Breakthrough Journal

Andrew Sullivan's Leftward Shift on Inequality

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:27:12 -0700

As a conservative, Andrew Sullivan’s says his perspective on inequality has typically been on of indifference. But now, he explains, inequality in the United States may have reached, and even surpassed, the point at which it is destabilizing to society. Here is Sullivan’s “Ask Me Anything” clip on how his view on inequality has shifted leftward, practically speaking, in light of the current economic situation.

The Seven Billionth Human

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:15:59 -0700

Supposedly, the seven billionth human was born yesterday. It’s the sort of milestone that’s abstract and difficult to be exact about, but somewhat like a birthday, it just feels important. So in honor of this astounding milestone, here’s a collection of pieces explaining what seven billion humans (or more) might actually mean:

The Washington Post ran a thought-provoking collection of stories, raising all kinds of questions about Earth’s growing population, from the abstract, like what would eight billion humans be like, to the very practical, like how do census takers count all of us? You can access all of the stories here.

The Atlantic Cities site told the story with graphs from the UN. The most notable one (below) depicts urban growth between 1950 and 2010. If you were wondering where seven billion people will live, the answer will, in large part, be cities.

And finally, the BBC has a calculator that gives you an idea of just how many people seven billion actually is in relation to the arc of human history, and a dizzying sense of how many people have ever walked our humble planet (I was the 79,943,237,493rd (ish) person born in the history of Earth).

Now that we did it, “next stop eight billion!”

Rethinking College Majors, Cont'd

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:57:26 -0700

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson suggests another way to restructure college education so that humanities majors have the technical skills they need to be competitive in today’s market:

“My proposal would be that the selective universities need to offer a set of technical minors, aimed at liberal arts, humanities, and social science majors…:
Technical, but at a level that looks to the math and science skills of the high school graduate that majors in English at that university;

available in the fields of SMET, economics, and accounting, perhaps a couple of other areas;

pass-fail, so as to deal with the rationality of avoiding anything a student doesn’t already know he or she is good at;

quite possibly taught by people who do not teach in the actual prestige-driven departments, since this will be at best an annoyance and distraction to those departments’ quite different incentives…

There’s something weird about inducing a nearly complete disconnect between the technical students and the humanities students, when they are all pretty smart. But what the humanities and liberal arts students need is a Yale history education — and a state polytechnic education in one or another technical field. It is not the case that there is no value in a mid-tier technical education; we have whole ranges of schools that teach at those ranges — the problem is, those departments are not accessible to students at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Duke, Rice, etc. We are absolutely not socially well-served by brilliant students who have carefully, rationally, and prudently not studied anything other than history, English, politics and government, international relations, etc., for fear of getting less than an A-. They are brilliant and will probably do well in law or business school — and we would be better off if they had some undergraduate training that told them in a real way about petroleum geology or computer programming languages.”

Photo Credit: Billy Hathorn

Rethinking College Majors

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:01:05 -0700

I made a joke to my friend the other day that the lesson to take away from articles like this recent Economix blog (“The Rising Value of a Science Degree”) and Noreen Malone’s piece in New York mag is that no one should be allowed to be an English major anymore. It was a joke, so obviously this proposition is preposterous on a whole variety of levels. But apparently the English major gods heard me because yesterday I saw an article in the Cornell Daily Sun (my alma mater) describing a recent info session focused on what to do with an English degree after college.

Unfortunately for many English majors, professors broke the news that there isn’t even a guaranteed path to academia anymore, so their prospects are even more devastatingly grim. But one professor recommended that students double major — as much to gain a competitive edge as to ensure an escape route. The Economix post suggests a double major for exactly the opposite reason — science majors could use a second major to give them a little more interpersonal savvy.

This “opposite sides of the same coin” situation has me thinking: maybe universities should move away from the idea of majors and minors, as they are traditionally conceived. After all, the system only seems to be working well for a relatively small and specific subset of college graduates with highly specialized degrees. Students who go down the liberal arts road often find themselves on the fast rack to a u-turn: a first class degree and nowhere to use it.

One alternative that would speak to both the malaise of the English major and the social limits of the STEM student would be for universities to move toward a course structure that allows, say, 3-5 areas of serious focus — a multi-major, if you will. Instead of trying to achieve some vague ideal of well-roundedness through general education requirements, students would choose 2-3 focus areas in the humanities and 2-3 in STEM. The ratio should be up to the student, allowing her to become a top-notch engineer, if that’s her goal, but also instilling the writing and critical thinking skills that will allow her to communicate effectively or switch careers, if that’s what she ends up wanting to do.

In a society where a more technical skill set has become important even in many of the most left-brained jobs, where more and more people switch careers, and where fewer and fewer have illusions that college is sufficient preparation for the “real world,” perhaps this sort of multi-focus structure would be better suited to developing students who can meet the demands — both present and future — of a complex economy.

Let me just say that I’m the first person to sign up for classes like Literature of the Outlaw, 19th century English Literature, and Creative Writing (yeah, I took all of those), but my job and this current economic situation has really forced me to confront the fact that, as much as I or anyone else might want to, no one can hide from math and science these days. Maybe it’s a little authoritarian of me, but institutions dedicated to higher learning and higher tuition(!), have the ability and the responsibilty to confront students with the realities of the job market they will enter while they are still in school, not after. A new way of structuring college education could be the solution.

Photo Credit: Twice25

Thoughts on the Future of the Creative Class

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:00:00 -0700

In 2002, it was easy to imagine that America’s bright future could be realized in the minds of the so-called creative class, a term Richard Florida popularized to denote a class of people who, “add economic value through their creativity.” There was plenty of reason to be optimistic that a new class of working creatives could harness the possibilities of computing technology to drive an increasingly postindustrial American economy.

But then the 2008 financial crisis struck. Since then, the long, torturous unemployment spiral that is its legacy has many, including hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protestors (and now, Occupy Writers!), questioning whether the creative class ever had as much economic firepower as Florida and others expected.

Scott Timberg is one such skeptic of the creative class, arguing that computing technology was supposed to help create more jobs in the swelling ranks of the creative class, but instead it supplanted many jobs and wreaked havoc on the very industries that should be at the forefront of the creative revolution.

Timberg writes:

But for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level — the working- or middle-classes within the creative class — things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold… [E]ducation, talent and experience — criteria that help define Florida’s creative class, making these supposedly valued workers the equivalent of testosterone injections for cities — does not guarantee that a “knowledge worker” can make a real living these days.

Florida responded to Timberg’s contention that the creative class is getting pummeled by the recession, arguing that although the creative class has taken a hit, in general, its workers are better off than those in the working class. And, according to Florida, the prospects for a creative class recovery are better in the near-term as “blue collar jobs are projected to decline by another 1.2 million over the next five or six years, while the creative class is expected to add another 6.8 million new jobs, with employment in arts, design, and media rising by 12 percent, according to projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics covering the period 2008 to 2018.”

But neither Florida nor Timberg adequately address the nuances implied by Timberg’s more provocative allegation — that “the creative class is a lie” because the web has displaced high-level creative class jobs.

On one level, Timberg’s assessment is accurate. Print publishing has suffered the rise of web-based media. There are expertly skilled members of the creative class whose high-wage jobs have been obviated by technologies that make it far more difficult for publications to monetize their content.

On the other hand, Timberg is being a bit myopic. Despite fears of a rogue citizen-blogger takeover, Matt Yglesias writes that paid blogging jobs seem to be on the rise, according to BLS data. That’s not to say that the increase in paid blogging jobs in any way makes up for the mass high-level editorial layoffs Timberg is talking about, but it does suggest that this segment of the creative class is still actively adapting.

Of course, much of that adaptation is contingent on the monetization question, which Florida never really deals with in his response. Technology forces us to confront the challenge of redefining our expectations for the creative class in an economy where it is far easier to be a creative, but far harder to base your livelihood on your creative pursuits. The music industry is another telling example. It’s much easier for a lot of musicians to make a record, build an online platform, and make a little bit of money creating their music. It’s not so easy to make a lot of money, even at the highest levels of the industry.

Thus, what follows from blaming the web for killing the old ways of being creative, is not the conclusion that the creative class is dead, but that adapting has been and will probably continue to be painful as the web, like other highly disruptive technologies, increasingly spawns other opportunities for creatives to repurpose their skills in the new media environment.

In many ways, the economic viability of the creative class is a question of scale — can it really be the major driver of economic growth or is it a necessary but vulnerable player in a complex global economy? If it’s the latter, what does that mean for those in the creative class who are struggling to find any job let alone a job in their field of expertise? What does it mean for millennials who assumed that creativity would enhance their earning potential?

The answers to these questions may change as different industries adapt and evolve in all kinds of ways. By it’s very definition, the creative class seems engineered to continually reinvent itself as the technological innovations its own members produce have all kinds of unpredictable and unintended consequences.

Photo credit: Beth Rankin

Occupy Wall Street and the New Inequality

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:35:00 -0700

Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

If Occupy Wall Street protesters have struggled to articulate their demands beyond taxing the rich, part of their challenge is the changed nature of the economy. In a new article for The Breakthrough Journal, NYU sociologist Dalton Conley notes that while the 1929 stock market crash reduced inequality by wiping out fortunes, the 2008 crash provoked measures that sustained it. “But greater equality after the crash came at a very high price: the Great Depression. So while the response to the 2008 crisis sustained the top-heavy structure of the American economy, it also averted the free fall that threw tens of millions of Americans into unemployment and breadlines throughout the 1930s.”

Moreover, even as the gap between the “99%” and the richest one percent has grown, “the interests of workers are increasingly yoked to those of their bosses,” Conley notes. “Half of Americans today have direct or indirect investments in the stock market, largely thanks to the shift to defined contribution pension plans and the ease of Internet investing… So if the rest of us want to save our 401ks, we have to save the status quo for the robber barons of Wall Street in the process.”

Couldn’t the problem have been solved by nationalizing the banks and redistributing wealth? Such a strategy “might have distributed the costs and benefits of the bailouts more fairly,” writes Conley, and “higher income taxes on the rich, along with more strongly redistributive social programs might succeed in mitigating some degree of inequality. But there are also powerful socioeconomic forces driving inequality.” Conley points to growing global demand for elite knowledge workers (such as by the financial sector) and the widening skills gap.

How should liberalism evolve to deal with the new inequality? By shifting its focus from absolute to relative poverty. When Americans were poor, liberalism’s priorities were food and shelter. Now most Americans are overweight and own their own homes. At the same time, poor and working-class Americans, living in districts with low-performing schools, are at serious risk of being left behind. Liberalism must thus focus on to new ways to expand opportunity, and Conley lays out several.

We should decouple school funding from local property taxes — and/or allow school choice, so the poor can attend elite schools. “Yes,” writes Conley, “fund private school attendance with vouchers, but require participating schools to enroll students from across the income spectrum, thereby increasing opportunity for education and facilitating entrance into the knowledge class.”

We should “de-skill” credentialing monopolies in health care and education. “For example, health care could be provided more affordably if everyone was willing to see nurse practitioners or medical assistants in drive-through clinics and forsake the latest high-tech tests and procedures. College could be more affordable if we adopted an open courseware model and de-emphasized the need for face-to-face contact with faculty members.”

Finally, we must go beyond the fantasy that America’s problems can be fixed simply through higher taxes on the richest one percent. Liberals should embrace reform that could appeal to both reasonable liberals and reasonable conservatives. Tax all income, including capital gains, the same, but also implement a national, value-added (sales) tax, and restrict government revenue to 25 percent of GDP.

While Tea Partiers and Wall St. Occupiers offer ideological slogans to vexing problems, Conley’s ground-breaking essay points to a set of pragmatic solutions — solutions with the potential to appeal to Americans divided by ideology but united in their view that expanding opportunity is a core national value.

You can see Dalton Conley talk more about his ideas for how we might create a new social contract that expands opportunity, below:

Yelp, the Chain Killer

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:47:14 -0700

Some interesting insight into the effects of Yelp on restaurants from Brad Plumer at WonkBlog:

However, looking more broadly, chain restaurants as a whole seem to have declined in market share as Yelp has grown in prominence. “This suggests,” [Michael] Luca writes, “that online consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation.” In 2007, about 50 percent of all restaurant spending, some $125 billion per year, went to chain restaurants. Chains have always benefited from uniformity: No matter where you go, you always know what you’ll get at an Applebee’s or a McDonald’s. Independent restaurants, by contrast, are more of a gamble. But as online review sites like Yelp expand, that’s no longer the case.

The Future of Pop Music and Youth Culture

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:21:11 -0700

Concerns that the US economy can no longer innovate seem to be trickling into the cultural realm. According to Grant McCracken at the Harvard Business Review, some music critics are worried that “innovation in popular music is in decline,” and that, “If this is true, a big cultural change is upon us — the end of popular music as the great lab bench for our culture, as the defining innovator of our time.”

But McCracken recognizes the nostalgia that underlies such fears, and puts forth five ways in which youth culture and pop music are actually changing the boundaries of what those cultural concepts mean today:

1. Contemporary musical forms like mashups are not a “barren genre.” They are merely a new grammar, invented by cultural innovators to express a new culture.

2. Originality is not so much in decline as being revalued.

3. Young consumers are interested in music produced by previous generations, but they are using this music for their own purposes.

4. The new forms of music are expressive of new forms of self and group.
5. If music matters less to the way young consumers define themselves it’s because they have found other, more useful media to do the job. Music doesn’t have to be the innovative media it was for Reynolds’ and other generations. That it worked especially well for earlier generations is due to historical chance and happenstance. Music matters to Reynolds for the same reason books matter to Boomer academics: it just happens to be the form that ideas assumed in the world they grew up in.

McCracken’s conclusion echoes Breakthrough Journal writer Dan Krewson, who wrote of punk’s enduring, if unconventional, legacy in “Punk and Possibility”:

In many ways, punk’s legacy is such that it is now a mark of sophistication among artists to draw from a constellation of influences, just as it was once stylish for prog rockers to draw upon classical music.

Consider Top 40 rapper KiD CuDi. Born in 1984, CuDi unapologetically channels Pink Floyd over Grandmaster Flash. He rhymes about outer space instead of the ghetto and samples Lady Gaga rather than James Brown. He combines orchestral strings with turntable scratching. He references Facebook, Carl Jung, and insomnia, embracing big pop hooks that helped his record debut at number four on the Billboard 200. Asked about his wide-ranging sound and influences, CuDi said, “I did want to make something that would baffle the critics, as far as putting it in a certain genre; I wanted them to have a hard time doin’ it.”

Photo courtesy of Tom Purves via Wikimedia Commons

Honey and the Long Haul

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:45:12 -0700

Check out Hannah’s reflection on writing the book at the Breakthrough Journal.

lareviewofbooks:

MARLENE ZUK

on the beekeeper’s Faustian bargain.
“bee?” © Mark Hanauer http://bit.ly/mSjmaq
Hannah Nordhaus
The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
HarperCollins, May 2011. 288 pp.

Honeybees are like starlings and chickens and thistles and wheat; they do not belong here in North America. Sure, they have been here, by way of Europe, since 1620, but their origins are African, western Asian, and southeast European — criteria by which many of us also lack native legitimacy. In The Beekeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America, Hannah Nordhaus reminds us that honeybees are not indigenous wildlife that have been gingerly tamed, or whose natural proclivities we tweak and observe. Instead, they are more like miniature cattle, which are charming in small numbers as a backyard hobby, but when used commercially can lead to stench and group exhaustion.

The Beekeeper’s Lament is not only about bees, or the people who make a living off of them, fascinating as both of these subjects are. It’s about the dying of rural America, the way we grow and sell our food, the reason people take risks, and, ultimately, about loving, as Nordhaus puts it,
something that can’t love you back, that is just as happy to hurt you, that lives without concern for its keeper or his profit margins or his pride, and that dies with astonishing indiscretion — that simply does what it was born to do.
It is a poignant and keenly observed narrative of almond orchards and a beekeeper’s Faustian bargain. And the story is particularly Californian.

Read More

Visualizing Bars: What WiFi Looks Like

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:43:26 -0700

This video takes the notion of signal “bars” to a whole new, totally breathtaking level. Using long-exposure photography and an incredible 4-meter light stick that measures WiFi, these filmmakers, in affiliation with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, have “painted” a communication network we rely on everyday but can never see — an “immaterial,” as they call it.

You can find out more about the video and the concept of “immaterials” here and here. In the meantime, just watch in awe:

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

h/t: The Atlantic

What It Means to Forget on Facebook

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:57:19 -0700

What It Means to Forget on Facebook:

This post is reblogged from our Associate Editor Yael Borofsky’s blog, Mneumozine, where she writes about memory:

mneumozine:

It’s odd that Facebook makes us worried we can’t forget enough, while Google makes us worried we’ll forget too much. As I mentioned here, it’s as if we don’t even know what to be scared of when it comes to these new web technologies. We’re just anxiety-ridden about the whole kit-and-kaboodle — memory, forgetting, privacy, open source, transparency, anonymity. To me, at least, it feels like a “can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em” situation that’s actually sort of calming, both in its familiarity and its uncertainty.

The latest buzz this week has come from the tech swarm around Facebook’s new Timeline feature, which I honestly haven’t even broached yet. But I hear tell that it’s literally a chronological record of everything you’ve ever posted to Facebook. Ever. In the history of your experience on the site. For me, that’s about six years.

Whoa.

Without dwelling on that horrifying number, I want to turn to a tumblr post from the Village Voice’s music editor, Maura Johnston, who jotted down some interesting reactions to the Timeline feature and what it means in the context of privacy and memory:

I think there’s something to be said about the idea of personality development over time that makes me quite uneasy about Facebook’s exuberance over being able to chronicle one’s whole life on the service. What does that do to the notion of memory, the fuzziness of which can have helpful functions at times? There are people who have been on Facebook since their teens—how is their development into adulthood affected by their past being so present? Shouldn’t people have the option to escape their pasts, or at least aspects of their pasts, if they’re hindering their personal development? Obviously there are degrees of the latter ideal—I’m not saying, hey, get away with murder and then expunge that fact from your record with a control-X—but I feel like the idea of having your whole life at your fingertips can be a bit of a trap, and can cause old patterns to persist for longer than they should.

My first reaction to this is to wonder how exactly development is (or is not) affected across the lifespan by what you might perhaps call a hyper-salient past? I’ll do some digging and report back on that question.

In the meantime, I also wonder how much features like Facebook’s Timeline are something we should actually worry about versus just something whose novelty we should acknowledge makes us feel “quite uneasy.” After all, it’s ok to be uneasy about new things, especially when their potential consequences are tough to evaluate.

I think Maura is right to point out that the “fuzziness” of memory “can have helpful functions at time.” That gets right back at this recurring theme that memory is actually a highly selective process (as opposed to accretive) and — with the exception of some relatively minor social fumbles that occur when your memory decides to filter out someone’s name, birthday, etc., — that’s a good thing. Facebook wasn’t around when I was in middle school but if it was, man oh man, would I desperately want Facebook to do me the mercy of letting me forget it.

But that desire right there is what I think is most interesting about Maura’s post and about this whole Facebook timeline concept. I have a much younger sister, we’re talking almost nine years here, and Facebook was around when she was in middle school, which was less than two years ago. So, not only is the question: how does a hyper-salient past affect my cohort’s development, if we can recall a time when the past, our previous selves, weren’t so hyper-salient? But also: how does a hyper-salient past affect my sister’s cohort, who probably won’t remember a time in which there was no public record of every sort of person you’ve ever been?

To give a blunt example, if you used to be fat before the advent of Facebook (B.F.) but now you’re thin and you don’t want anyone to see that you were ever fat, no one has to. But if you used to be fat after the advent of Facebook (A.F.*), there’s a pretty public record that, at the very least, your immediate friends can always unkindly remind you of. How does that affect say, self esteem, in the two different cohorts I outlined? Or as Maura mentioned, how might that affect habit patterns?

For me, and everyone older than me, maybe that makes for a few nasty situations. Of course that could happen any time someone or something from the past ruffles up some conveniently forgotten memories because they knew you in a so-called past life. But what if everyone younger than me habituates to the constant availability of a partially-public development timeline and instead of CHANGING EVERYTHING, it barely changes anything?

And once we get used to how Facebook helps us remember, what if one day our timeline gets lost. What will we be worried about then?

- yael

*heh - lame, I know.

What Comes First: Philosophy or Politics?

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:23:43 -0700

Andrew Sullivan raises an important question: “Where does political philosophy come from?”

Will Wilkinson says, “politics,” asserting that we construct our political philosphies around our politics to “justify our pick.”

But a couple of months ago, the Dish’s Zack Beauchamp said the exact opposite. He made the case for “philosophy,” grounding his argument in the theory of motivated reasoning, by explaining that we are predisposed to pick our politics to align with our moral philosophies.

Is this a “chicken or the egg” sort of question? Is it different for everyone? What do you think come first?

Duh-pocalypse is not at hand

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:57:33 -0700

Before I left for vacation in mid-August, Neal Gabler had a thought-provoking NYT Review piece, “The Elusive Big Idea,” which argued that the age of the influential big idea is dead. The piece was largely (and somewhat rightfully) dismissed by many who filed Gabler under, “you just don’t get it,” — along with others who seem to lack faith in the capacity of people to adapt effectively to new technologies.

Before this piece gets lost in the abyss, I wanted to point out that over at Nieman Labs, Megan Garber did the important work of pinpointing why Gabler is wrong: in a new media landscape, new “Big” ideas just look different:

“Gabler assumes that ideas are individual things: discrete, definable, the products of individual genius and inspiration. It’s not the theory of relativity; it’s Einstein’stheory of relativity. McLuhan’s notion of the medium. Marx’s economics. Freud’s psychology. Etc. In the past, Gabler notes, wistfully, ideas were empowered not only to “penetrate the general culture,” but also to “make celebrities out of thinkers.” Ideas, in that framing, aren’t just glorified media events; they’re also personal creations that can be directly, and conveniently, associated with the creators in question.

Increasingly, though, the ideas that spark progress are collective, diffusive endeavors rather than the result (to the extent they ever were) of individual inspiration. Ideas increasingly resist branding. The idea of the idea is evolving. We don’t treat Google like a Big Idea — though, of course, that’s most definitely what it is; we treat it like Google. Ditto Facebook, ditto Twitter, ditto Reddit and Wikipedia. Those new infrastructures merge idea and practice, ars and tecnica, so seamlessly that it’s easy to forget how big (and how Big) the ideas that inform them actually are.”

What Dr. Seuss Might Say About Health Care

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:53:57 -0700

When it comes to complicated policy issues, don’t we all sometimes wish we could have Dr. Seuss explain it to us with perfect end rhyme and rollicking pictures?

Over at Marketplace, Gregory Warner applies Seuss’s childish genius to a decidedly kid-unfriendly policy problem: “our big debate about job growth and our big debate about healthcare debt.”

Enjoy:

Oh The Jobs (Debt?) You’ll Create! from Marketplace on Vimeo.

H/T TNR

English in the Age of the Internet

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:04:00 -0700

Although the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary seem to be racing to keep pace with a growing lexicon of catchy new Internet slang, Professor David Crystal says the internet hasn’t altered the English language all that much. The advent of the web, particularly web 2.0 technologies, however, has led to an outpouring of new styles of English, impacting the way in which we use it to express ourselves.

Here’s Crystal, for Macmillan:

Can Cyber College Close the Education Gap?

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:06:20 -0700

The University of California (UC) plans to launch a classroom-caliber online education program this coming January. UC’s newest contribution to e-academics is fueling important debate about the future of secondary education in the age of the Internet.

Financing issues aside, can this type of innovation expand secondary education access to poor and working class demographics who have been unable to cross what Dalton Conley describes as an “educational gap that is widening at precisely the moment when education has become most critical to their economic prospects”?

For the US military, at least, the answer may be yes. UC is pursuing action that will allow military personnel to “take online classes while on active duty, preparing for transfer to a four-year university.”

For other disadvantaged or unconventional demographics, the accessibility of UC’s online education experiment may take time to sort out. Still, top-tier online academic programs could have important implications for families overwhelmed by the current cost of a conventional college education as well as for low-income young people who might otherwise be locked out of the knowledge economy.

How Social Media Really Impacts Social Uprising

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:30:13 -0700

Mubarak set the example, Qaddafi learned the lesson, but apparently BART missed the memo that social-networking software may not be as effective as it appears at inspiring rebellion. Cutting connectivity to prevent an uprising, however, works like a charm, finds a new paper, “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

According to a New York Times report on the study:

“His [Navid Hassanpour] conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.
To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

…

In an interview, described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.”

Podcast: Nordhaus Re-thinks the Role of Government

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:04:45 -0700

Executive Editor Ted Nordhaus joined the Ben and Joel Podcast, led by Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, to discuss what’s new at the Breakthrough Institute and the Breakthrough Journal. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but Ted took the time to explain that we need to answer two important questions as we re-think the role of the government in our modern lives:

1) What we want government to do?

2) How do we think government should do that?

Click here to be taken to the full podcast. The bit where Ted explains what we need to think about as we figure out the role that government should play in our lives runs from 2:50 - 7:05.

Mini-Dialogue:

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:46:17 -0700

The acrimonious debate over raising the debt ceiling, the subsequent downgrade of American credit, and plummeting stocks worldwide, has finally brought home the harsh reality of just how broken Washington DC is. To quote from Standard & Poor’s justification for the downgrade, “More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, U.S. policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures.” Instead of solutions, the continual crisis has led to an epidemic of posturing and “brinksmanship,” the all-time lowest approval rating for Congress, and a global economy that tumbles on the words of a few self-appointed ‘experts’. This crisis of credibility has destroyed the ability of the American government to respond to any other challenge.

What does this latest loss of faith in government imply for the future of US policy-making and what it might it mean for the project of modernizing liberalism articulated by the Breakthrough Journal editors?

How can we restore a responsible and effective government capable of legislating under the pressure of immense domestic and global 21st century challenges?

Below multi-generational policy thinkers share their vision about where the U.S. goes from here:

Mike Lind, New America Foundation: “When pirates capture a tanker, one does not blame the ship’s design. The problem of conservative obstructionism in Congress is a political problem, not a structural defect of Congress or government as a whole. Conservatives have intimidated moderate Republicans into acquiescing in their strategy of using any and all chokepoints to advance their radical agenda. The solution, like the problem, is political. If moderates cannot marginalize the far right within the GOP, then the militant-controlled GOP must be marginalized by a more popular and successful Democratic party. Blaming “the system” or implying that all sides are to blame just diverts attention from politics to process.”

Rob Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation: It’s long been popular to blame Washington for the nation’s problems, but no more so than now. It’s Washington’s intransigence and corruption that is to cause for the latest financial downgrade and debt ceiling brinksmanship, so goes today’s common wisdom. If only elected leaders would 1) get a spine; 2) be term limited; 3) stop being so partisan; 4) be more partisan and stand up for their beliefs, or (fill in your favorite complaint here), then all would be well.

Let me suggest that this has it fundamentally backwards. As Alan Simpson once said shortly before he left the Senate, I know people are fed up with Washington, but let me tell you something, I am fed up with the American people. Right on, Alan! Try running in any Congressional primary, Democratic or Republican, have a key plank in your platform that for the good our nation we need to raise the gas tax and use the money to invest in infrastructure. Odds are you will be voting in the general election for someone other than yourself. We haven’t raised the gas tax since 1994 and it’s lost considerable purchasing power since then due to inflation. And the result is that as a nation we massively under invest in surface transportation infrastructure (roads and transit). But any effort to tell Americans to stop being so selfish and instead start worrying about the good of the nation and our children, is met with disdain or worse. Try running in a Congressional primary and saying that for the good of the country we need to raise the retirement age to 70 (including for government workers) and index Social Security benefits to inflation, not wages. Again, good luck with that election.

In other words, over the last generation Americans have turned inward and selfish. Today’s John Kennedy’s call to arms “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” is as quaint as a Ben Franklin proverb. So before you once again blame Washington at your next cocktail party or barbeque, take a long look in the mirror and remember Pogo’s advice, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Teryn Norris, Americans for Energy Leadership: If modern liberals want to salvage the United States from a decade or more of political dysfunction and economic malaise, they need to present a clear choice to the public in the years ahead: elect “leaders” who refuse to govern and would tear the country down, thus empowering China to dominate the 21st century, or choose a responsible vision and agenda to rebuild the nation and reclaim American greatness for decades to come.

Despite the current dysfunction, exceptionalism still runs deep within the American psyche, as it has since the founding and throughout Civil War and Great Depression. As national pollster Stan Greenberg has said, “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

Earlier this year, a Gallup poll found that 52% of the public would name China as the world’s “leading economic power,” the highest percentage favoring another country in Gallup polling history. In contrast, only 7% named Japan, and just 3% the European Union. Meanwhile, the IMF recently projected that China’s GDP will surpass the U.S. by 2016, measured by purchasing power parity — a vastly over-optimistic prediction, but shocking nonetheless.

Those who are still committed to American leadership — Democrats and moderate Republicans alike — must recognize one clear reality that’s emerged over the past two years: it is not enough to simply discuss the potential benefits of sensible economic policy. The public needs to understand the full stakes for the United States and the world if the Tea Party succeeds and we fail to pursue a proactive economic growth strategy. And what’s at stake is nothing less than the American era and international order as we know it.

Don't Cut Investment, Cut the Deficit

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:45:10 -0700

According to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, the debt ceiling is just a distraction. The real problem with the American economy is not that one number (the national debt) is getting close to another number (the GDP), but that the economy is losing it’s innovative fire. But there are lots of policy changes that could translate the latest scientific breakthroughs into commercial products, bring smart people to the US and keep them here, and invest in the clean energy technology of the future. Sure beats hunkering down in a bunker with gold (or beer) and guns:

“Consider this: increasing the country’s average growth rate by one percentage point over the next 20 years would not only result in much higher incomes and more jobs for all Americans but would also obviate the need for drastic spending cuts today to reign in the government deficit. With a 2% increase per year, average incomes in the United States, and to a first approximation government tax revenues, would be 49% higher in 20 years than they are today; with a 3% increase per year, they would be 81% higher.”