companies. The regulators of the nuclear industry are hand in glove with the industry they are supposed to regulate. When the falsification of inspection records came to light, the government reacted limply and failed to take appropriate action to make sure that the nuclear power company would take safety measures more seriously.

The public in Japan, and all over the world, was put in danger in order to save money for the stockholders of TEPCO and to preserve the cushy jobs of government officials. In short, the regulatory mechanism failed completely.

Contrary to prevailing conservative opinion, private enterprise did not benefit the public. More importantly, and more seriously, private enterprise corrupted the governmental mechanisms supposed to step in where private enterprise fails to benefit everyone and to keep everyone safe. Not only did the privately owned nuclear power company put their own profit ahead of public safety but they managed to undercut government regulation to ensure that nuclear power plants would be safe as possible.

Once again, private industry shows itself more powerful than popularly elected governments. Private industry has no difficulties using government for its own purposes to the detriment of the public at large. Its no longer government "for the people" but for the large corporations.

The Greeks and the US

Athens is more than 5000 miles away from Washington DC. Greece is a small country with relatively few resources. Ours is a very large, rich and powerful country. In spite of the differences, there are lessons to be learned from the suffering of the Greek people.

The Greek government owes a whole lot of money to banks in Germany and France. For a long time, these banks were happy to turn over Greek loans, but in the present global financial crisis they have become much more reluctant to make loans to Greece and the Greek government is running out of money.

How did the Greeks manage to get themselves into this tight spot? The answer to this question depends pretty much on whom you ask. Some observers blame the generous social safety net and pension arrangements for Greek workers. The government paid out more money than they could afford and so they borrowed. That served to maintain the popularity of the governments in power and to get them reelected.

Add to that the Greek government's inability to collect taxes. In Greece tax evasion is a national sport. Even the local vegetable seller will not give you a sales slip. That keeps the transaction off the government's radar and enables the vegetable seller to evade sales taxes.

This is the sort of explanation that blames ordinary Greeks, but, of course, the major tax evaders are the rich in Greece, not the ordinary people who barely get by.

Also, the banks who lent money to Greece were not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. Banks in the wealthy European countries were sitting on a lot of cash. Lending it out to countries like Greece was very profitable inasmuch as interest rates on loans to Greece were higher because the loans were considered riskier.

But as long as the interest payments came rolling in, the banks continued taking the risks and lending out money. But then the 2008 financial crisis hit. The banks in the wealthy countries suddenly became reluctant to lend out more money and the Greeks were stuck with an enormous debt they could not pay back.

There is clearly plenty of blame to go around. For the sake of short-term profits the banks took excessive risks. Citizens, rich and poor, evaded their civic responsibility by not paying taxes. Governments put their narrow political advantage ahead of the well being of the country they had sworn to enhance. The European Community ignored its own rules.

Everyone was looking out for number one. And now all are losers, common people in Greece worst of all. With 25% unemployment and a seriously torn social safety net, the poor, the sick, and the elderly are suffering.

On the surface, conditions in the US seem very different. The Greek debt is 130% of the Greek national income. Our national debt is just slightly larger than what we produce. Ordinary people do not evade taxes, much. It is only the largest corporations like Exxon and GE that do not pay any taxes. US governments do not get re-elected by giving ample benefits to ordinary people. They manage to stay in power through welfare to the rich while cutting benefits to retirees and the neediest in the nation.

But in both countries the banks play a central role.

Banks originate when ordinary people and businesses need someone to keep their money for them. At other times, individuals, businesses or countries are a bit short on cash and they want to borrow some. So they all get together and establish a bank. Everyone gets what they want. The deposits of some become loans to others. It is one more way in which neighbors get together to help each other out.

Until . . . . some rich guys get together and start their own bank, not as a service but in order to make money. They take in deposits and invent all sorts of fees to make money off the depositors. They make loans and they like the risky ones because those carry higher interest payments. They start, essentially, gambling with risky loans and make side bets to insure themselves against losses. They enter transactions so complicated that even they do not fully understand them. (Doing that J P Morgan recently lost somewhere between $2 and $9 billion).

The Greek crisis, in part, is the result of huge for-profit banking just as is the 2008 meltdown whose effects we are still feeling.

The lesson? Let's go back to not-for-profit banking, to credit unions or cooperative banking. Not everything we do needs to be a way to make money. We do not have families and children to make money. For many—not for all—religion is not a source of profit. Most creative people make music, write novels, or tinker in their garage not to make money but for the pleasure of it. Most people participate in sports to be healthy or, again, just for the joy of it.

For-profit banking, the entire huge financial industry, is a big mistake. It sank Greece. It will sink us, unless we take measures to protect ourselves against their recklessness.

What happened in Wisconsin?

Unless you were in Wisconsin during that campaign, it is difficult to assess the precise meaning of this defeat. Many commentators tell us that Gov. Walker's victory was a bad omen for President Obama's reelection. That may well be true. But what else can we make of this?

The country's move towards the right, in this case to hostility to government, labor unions, to paying taxes has not yet come to an end. That is distressing for those of us who are not on the right of the political spectrum.

But much more upsetting is the general air of unrestrained emotionalism and sheer craziness that we can see everywhere. Educational authorities in Arizona continue to purge the libraries and classrooms of books they regard as unsuitable. The state legislature of North Carolina has ordered its climate scientists to ignore the powerful evidence that ocean levels will rise and threaten the Outer Banks. Ignoring facts has now become official state policy in North Carolina. These and many other moves on the part of elected officials are not just conservative – they are plain crazy.

The right-wing agenda clearly has different strands. There are businesses who want to assure continued welfare for big business and, since money is in short supply, agitate to cut benefits for the poor, the elderly, retired people. There are religious Christians filled with hate for gays, appalled by abortions, who want to put women back in the kitchen and the nursery. And then there are millions of people who are not in business and who have no serious religious commitments, who accept the program of the big business-reactionary Christian alliance. Under ordinary circumstances these folks would recognize how crazy the remedies are that they now put their faith in. But today they are willing to give any of them a chance.

If we look at the last century of public decision-making, we see times when the country does well, is aware of the demands of our political ideals, is inventive and forward-looking and generous towards those who suffer. Then there are the times when we all seem to be pointing fingers at each other, and blaming each other for whatever is wrong, when citizens seem to be filled with hate, when groups circle the wagons to defend themselves against threats—both real and imaginary.

It seems clear that we are in one of these periods. We have had some difficult years between the attacks of 9/11, between two failed wars and now a financial crisis that will not go away. Our schools seem to be in a shambles. Health care costs are rising precipitously. What will we do with a rapidly aging population? It is not surprising that people are afraid.

What is worse, no one seems to have any good ideas of how to improve the situation. The fight against abortion rights, the war against contraception unleashed by the Catholic bishops, whose parishioners all practice contraception, the hysteria about immigration, none of them will put people to work or deal with the problems of education, of the environment, or resolve the crisis in health care.

Then there is the enthusiasm for the free markets. For one thing, the anti-immigration movement is saying that we do NOT want a free market in labor. The persistent attacks on labor movements send the same message. In addition, a free market does not tolerate monopolies or government subsidies but free market enthusiasts have no problems with either. What else is cutting taxes on business and their rich owners but a subsidy? Their praise of the free market is not a reasonable economic policy; it is an emotional symbol, it is pure superstition.

With everyone unsure of how to solve our problems, the snake oil salesmen have a field day. When in trouble, we are likely to want to try any weird thing. "Let the free market handle it" some say, "shrink the government" say others. "Lower taxes for the rich, " "ban gay marriage," "make it harder for people to vote," "reverse the gains made by women in the last 50 years," and on and on. Some of these remedies will not work; others are morally repugnant. None of them will solve our current problems.

The real lesson of Wisconsin is this: the country is scared and at its wits' ends.

Shooting ourselves in the foot

In business, there is considerable advantage in bringing a new commodity to market. After a while the competition will succeed in producing similar or better products. But for a while the company that has a new gadget will profit substantially. Just look at Apple.

This same thing seems to be true with respect to weapons. The United States was the first country to have a functioning atomic weapon. For a number of years that gave us a significant advantage in world politics. But in the case of weapons, the short term advantage gained by finding new ways of killing and destroying is far outweighed by the long term damage done by new weapons systems.

David Sanger, who writes for the New York Times, recently published a book – Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power – in which he points out that a new kind of warfare is now being conducted by our government. Its chief weapons are drones and, more recently, computer viruses. Everyone knows about the drones. Not everyone knows that the US government succeeded in infecting Iran's computers with viruses that blew up a significant number of centrifuges producing weapons grade uranium. Some terribly clever people here, and in Israel, have discovered a way of interfering with the production of weapons of other countries.

Once again we are the first to be able to wield this new form of causing mayhem. At the moment that clearly gives us an advantage. But when it comes to armaments, being the first to use a new weapon is in fact a very bad idea.

The conflict with Iran illustrates this forcefully. When we succeeded in building an atomic bomb some people thought that we needed to use it, even though many people believe today that Japan was about to surrender even before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost 70 years later, many countries have atomic weapons, even such precarious states as Pakistan. Others are trying to build atom bombs, as for instance North Korea and Iran. Our eagerness to be the first to use this new weapons has cost us untold billions trying to protect ourselves from other countries that now have nuclear weapons. It has contributed significantly to make the world a whole lot less safe. It has now made an Iranian nuclear program a real threat.

No country ever can monopolize a new form of destruction. If one country has a new weapon, all the other countries will try to get them also. It will not be long before other countries will fly drones perhaps against targets in the United States. Other countries have technically ingenious computer people who will figure out how to infect computer systems in our country.

What will happen next? Will your computer blow up in your face? Will children die when their Xbox explodes? Will atomic power plants explode because some enemy managed to infect its computer control program with a virus?

It is clearly a mistake to introduce new weapons. The worry about Iran's nuclear program is the best example of that. Had we kept the atomic secrets to ourselves, would Pakistan be armed with nuclear weapons? Would we now have to unleash new ways of warfare on the Iranians in order to slow down their program of becoming a nuclear power? 

Instead of learning from past mistakes, our government has chosen to unleash a new weapons system. All of us will pay the price for this latest, short-sighted policy.

Check before you talk

 

Most of us tend to have fairly simple diagnoses of problems and similarly simple prescriptions for resolving those problems. But every now and then we get our nose rubbed in our own ignorance. We are reminded that simpleminded diagnoses and similarly simpleminded solutions are often destructive. Such simplemindedness is the common coin of political rhetoric, especially during political campaigns.

But politicians are not the only ones to oversimplify.

These reflections were occasioned by a recent debate about the morality of selling body parts. Should kidneys for transplants be assigned by lottery or should they be for sale in the open market? Michael Sandel of Harvard University opened the the debate by arguing that selling organs for transplants is morally reprehensible. Some things, Sandel believes, may and should be traded in a free market. Other things should not become commodities for sale, kidneys among them.

An economics professor in Montana, and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute argued the conservative line against that. If kidneys could be bought and sold, then some people who were really short on cash might be willing to sell a kidney and thereby save the lives of people who now died because no transplant kidney is available for them. Once again the free market comes into play to save lives and make the world better.

But this pro and con selling kidneys argument ignores important facts and therefore is seriously oversimplified.

Here is one set of facts:

"Many people seem to think that donating a kidney is like giving a pint of blood. It is not.

- 4.4 kidney donors die each year in the US within 12 months of surgery.

- 20% experience complications, some of which are life-long and painful.

- 20-30% of living donors suffer from depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

More to the point, EVERY study from ALL countries with legal or illegal kidney sales has concluded that organ donation is highly detrimental to the person relinquishing the kidney. They experience more health problems, greater financial difficulties, increased psychosocial woes, and a general decreased quality of life. " (http://livingdonorsarepeopletoo.com/kidney-markets-epic-fail/)

Here is another interesting perspective on the kidney transplant debate:

“Trichakis (a professor at MIT) and his colleagues decided to try to figure out how to balance fairness and efficiency in kidney transplants. They spent last summer building a sophisticated computer model that included thousands of variables and decades of data on organs and patients and medical outcomes.

At the end of the summer, they ran their model against the formula doctors currently use to allocate kidneys. Trichakis' model was just as fair as the current system— and enormously more efficient.

If you used their model to match patients and kidneys for one year, and you totalled up the extra life expectancy patients would gain, you'd get 5,000 extra years of life, according to their results.”

What do we learn? We should not argue about allowing people to donate kidneys before we are informed about the side effects of organ donation. Nor should we argue about the economic attractions of organ donation without having any understanding of what kind of difference kidney donation will actually make. Before we get into this free market vs. morality argument we had better find out whether there are more effective ways than organ donation of solving the problem of a shortage of kidneys for transplants.