http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/05/do-big-cities-help-college-graduates-find-better-jobs.html

“Why, for one example, struggle so hard to craft the ACA and protect it from political backlash, why make legislation which could so easily be painted as a labyrinthine mess of contradictions and confusion because it is a labryinthine mess of contradictions and confusion, when there was ample evidence that a solid majority of American voters would support a simple strong regime of mandatory cost controls and something rather like a single-payer system? ”

Tim, sort the US Senate from left to right. Start at the left, and count 60 Senators over to the right, ending up at the Senator 41st from the rightmost. The bill had to get the votes of all 60 of those.

Yes, that is true. One of the most frustrating things about elected lawmakers is their apparent belief that if you ban the things you don’t like, then the things you *do* like will naturally take their place. (Bans on abortion in the hope of promoting marriage and family-focused childrearing; bans on new road construction in the hope of promoting mass-transit uptake; and so on.)

Although really, the problem with providing vocational training is that if there were vocational jobs to be performed then you wouldn’t *need* government-funded vocational training, because students who couldn’t hack high school would drop out and go get that training from their employer.

It used to be that the dumb kids could drop out after 6th grade and go work on the farm, or in the factory, or the mine, or the construction contract firm, or the auto repair shop, and that would be their job until they hit retirement age. These days, we’ve moved the mines to Africa and the factories to China; the farming is done by machines; and construction is done by guys outside Home Depot who have a weird lingual amnesia triggered by the words “social security number” or “green card”.

You say “not if college is the essential entry point to anything but subsistence service labor”, but the problem is that there are no more jobs than that for people who aren’t smart. You see it in the protests about better wages for fast-food service workers. It used to be that fast-food service was an entry level job that you used to build experience on your way to something more rewarding. These days, fast-food service is the only job some people will ever *have*.

I agree with you, but telling DD that he needs to come up with a plan for solving the problem he has identified is a waste of time. My father, who had the outlook of a philosopher (even though he was a mechanic), often said that there are three eternal questions that engage humankind: “Where did I come from? Where am I going? What should I do while I am here?” My mother, who had the outlook of an engineer (which she may well have been if society and circumstances had given her the chance), posed her own eternal questions. There are four of them: “Where do we stand? How did we get here? Where do we want to go? How do we get there from here?”

I often talked with my father about the myriad ways his three questions could be answered, and it was lots of fun. But, usually, he would end our conversations by telling me that I should answer his third question: “What should I do while I am here?” by trying to answer Mother’s four questions.

I did as he said, and my working life was very rewarding. I felt that I was accomplishing something that contributed to the common good. It was a hoot.

But since I retired in 1995, I have become weary of hearing so many people, thousands and thousands, complaining about our situation, as well as identifying all kinds of problems. I hope for solutions, but I don’t see them. The closest thing that I see are people who say that we have to vote, or march, or write our congressmen, or, in general, work harder within the current system. That will never work.

So, what is your solution? What is DD’s solution?

My solution, which I have worked on for more than sixty years, is to answer my mother’s four questions:

Where do we stand? We are saddled with human nature, with human history, with the wrong form of government, and with badly designed education, business, economics, and religious systems.

How did we get here? By rewriting the history of our nation in terms of the effects of human nature, we can easily see how we got here, and we can see even more clearly where we are headed.

Where do we want to go? First, we do not want to go where we are now headed. We can’t replace human nature, but we can control it. The Framers tried, to a degree, but they failed. The Greeks tried, and succeeded internally, but were too small to deal with Persia, Macedon, and Rome. But, we can use the superior ideas of Athenian democracy to revise our government and thereby control the negative effects of education, business, economics, and religion.

We don’t need to do much with science, engineering, technology, and mathematics, except to fund them and follow their lead with an occasional plan to show them where we want to go and need to go.

How do we get there from here? The only group who can get us to the place we want to go is the age cohort I think you are most concerned with. I mean Americans under age 26. There is a way to organize these young people so that they can actually take the lead in changing our overall system. The technology is already is here, the funding can readily be obtained, and the need is overwhelming. These young people can, and should, perform this mission without any assistance from the current elected and appointed officials of our government. Other leaders of education, business, economics (especially economics), and religion also will be excluded from leadership positions in the new mission.

The specific changes I propose are revolutionary, but so was our war with Great Britain. Most revolutions of that sort involve violence and years of recovery. But our revolution can be non-violent. Instead of guns and bombs, all we need is the keyboard. In taking the lead in this revolution, our young people will not only transform our government, but they will transform the education system in ways that I think you would approve, and they will serve common good. They, like the similar age cohort that fought in WWII, will do a mighty thing.

These changes are risky, but no less risky than the task that faced those children of the Great Depression as they responded to Pearl Harbor. For most of my conscious, thinking life I have known these people, I have heard their stories, their hopes and their worries. If we had given them the chance, things would be much different and much better today.

I know what I say sounds arrogant, but how else to say it? I think it needs to be done and I am doing it. My ideas and plan may be silly, but they also may work. I do know that when I finally publish my plan, and it won’t be long now (I think I am about to wander out of the woods), it will be the best plan I can propose, and it, (now here is the arrogant part) will be the best plan put on the table since FDR’s programs.

Yes, you are a prude. Own it.

But not if college is the essential entry point to anything but subsistence service labor. That’s the point: if you want to define a bottom minimum of what “college” is but you decline to define and invest in some other kind of extended training or vocational education, all you’re doing is telling all the people who no longer have colleges that can accept them that they’re screwed. They’ll still need to go, want to go, not because they believe in “college” but because they have aspirations to do something other than live below the poverty line. This is roughly the same as what K-12 publics do with the students who are “doomed to fail”: since they kill your bottom line in an NCLB regime and get teachers and principals fired, and since no one has any will to educate those students or imagine possible futures for them, everyone plays ding-dong-ditch with those students until some school gets stuck with them and runs out of ways to hide their existence. This is just the same on a new scale: it denies that there could even *be* a vision of what to do with the Americans who can’t get into the new “improved” colleges that won’t dare to accept them anyway or it at least kicks the can down the road to players to be named later.

The thing is, though, that everyone has finally admitted that pre-college schooling in America is basically twelve years of day care, and that a high school diploma is not an indicator of quality in competence or intelligence. And so college now plays the role that high school used to play, because it’s possible to fail out of college. It is not possible to fail out of high school. The only way you will not receive a high school diploma is if you do not show up to the graduation ceremony. Sometimes if your performance is truly dire you may take a couple extra years, but you’ll get there.

And that applies to teachers, too. College teachers can be fired more easily than pre-college teachers, and so it is possible to set a line below which performance is unacceptable. Which is where the President is coming from; while it makes little sense to come down hard on schools that can pick neither students nor staff, an organization that can set standards for its raw material and its workers can presumably be expected to perform at certain levels.

I agree with the general thrust of your argument, but I would suggest it puts too much stock on technocrats as individual actors. Their awareness of what they are doing is secondary to the outcome of what they do – outcomes which, by the way, often end up being just as harmful as what the market ‘fundamentalists’ advocate outright. i am not advocating an orthodoxly structural analysis, but why put so much stock in ‘rational actor’ approaches? Rather, we might ask what are the social forces/dynamics that make these ‘choices’ appear to be the ‘best’ of all available options. I think you start to get at this question here:

“But if the federal government wants that outcome or we want that outcome, then figure out an answer to the question, “So why do students and their families actually pay so much for a bad service?” The answer is a little bit, “Because there’s not enough information out there to make a good choice” and a lot, “Because they have to.” Why do they have to? Because there are too many people chasing too few jobs, and because employers are using credentials as a proxy for, “People who want the jobs bad enough that they might do the job well”. The more people that get the credentials, the more that people looking for a proxy that makes a more and more arbitrary process of selecting a candidate manageable look for more credentials. Which turns higher education into a kind of death march of debt and dysfunctionally pegs its content to whatever concretized credentials desperate middle managers think they need for jobs that really just take common sense, critical thought, energy and the ability to communicate.”

I would suggest it largely comes down to a question of the articulation of the state with capitalist interests – something which you do not dwell on here (at least not directly) although plenty of education critics have done so.

Unrelatedly – regarding your use of ‘go suck a bag of dicks’: I am no prude, but I regard this as a pejorative phrase toward both heterosexual women and gay men.

You asked three questions in the fourth paragraph:

1—Why do technocrats insist on indirect, stealthy approaches to objectives they refuse to declare directly?

They do this because they were trained to do it by the elite universities they attended. They were trained to be clever and obscure. For example, James Madison was at his most clever and most obscure best in Federalist 10.

2—Why not talk more clearly about both the philosophy and the goals behind a major public policy initiative?

Goals in particular are part of an engineering process. Engineers do not become consultants at the highest levels of government. Economists and practitioners of other pseudo-sciences get those jobs.

3—Why do technocrats still not understand after all this time that it is precisely their indirection that continuously fuels American popular skepticism about ‘government’ and robs them of the political goodwill of many people who actually support the values or objectives that can be dimly discerned inside of the Rube Goldberg machine of some over complex policy apparatus that is being dragged through the torturous rounds of our highly dysfunctional bureaucracies and legislature?

Wow. A 73-word question. It may require an even longer answer. The short answer is that technocrats are aware that the popular skeptics say what you say they say, but they (the technocrats) consider this to be a confirmation of the popular skeptics’ stupidity. For example, Paul Krugman, a technocrat whom I follow assiduously, has on two occasions in recent weeks talked about the inability of the People to understand that a family is not like a government in that the family cannot increase its income at will, while a government can. He is very irritated about this. But I am irritated at his inability to understand that the People do understand about the income issue, while they also understand that the family, or at least the ideal family, follows policies that governments should also practice but don’t. For example, the People understand that families have to make plans that aim at goals with milestones, with costs, and dates of completion, and families expect every member of the family to adhere to the plan. The People want their government to adopt those policies, and apparently you do also.

Today I saw President Obama at some university taking questions. One came from a professor, a technologist—not a technocrat, who asked why the government would not provide some goals, some funding targets, some dates, etc. so that his group of alternative energy source technologists could make their own plans to dovetail with the government’s plans. Obama ducked it, and he took a long time to do it.

In another take on the problems with our education system, I read today an essay in the September issue of Harper’s magazine with the title, “Wrong Answer, the case against Algebra II.” The author freely lambastes those who insist on teaching Algebra II to our high school students. He reminds us of the vapid and wrong-headed reasons that the establishment gives for such torture. I took Algebra II, I taught Algebra II, and I worked in a field where one would expect to use Algebra II, only to find that it was of no use to me at all. You are not alone in your concern although I am sure you know it already.

I have long thought that Algebra II should be replaced with a different type of course that would prepare students to go to a different kind of college. I think that is what you are talking about here. I think you are talking about a technological solution, and I am with you all the way.