Ipse Dixit: The MLK Cult

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has become a national high holy day, still somewhat behind Independence Day and Thanksgiving in importance, but well ahead of Presidents’ Day and Veterans Day. Official speeches, marches, candlelight vigils, and service activities sponsored by civic organizations, schools, and colleges commemorate Dr. King in cities across the nation.  MLK Day has taken on the character of a saint’s festival, complete with processions and pilgrimages.

In the years since his tragic death, the popular apotheosis of Dr. King has translated him from the status of a fallible mortal to a paragon of moral perfection and preternatural wisdom. Debates over affirmative action, for example, frequently deviate from arguments for or against race conscious policies in employment and education to competing interpretations of the great oracle’s remark about people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It is as if social and political issues can be resolved by invoking the moral authority of the martyr. I don’t know what someone who died in 1968 would think about the public issues of the twenty-first century. I also don’t think this is relevant because, however admirable his courage and public speaking ability, Martin Luther King, Jr. possessed no supernatural insight.

Mark Engler’s article entitled “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Economics” in the Feb. 1 edition of The Nation illustrates both the ipse dixit use of Dr. King’s memory and the highly questionable nature of much of his thinking. The article tells how the martyred sage would solve contemporary problems of recession, unemployment and foreclosure by describing him as favoring two broad economic programs in the United States: a federal jobs program that would guarantee employment to every individual capable of working and a universal guaranteed income.  The latter would not simply maintain every person at level of minimal subsistence, but would lift everyone up to “the median income of society.”

I believe the author of this article quotes and interprets Dr. King accurately.  During the last part of his activism, at least, Dr. King does seem to have moved beyond trying to assure voting rights and nondiscriminatory access to public resources and toward wider efforts at restructuring American society. That is precisely why we should reject the portrayal of this historical figure as an image of saintly infallibility. These economic proposals are at best highly debatable and arguably remarkably foolish.

On the first proposal, the sheer cost of a universal federal jobs program is incalculable. It would mean not just creating work for all, but a massive jobs bureaucracy. The cost would entail the drag on our economy of so much artificially produced employment, in addition to wages for bureaucrats and putative workers. If we wanted to ensure a long-term downward spiral for the American economy, this would be an ideal way to go about it.

In providing jobs for everyone, the government could either mandate that each person take the assigned position or provide that all get the jobs that they want.  The first is a prescription for universal involuntary servitude, a strange goal for a civil rights leader. The second would mean that we would all be able to do refuse to do any work that falls short of our dreams and desires, which would make it impossible to get some of the most essential jobs in our society done.

There have been some reasonable arguments for a guaranteed minimal national income. The negative income tax plan once considered by the Nixon administration (the higher your income is above a certain amount, the more you pay; the lower your income is below that amount, the more the government pays you) was essentially a universally guaranteed income. Some have argued that such a scheme would be cheaper and more easily administered than our current hodge-podge of government assistance programs.  Others have responded that the very fact of guaranteeing everyone an income would simply universalize moral hazard, and also contribute to the problem of filling the least desirable jobs.  Most plans for a guaranteed income, though, make explicit the fact that the level of support would be minimal.  Dr. King’s suggestion that all be supported at the “median income of society” was, to put it bluntly, looney. It isn’t just that giving everyone a comfortable standard is beyond our capability or that to attempt to do so would be as economically destructive as trying to give everyone cushy jobs. This would be logically impossible. A median is a mid-point that divides cases into half below and half above. If it were possible to make a median a new minimum, there would be a new societal median.

In pointing out that Dr. King was not a very good economic thinker, I do not mean to speak ill of the dead. But I think we should stop pretending that, whatever his virtues may have been, he was anything more than a human being of limited judgment and understanding, like all the rest of us. Speculating on what MLK would have done tells us nothing about what we should do.

Costa Concordia

Those of us who have jobs with administrative duties often wake up at night worrying about doing something wrong, precipitating a disaster of some sort. As investigations of the Costa Concordia tragedy continue though, we might reflect that no matter how badly we mess up, we won’t sink a ship.

Comment on the "Too Many People in College" Debate

The website “Minding the Campus” features a debate between George Leef and Peter Sacks on the question “Are Too Many People Going to College?” Leef answers “yes” to this question and Sacks answers “no.”  Leef and Sacks really seem to be arguing whether policymakers, using public funds and rhetorical encouragement, should promote more people going to college, not whether it would be desirable if more individuals, left to their own wishes and judgment, would happen to decide to pursue post-secondary schooling. 

Sacks clearly favors national educational planning and public investments in directing more people toward advanced schooling, although he does necessarily see this as a matter of four year degrees. This planning orientation underlies his criticisms of arguments against promoting college. He says for example, “the real argument here is whether we are over-investing in higher education leading to bachelor's degrees, and if so, how do we legitimately ration higher education opportunity.  How do we decide who "legitimately" deserves this privilege?” This presumes that the decisions are always those of planners, who make decisions about how many people go to college and who those people should be. 

Leef’s position, on the other hand, can be taken in two different ways. One is a different version of the planning orientation: too many people are going to college and this is directing them into the wrong occupational directions and creating credential inflation. Therefore, policymakers should plan the lives of the public differently and direct more people into vocational training or some other activity. But Leef’s position can also be taken as simply saying we should stop trying to push more people into college and let individuals make their decisions on the basis of market conditions. I’m inclined to believe this second interpretation is closer to Leef’s view. Still, it is important to be clear about whether the debate concerns what is the right type of national educational planning or the extent to which we should have national educational planning.

Sacks raises excellent questions at the beginning of his statement, when he asks  “[f]rom what or whose perspective are there too many college goers?  From an individual's point of view at the present time?  From a societal perspective now and in the long run?  From a macroeconomic viewpoint?”  At heart, the perspectives may be: does the job market need more college graduates? Does it benefit individuals to have college degrees? These are radically different ways of looking at the issue.

Looked at from the first perspective, I think the answer is clearly “no.” The view that America is becoming a place in which everyone will be doing advanced high-tech work is pure fantasy. Many technical advancements, such as the cash register that computes change, actually bring down the skill requirements for work. We do need some highly trained individuals, especially in technical fields. However, the main reason that undocumented immigration is such a big issue for us today is that there is such a huge demand for low-skilled, low-credentialed labor.  If the need for low-skilled labor were disappearing, it would be difficult to understand why people have been pouring across our borders to take those types of jobs.

According to a 2007 publication by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “oc­cupations that usually require only short- or moderate-term on-the-job training … will continue to account for about half of all jobs by 2016. These occupations require little, if any, postsecondary training. Among such occupations are retail salesper­sons, food preparation workers, and personal and home care aides, all of which are expected to add numerous jobs over the coming decade”  Along similar lines, in a skeptical discussion of “the new knowledge economy,”  I recently cited a 2006 Forbes article entitled “The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in America.” “Engineer was indeed number 1. However, the list also included truck drivers, explaining “They are hard to recruit because they have to be away from home for long periods, receive low wages, work very long hours and put up with a fluctuating workload.” Another hard-to-fill job was laborer. Forbes explained the shortage by the fact that This is very physical, unskilled and often repetitive work at low pay.”  A more recent MSNBC article by Eve Tahmincioglu quotes Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy. “If you look at the job growth distribution of the last two recoveries, it suggests we’re going to see growth of a lot more lower-income jobs.”

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Forbes recently looked at the top ten employers among 18 to 29 year olds, probably the most highly credentialed generation in history. The military topped the list, but other big ones were Walmart, Starbucks, Target, Best Buy, McDonald’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, the YMCA, CVS, and UPS. Would you like fries with that BA?

So, if we look objectively at the evidence, the answer is clearly that from the macroeconomic viewpoint we don’t need more people in college. What about from the point of view of the individual? Well, on average people with degrees make more money than people without degrees. So, it may make good economic sense for you or your child to plan on higher education. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes good sense for taxpayers to subsidize your personal good fortune or that of your family. In fact, given the competition for professional positions, your good fortune may not be in my interest at all.

But to what extent will college really promote your good fortune? That may depend on what you study. I analyzed individual level U.S. Census data from the 2009 Public Use Microdata Sample to see what people in different degree fields make. Those with at least four years of college with degrees in electrical engineering had a median income of $80,000. In geological and geophysical engineering and aerospace engineering, incomes were even higher, with medians of $85,000 and $85,500. Petroleum engineers and nuclear engineers topped this, earning $104,000 and $100,000. Getting an engineering degree pays off. However, those with degrees in early childhood education had a median income of only $34,000. Those with degrees in area, ethnic, and civilization studies were somewhat higher, at $40,000. Those with degrees in advertising and public relations and in communications were also at $40,000.

What about people who did not go to college?  Obviously, given the above paragraphs on job demand, many of them were doing important and needed types of work.  But in a number of fields they were also doing quite well.  To see how well, I looked only at people with no college. I included workers without high school diplomas as well as those with, so the estimates of incomes are modest and understate how well one can do financially without college.  Among workers with high school degrees or less, supervisors of mechanics and repairers had a median income of $46,800. This doesn’t put them in the range of petroleum engineers, but it is considerably better than those who went to college to get degrees in early childhood education. Elevator installers and repairers with no college were doing even better: their median was $58,100. Electrical power installers and repairers had median incomes of $46,000. Without dragging this list on too long, I can state as a social fact that there plenty of job categories employing people without college degrees that pay off better than many types of degrees.

As a final note, I don’t think that monetary return is the only or even the best way to look at education. It may be my professorial bias, but I think a liberal arts education is actually worth financial sacrifice.  I think it makes sense to take a lower paying job in order to study subjects that are intrinsically valuable. That’s one of the arguments for keeping educational costs down so that people can afford to put their time and effort into learning if they choose to do so. But this is not any kind of an argument for national educational planning.

The Ministerial Exception

A couple  days ago, in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision that a teacher fired by a religious school could not sue her former employer for workplace discrimination because of the Constitution’s protection for religious freedom.  Although Cheryl Perich taught mostly secular subjects at her Michigan school, but she also taught some classes in religion and had received some religious training. This, in the eyes of the Court, justified a “ministerial exception” to government oversight of employment on the grounds that religious groups should be free from intervention by the state.

In an editorial, the New York Times has criticized the ruling for having an excessively encompassing conception of the ministerial exception and suggested that “it’s [the Court’s] sweeping deference to Churches does not serve them or society wisely.” I’m inclined to agree with the Court on this one and to disagree with the Times. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the anti-discrimination law that provided the grounds for Ms. Perich to sue when she sought to return to work after a period of sickness, was itself fairly sweeping in its extension of federal authority. The ministerial exception at least establishes some limits to that authority by excluding religious organizations and religious activities from federal interference.

Today's College Graduates

In an earlier piece, I looked at a Forbes report on the top ten employers in the United States for people aged 18 to 29. None of these were employers of highly skilled or highly labor, considering that this is one of the best educated (or at least most credentialed) generations in history. This made me wonder what kinds of education these young people might have. I looked at the 2009 individual-level census data to see what the most common degree fields were in that recent year.

Among all young people aged 29 or under with a bachelors degree or more, the most common degree field was psychology (5.7 % of degree holders). That was almost matched, though, by business management and administration (rounding off at 5.7%). In descending order, the next most common degrees were biology(3.9%), elementary education (3.4%), communications (3.1%), marketing and marketing research (2.9%), English language and literature (2.9%), political science and government (2.9%), general business (2.8%), accounting (2.8%), and nursing (2.7%). If you are like me, and you enjoy rows of numbers, you'll probably find that interesting. But most people probably want to know what that means. One thing we might notice is that although there are some liberal arts type of degrees in the list, most of these are explicitly vocationally oriented. I've generally argued that as more people get college degrees, this creates pressure for job-oriented credentials. When very few people have completed college, you can study what you like and still get that management job. When you have to compete with many other graduates, a business management degree might give you the edge. Ironically, then, the declining place of liberal arts in higher education can be attributed to rising college enrollments.

Of course, we know that young women now make up a majority of college students and recent college graduates, but do their areas of study still differ from those of men? Among men, the top ten degree fields were: business management and administration (7 %), finance (4 %), computer science (3.9%), general business (3.7 %), political science and government (3.5%), biology (3.3%). economics (3.1%), psychology (3%), accounting (2.9%), and mechanical engineering (2.8%). Men may be less likely than women to go to college these days, but when they do, they are most likely to go into fields that they think will get them work.

Among women, the business orientation is there, but much less marked. Their major fields were: psychology (7.7%), elementary education (5.3%). business management and administration (4.7%),  biology (4.4%), nursing (4.2%), English language and literature (3.5%), communications (3.5%), marketing and marketing research (3.1%), accounting (2.7%), and political science and government (2.4%). The first thing that should leap out at us is that several of the preferred fields for women (elementary education, literature, communications) are relatively low paying fields. Men and women, even when they get degrees, aim in different directions. Unless we believe that an Office of Gender Engineering should be trying to change the choices men and women make, we may need to just accept the differences.

What about race? I don't want to carry this listing too far, so I've just looked at black degree holders. Like whites, the most common degree field was business management and administration (7.5%).  But there were substantial differences in concentration. The rest of the list reads: psychology (7%), biology (4.8%) , criminal justice and fire protection (3.7%), sociology (3.3%), accounting (3.3%), communications, (3.3%) general business (3.2%), marketing and marketing research (3.1%), and nursing (3.0%). Blacks and whites were not all going in two completely different directions, but there were enough differences to conclude that racial vocational concentrations and income inequalities are still big parts of our national landscape, even among college graduates. Again, since these are matters of the choices people make, there are good arguments for simply accepting the differences.

One final thought: many young people appear to be thinking about college in terms of getting jobs. But if we recall the Forbes list, we might wonder how many of those aspiring business administrators and financiers will end up marching in the military or standing behind a counter at Walmart. Or, we might wonder how many of them will be rejected from those retail and service jobs because they are seen as overqualified.

"Compelling National Interest" or "Pressing Public Necessity"?

Larry Purdy, one of the attorneys for Barbara Grutter in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case, argues here that the Supreme Court should accept Abigail Fisher’s petition for certoriari and use the Fisher case to overturn Grutter.  The earlier Supreme Court decision accepted the use of race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School, where Barbara Grutter had been denied admission. Similarly, Abigail Fisher was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin in a race-conscious process. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals followed the Grutter decision in accepting UT Austin’s rejection of Ms. Fisher on the basis of race.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in admissions in Grutter primarily on the grounds of “compelling national interest.” Curiously, the author of the majority decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor acknowledged that the reason the national interest had to be “compelling” was that treating individuals differently because of race was indeed a problem for American legal principles.  This was a curious kind of legal logic, admitting that discrimination is inconsistent with equal treatment under the law, but claiming that it is ok if only your reasons are good enough.  It is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which Justice Hugo Black justified the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry because of “pressing public necessity.”

As I point out in this law review article on the Grutter decision, O’Connor was also sufficiently cognizant of the problem of differentiating among people on the basis of race that she claimed that doing so to serve this “compelling national interest” could only be a temporary remedy. Therefore, she stated, race-conscious programs would lno onger be necessary in twenty-five years, presumably because strategic discrimination will have ended all variations among groups by 2028. This is where the empirical difficulties come in. If affirmative action policies are supposed to diminish achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups, they haven’t started to do so yet. And there is no evidence that they will do so in the foreseeable future.

I have posted here a chart of critical reading and math SAT scores. The gaps among the groups in the twenty-three year period from 1986-87 to 2009-10, precisely the time when not only affirmative action but other national strategies such as No Child Left Behind aimed at eliminating group differences, did not diminish. In fact, some of the gaps increased. Notably Asians have almost caught up with whites in reading, and will pass whites if the trend continues.  In math, Asians have been ahead of all other groups throughout the period, and their lead is growing. The scores of Hispanics, on the other hand, have gone down slightly in reading and remain flat in math. Since Asians and Hispanics are the fastest growing racial or ethnic categories in the United States, this suggests the gaps in the future will be larger among more people.  Moreover, because Asians are both the highest scorers and the smallest in numbers, policies that attempt to increase the representation of the underrepresented will negatively affect Asians much more than anyone else. Maybe Grutter resembles Korematsu in a number of ways.

The Civic Engagement Doctrine

“Engagement” is one of the popular buzz words in higher education these days. According to an article in Inside Higher Education, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement has issued a new report, prompted by the Department of Education as a part of “a push to make democratic engagement a national goal.” I had always thought that in a free society people could choose their own goals. Apparently, this is not the view of the task force or the Department of Education.

I believe the report confuses two very different forms of education. One of these we might call civic studies, which would entail learning about competing political philosophies, the history of government in general and of American government in particular, and current political structure and political process. This type of education pushes no position and involves no proselytizing. It simply provides citizens with the information to make up their own minds and decide whether and how they will be involved in public issues. The other form of education we might call civic engagement learning, which involves preaching the socio-political values approved by the institution and recruiting students for social crusades through mandatory "public service." This second approach is not only inconsistent with the traditional approach to liberal education, it is inconsistent with liberal democracy.