Monthly Archives: November 2021

the ROI for philosophy

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In Monday’s Washington Post, Jon Marcus writes that “one of the most basic measures of student success” is whether a degree in a particular subject “will provide [graduates] with the gainful employment they need to make it worth the price.” As an example of a bad outcome, he notes that “a philosophy degree from Oberlin costs $142,220 and graduates two years later make $18,154, on average.”

This fact comes from a study by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREO), which “conclude[s] that more than a quarter of programs — including most of those in art, music, philosophy, religion and psychology — leave students financially worse off than if they’d never enrolled.” I’ll raise a few methodological questions later, but first–how should we think about the values at stake here?

Preston Cooper of FREO writes:

This isn’t to say that lower-earning majors are worthless. Society needs artists and musicians. But low incomes for these majors signal a supply-demand mismatch. Universities are producing too many art majors and too few engineering majors relative to the number of jobs available in each of these fields. As a result, employers bid up the wages of engineers while surplus artists flood the labor market. The answer is not to eliminate low-earning majors nationwide, but to reduce their scale.

Many (not all) art majors want to be artists, and if artists’ earnings are very low, that suggests a problem. One solution would be to reduce the number of art majors. Another would be to expand society’s demand for artists (which doesn’t necessarily imply government funding for arts, although that could be one strategy). A third response is to expect artists to tolerate low pay–as we have long done. Which solution we prefer depends on how important we think art is for the society as a whole.

Liberal arts majors are different. Few philosophy majors, for instance, ever enter the job market for philosophy. They end up as lawyers, k-12 educators, business people, founders of LinkedIn–and of course, the proverbial taxi drivers who can quote Kant. The purely economic question is not whether we are producing too many historians, philosophers, and literary critics, but whether a liberal arts education has sufficient value in the general job market.

If philosophy majors get good jobs, that is because employers value clear writing and good reading skills, or because completing a liberal arts degree signals “cultural capital” and membership in an elite.

If, on the other hand, the data show that fields like history and philosophy produce low wages, that suggests two significant problems. First, if majoring in these disciplines is financially costly, they will be luxury goods that only wealthy families can afford–which is bad for the disciplines and unfair to young people of other backgrounds. Second, if we assign most of the society’s work of historical and philosophical inquiry and art criticism (etc.), to professors of those subjects, and if the number of jobs for professors is affected by the number of majors in their disciplines, then these social functions will be limited. We won’t get a very impressive culture under those circumstances.

We need philosophical inquiry, historical depth, cross-cultural understanding, and aesthetic excellence. Those ideals would not, by themselves, justify liberal arts majors that turn out to be costly for individuals. After all, there are other ways for a society to inquire into philosophical questions than to educate a very small number of undergraduates as philosophy majors. I am especially interested in strengthening the liberal arts outside of academia. (See a way forward for high culture.) We could consider organizing undergraduate education in ways that did not depend on majors. However, as long as we are not actually implementing any alternative strategy for producing excellent forms of culture, then poor financial returns to liberal arts majors would be a problem.

But is the empirical finding correct? The lifetime returns for a philosophy degree vary enormously by institution. According to the FREO study, majoring in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania would net you a handsome $1,250,711 over your lifetime, but a philosophy degree from Loyola University Chicago would cost you $419,352 compared to not having a degree at all. From those two examples, one might hypothesize that philosophy pays at highly prestigious institutions, but if that’s a trend, it admits much variation. Philosophy majors from Illinois State do pretty well (ROI = $197,864), while graduates of the excellent NYU department are $259,265 worse off for having obtained a BA. This looks like noise.

One solution would be to combine the people with a given major from all universities. Apparently, 80% of philosophy & religious studies programs have negative returns if you remove financial aid and assume that students must pay the whole cost. But with a variance among philosophy programs of nearly $1.7 million–from very profitable to very costly–I am somewhat skeptical about the meaning of this aggregate statistic.

Also, the FREO study assumes (with some grounding in previous research) that 80% of the benefit of a graduate degree over a BA is attributable to the graduate degree. But it could be that majors in subjects like philosophy help students to obtain valuable professional degrees next. If that is true, the study underestimates their economic returns.

In any case, the economic question is not the only one to consider. To me, the really important question is how our society as a whole addresses ethical, interpretative, aesthetic, and conceptual matters. Offering liberal arts majors and using the revenue to fund scholarship in those disciplines is only one model. It may be a flawed one. But if it is flawed, we need better ways to accomplish the task.

See also: rationales for private research universities; the weirdness of the higher ed marketplace; David Brooks/Pierre Bourdieu; what kind of a good is education?

a simulation to teach civic theory and practice

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My book entitled What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life will be released in April 2022. It summarizes the concepts and ideas that I believe are most useful for people who want to improve their communities and the world. It is based on many years of teaching undergraduates and advanced graduate students and seasoned practitioners, while studying and promoting civic education in K-12 schools.

Obviously, my list of concepts and how I think about them are completely debatable. But what if we wanted to teach many people some set of such concepts without explaining them all (as in a book or a series of lectures)? Could we teach these ideas experientially, so that students consulted manageable bites of theory as they worked together on civic problems? And could we make the learning scalable, so that students could experience it in many schools, colleges, and community settings?

I am thinking about an online simulation along these lines. …

The setting would be a fictional community–maybe a smallish US city with a declining industrial base and a diverse population. (Other versions could be built with different settings). Players could consult summary statistics about this community at any time, such as its unemployment rate, the ratio of arrests by race, or the number of people using its main park. Those statistics would be affected by the players’ choices and behavior–as well as by random factors beyond their control.

Each player would simulate a fictional character who would have personal characteristics, values, and goals; various roles (e.g., a parent of a child in the public schools; the mayor of the city); some money; and the ability to make menu-driven choices at any moment. These choices would sometimes be affected by other players’ actions. Examples might be expanding or contracting one’s own business, voting for various candidates in a mayoral election, or attending a protest, among others.

There would also be organizations: governmental agencies (such as the school board), private associations, and media platforms.* Players would have roles in these organizations, such as a member, a leader, or a subscriber. They would be able to start new associations and media platforms. Governmental agencies would be able to create new agencies under certain circumstances.

Each organization would be able to make choices, such as how to allocate its resources and govern its assets. It would have rules for making these choices, for determining who belongs and holds various roles, and for changing its own rules. For instance, the members of the school board might be elected, they might make decisions regarding the schools by majority vote, but only the city government could change these rules. Meanwhile, a private association might be structured so that anyone could join and might simply be a space for conversation, with hardly any rules.

Players would not be able to communicate with each other at will. True, in a real city, it might be possible for anyone to get any official’s email address and contact that person. But a senior official is unlikely to give a random person much attention–if any. To simulate the friction and inequality of communication in the real world, players would only be able to contact others through organizations, and each organization would have rules for interaction. For instance, members of the school board would be able to message each other freely. When they were together in a group chat, their messages would be open for anyone to read (simulating a public meeting). They could message all parents on a one-way basis. And they could maintain a message board where parents could post comments for them to read. A protest group or a newspaper would have different rules for communication. This means that if you wanted to influence the mayor, you might have to join an association in which the mayor is active, or persuade the newspaper to cover your issue and hope that the mayor reads messages from the newspaper.

The game would start with characters already holding memberships in organizations, and organizations already having rules. Characters might even have drafts of messages ready to send that would start the business of the community. (For instance, the editor of the newspaper would have almost everyone as a subscriber and would have a draft message ready to send to solicit news tips.) Once the game got underway, characters would begin to change their status in many ways and communicate with each other. As a result of all their choices, the community’s statistics would gradually shift.

Finally, each player would have a student page for work outside the game, such as short written assignments that could be graded. Here the student would also see links to accessible summaries of concepts relevant to current events in the game. For instance, if your character is dealing with a good (such as green space or public safety), you would see a link to a wiki-like entry on types of goods, drawn from Elinor Ostrom, that could inform your behavior and give you material to write about. If your character faces a conflict, you would see a short reading on negotiation. If your character is involved in a protest, you would see an entry on social movements.

I can also imagine a hybrid version, with face-to-face meetings of characters plus “meta-discussion” of issues that arise in the game occurring during class time.

*The organizations would not include for-profit firms or markets. My instinct is that fully simulating an economy would make the game too complex, even though the economy is certainly relevant. The focus would be civil society and the state, with the market somewhat to the side. However, individuals and organizations would have economic choices to make, and some characters would have disproportionate economic influence as business owners or investors. Getting them to make helpful individual choices would often be an important strategy for shifting the community’s outcomes.

Shaun Chamberlin on David Fleming’s Vision of Post-Capitalist Life

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Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist, has long been involved with the Transition movement; with climate change activism; and with a titanic effort to popularize the work of his former mentor, David Fleming. On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #20, I speak with Chamberlin about these issues as well as the fragility of capitalism and our post-capitalist future.

Chamberlin is arguably the leading authority on David Fleming’s work. Fleming was a British polymath, political economist, and cultural historian involved with the Green Party, Transition movement, and climate activism, who unexpectedly died in 2010.

He left behind an unpublished manuscript that he had been working on for 20 years, which few people had read. It fell to Shaun Chamberlin, Fleming’s long-time colleague, to turn the manuscript into Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. The book was published in 2016 and promptly showered with awards and acclaim.

Lean Logic consists of some 600 pages of “dictionary entries,” or mini-essays, on such topics as “Climate Change,” “Reciprocity and Community,” “Debt,” and “Systems Thinking” as well as “Religion,” “Death,” “Presence,” and “Play."

Some entries are several pages; others are just a paragraph or two. Readers can pore through the entries in any sequence they find interesting, but in whatever order they are read, taken together they offer a brilliant perspective on the problems of contemporary capitalism, the vulnerabilities facing human civilization, and how a post-capitalist world will likely evolve. Especially intriguing are Fleming’s speculations into how cooperative culture will surge as modern capitalist structures and markets fall apart.

The publication of Lean Logic spurred a wide public interest in Fleming’s ideas, perhaps because he addresses topics that are very much on people’s minds, but not often approached with frank realism and subtlety.

The book’s success was helped along by a shorter companion volume that Chamberlin prepared, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. This book is a more conventionally structured book of essays that distills the best of Lean Logic but edits the text into a “linear read,” meant to be read straight through, from front-to-back.

The entry on “Death” gives a sense of how Fleming’s method and depth.

“Death. The means by which an ‘ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places….The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win.”

An entry on “Carnival” explains how “the making and sustaining of community requires deep presence and empowerment, with three key properties” – a “radical break” from the everyday; the elevation of the “animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen”; and a “sacrifice-and-succession” process to affirm the ability of a community to survive and even be immortal, despite the death of community members.

In other words, Lean Logic offers a lot to reflect on. If you'd like to dip into David Fleming's world and check out his sensibilities, visit the Lean Logic website at https://leanlogic.online.online.

Over the past decade, Shaun Chamberlin, while promoting Fleming’s writings, has pursued his own set of system-change initiatives. He leads a course, “Surviving the Future,” through Sterling College in Vermont. And with a friend, Mark Boyle, he recently launched “The Happy Pig,” a “free pub, bunkhouse and community space” where people can connect and enjoy each other’s company.  Chamberlin shares his research and writing at his website Dark Optimism.

My podcast interview with Shaun can be found here. 

Shaun Chamberlin on David Fleming’s Vision of Post-Capitalist Life

Posted on by
Reply

Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist, has long been involved with the Transition movement; with climate change activism; and with a titanic effort to popularize the work of his former mentor, David Fleming. On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #20, I speak with Chamberlin about these issues as well as the fragility of capitalism and our post-capitalist future.

Chamberlin is arguably the leading authority on David Fleming’s work. Fleming was a British polymath, political economist, and cultural historian involved with the Green Party, Transition movement, and climate activism, who unexpectedly died in 2010.

He left behind an unpublished manuscript that he had been working on for 20 years, which few people had read. It fell to Shaun Chamberlin, Fleming’s long-time colleague, to turn the manuscript into Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. The book was published in 2016 and promptly showered with awards and acclaim.

Lean Logic consists of some 600 pages of “dictionary entries,” or mini-essays, on such topics as “Climate Change,” “Reciprocity and Community,” “Debt,” and “Systems Thinking” as well as “Religion,” “Death,” “Presence,” and “Play."

Some entries are several pages; others are just a paragraph or two. Readers can pore through the entries in any sequence they find interesting, but in whatever order they are read, taken together they offer a brilliant perspective on the problems of contemporary capitalism, the vulnerabilities facing human civilization, and how a post-capitalist world will likely evolve. Especially intriguing are Fleming’s speculations into how cooperative culture will surge as modern capitalist structures and markets fall apart.

The publication of Lean Logic spurred a wide public interest in Fleming’s ideas, perhaps because he addresses topics that are very much on people’s minds, but not often approached with frank realism and subtlety.

The book’s success was helped along by a shorter companion volume that Chamberlin prepared, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. This book is a more conventionally structured book of essays that distills the best of Lean Logic but edits the text into a “linear read,” meant to be read straight through, from front-to-back.

The entry on “Death” gives a sense of how Fleming’s method and depth.

“Death. The means by which an ‘ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places….The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win.”

An entry on “Carnival” explains how “the making and sustaining of community requires deep presence and empowerment, with three key properties” – a “radical break” from the everyday; the elevation of the “animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen”; and a “sacrifice-and-succession” process to affirm the ability of a community to survive and even be immortal, despite the death of community members.

In other words, Lean Logic offers a lot to reflect on. If you'd like to dip into David Fleming's world and check out his sensibilities, visit the Lean Logic website at https://leanlogic.online.online.

Over the past decade, Shaun Chamberlin, while promoting Fleming’s writings, has pursued his own set of system-change initiatives. He leads a course, “Surviving the Future,” through Sterling College in Vermont. And with a friend, Mark Boyle, he recently launched “The Happy Pig,” a “free pub, bunkhouse and community space” where people can connect and enjoy each other’s company.  Chamberlin shares his research and writing at his website Dark Optimism.

My podcast interview with Shaun can be found here.