A Struct-Christian alliance?

Lastly, in the long run we are most certainly dead. If you don’t see that, then you are simply not thinking long term enough. ~Karl Smith

In that post, Karl yet again reiterates what I think is probably the most sensible and least likely stimulus policy possible right now: tax relief or suspension coupled with funding government expenditures entirely with T-bill sales. I say most sensible because real interest rates are below 0. I say least likely because debt is such a big deal right now that it crowds out all rational thinking.

But back to the long run.

I find it extremely convenient and intriguing that the Structs and Austrians are aligned with the right. These are the people who think the right medicine for the economy is the infliction of pain and suffering. These are also the people who tend to infuse their rhetoric with the most religious thinking. Do you see where I am going with this?

We have an equilibrium where some of the strongest advocates for structural reform and pain have a general worldview imbued with the idea that salvation is not for the temporal world – but that suffering through this life is the proper trajectory toward it. These ideas are strange bedfellows because these economic ideas, as far as I am aware, are not the product of religious thinking. But bedfellows nonetheless.

The same with the converse – the most liberal minded individuals are Cycs. They are those who understand that this world is extremely important and that in fact people are suffering and even dying, right now, because of an unnecessary crucible.

So when Karl yells from the mountaintops that in the long run we are dead, I wonder if that doesn’t even undermine his case with the kind of people who would toss the economy into the abyss rather than vote to take on more debt today. Death is when we get the rewards.

PS I am not trying to shoehorn people. One reason why I like market monetarism so much is that you have right-minded people with an eye toward structural reform who nevertheless understand the need for a robust stimulus. I’m just looking at who tends to move under the same tent these days.

POTUS led an LBO, remember?

Corey Booker is right that the Obama administration is acting absurdly and childish.

Corey Booker is right that this whole discussion of Bain Capital is nauseating.

Private equity is the dark side of capitalism in some ways. Such firms’ game is to catalyze creative destruction. Specifically: squeeze every ounce of productivity possible out of failing firms and dump them when the timing is right by either palming them off or taking them public.

Some firms might not have failed if not taken private. Some firms failed anyway. Not the point. There’s no reason to become mired in counterfactuals and fostering employment is not the goal of private equity. Some asshole discovered a number of years ago, not that many really, that you can  buy out companies, pile them on with debt, and that it was possible to make enough return in doing so to be profitable. Private equity was born.

Anyone who has worked with private equity, including yours truly, understands that these firms are willing to do what it takes to turn around a business, and often their greatest asset (from the standpoint of achieving their ends) is their ability to let people go remorselessly.

What intrigues me is that I think, in a way, Obama and Romney are on opposite sides of the issue from where they ought to be.

Romney’s experience at Bain helped him prove he is a capable manager and a bright man. He’s sharp. He is a rare example of a very rich boy who still earned most of his life’s wealth. That’s admirable enough. There’s no reason to lie about creating jobs through private equity. He’s pigeonholed now.

Our president, on the other hand, detests private equity only when it’s not being performed by the government — call it “public equity.” It’s ruthless when rich people invest in companies that restructure failing ones by in part laying people off. It’s heroism when the president unilaterally decides to make the American people equity holders in an operation to restructure the darling auto industry and to abuse the rule of bankruptcy law in the process. Taken at face value, the president’s stated positions are that private equity is inhumane and exploitative while an LBO of the auto industry designed to score political points is laudable.

And yet, despite maximizing political capital rather than monetary return, the LBO of GM did just fine. President Obama, and to be fair Tim Geithner, were leaders of one of the more successful LBO’s since the financial crisis.

Because Obama hates private equity, he can’t play that up. Because Romney loves private equity, he has to concede the auto bailout was successful. This is in spite of Obama supporting publicly-backed leveraged buyouts and Romney detesting them.

Modifiers.

Paul Krugman:

The point, again, is that an institution like JPMorgan — a too-big-to-fail bank, not to mention a bank whose deposits are already guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers — shouldn’t be engaged in this kind of speculative investment at all. And that’s why we need a return to much stronger financial regulation, stronger even than the Dodd-Frank regulations passed back in 2010.

Good columns outline specific solutions in spite of the fact that a column is a short and general space that does not lend itself well to being specific and wonkish.

This word “stronger” is what gets me. Does that mean “more” or “better” or “more and better.” You’re going to get a lot of empty campaign rhetoric, but I wonder how much of the substantive differences in both sides can be outlined by simply switching modifiers. I might support legislation that breaks up big banks, believe it or not, if I got a tradeoff that greatly reduced the size of the administrative state.

On Eduardo Saverin.

What does it mean to “owe” something to “The United States”? This question, prima facie, appears to have deep deep implications. Yet you wouldn’t know if if you read the majority of media opinion on Eduardo Saverin.

With his first straw man sentence, Bruce Ackerman sets up an entire stream of wrong-headed thought:

Is citizenship a commodity, to be bought and sold when the price is right?

This is the kind of poor thinking that many otherwise sophisticated individuals have exhibited when commenting on Eduardo Saverin’s decision to forgo his citizenship. I happen to believe one can and should think of citizenship in market-like terms, and I will explain why later, but no one (especially Saverin) is even suggesting what Ackerman opens with. Ironically, Ackerman seems to think there’s something abhorrent about a market in citizenship even as he uses cost as a stick with which to abuse would-be renouncers. He starts with an appeal to nationalism.

This dynamic creates a dilemma in national self-definition. We should not close our doors to thousands of entrepreneurs yearning to realize the American dream. This is, after all, the land of opportunity. But citizenship is more than an ordinary market transaction. It is a personal commitment to the nation and its welfare. This core principle is threatened when relative newcomers, along with some native sons, follow Saverin to the exits in search of tax havens.

So what’s Ackerman’s solution? Raise the *cost* of “selling” one’s citizenship back.

Nevertheless, the right to repudiate can now be exercised at too low a price. At present, Saverin and his followers can renounce the U.S. and then return at will on short-term visas as tourists or business travelers. So long as they can flit in and out, they will enjoy many of the benefits of citizenship while evading their fair share of federal and state taxes.

I’m not trying to beat up on Ackerman myself, but I am rather trying to expose the inconsistency in the position taken by many conservatives, and disappointingly, liberals. Agents of the state cannot be blamed for manipulating this minor controversy to support increasing the state’s claims on citizens, but it’s a shame that opinionmakers, especially in media, are so complicit in this kind of poisonous nationalistic catharsis.

The Wall Street Journal is a little more congenial to my position, in a backhanded way:

Not that we have any sympathy for Mr. Saverin, whose citizenship decision is a remarkable act of ingratitude toward the country that welcomed him as a child from Brazil. America’s rule of law and relatively open markets have allowed him to take $30,000 in savings and turn it into Facebook shares that after Friday may be worth more than $2 billion. For anyone who saw his portrayal in “The Social Network,” his citizenship choice plays to sad type.

This intrigues me, but I don’t think I’m convinced that our rule of law and markets mean that Saverin should be grateful to “America.” Saying this country welcomed him is a stupid cliche and really means nothing in the real world. I think he should maybe be grateful to a handful of VCs. Accepting an enormous tax burden is a high bar to set for exhibiting gratitude, and the logic of the WSJ suggests that anyone who did well in America is stuck here lest they be rude. At least they note at the end that the decision to leave says something about America’s competitiveness.

On the other end of the debate, Reihan Salam offers a reasoned analysis for why our public policy orientation toward expats is pragmatically bad. He makes a good case that we want an outward orientation because even if we’re not collecting tax revenue from Americans abroad, they are engaged with a much wider array of experience that can be translated into innovation in the home country. But really, there’s this:

Think about it. The United States has been greatly enriched by migrants from countries like the Philippines, France, and India, who were educated at great expense in those countries yet who’ve come to our country to make their way in the world. These countries do no vindictively tax those who emigrate or declare them traitors, at least not now. Countries like India used to take that approach, yet they eventually realized that this was profoundly foolish — that moving to opportunity was in many respects a good and noble thing that could benefit the home country and the world. Wouldn’t it be strange if the Italian government in 1905 decided to tax the Sicilian immigrant who left Italy behind to make good in the rag trade in New York city?

Understandably, we’re used in this country to being the place that anyone who is anyone wants to be. And for good reason. That’s decreasingly the case though, and is irrelevant to the fact that the double standard is glaring and absurd. Our immigration policy is far too restrictive, especially for highly skilled workers, but we’re damn glad to have them when they get here and do amazing things. Bruce Ackerman isn’t saying that innovative immigrants owe a monetary or moral debt to their home countries. You can be sure there would be outrage if India or China came down on individuals seeking to renounce citizenship and emmigrate. One might expect a plausible manifestation of this scenario to involve human rights rather than taxes. The real question though is whether one can justifiably draw lines in the sand or whether the real issue is a fundamental right to self-determination. Obviously I come down on behalf of the latter. And most “patriotic” Americans fervently defend the right to renounce citizenship because of taxes every year on July 4th anyway.

Now, I noted earlier that I actually support viewing citizenship like a market — but not quite like Ackerman paints it. National boundaries are arbitrary and largely the result of state-sanctioned and orchestrated slaughter. But they contain political regimes of varying degrees of desirability across an array of measures. In this country, our nationalism and xenophobia pairs with our generally pro-market culture to produce this strange bias of anti-labor mobility and pro-capital mobility (free trade). Citizenship is essential to the anti-labor piece of the puzzle, although we usually discuss it with respect to low- and sometimes high-skilled immigrants rather than emigrants. From the standpoint of the kind of deeply libertarian political economy I support, I am enticed by the idea of lowing all but geographic barriers to citizenship. In practice this is impossible, but they could certainly be much lower, which would stimulate much more competitiveness among governments that I would find quite desirable for more than the obvious opportunity it presents to get Tom Friedman to finally leave for China for good. Obviously most people are tied to their nation of origin and have emotional bonds, but on the margin a fair number of people could be persuaded to take their civic business elsewhere. I would thus add this to the pragmatic case for not hating emigrants.

What I’m particularly interested in though is a deeper question about what kind of duties and obligations individuals have to the “state” regarding citizenship. In my readings this has been touched on best by A. John Simmons in Moral Principles and Political Obligations. It’s a fascinating survey of Western conceptions of duty and obligation. Disclaimer: Simmons is a philosophical anarchist, so one ought to expect a vigorous anti-statist stance from him anyway. That doesn’t mean compelling accounts are free to ignore him, obviously.

One of the insights of the work is that the “duties of citizenship” are what Simmons calls “positional duties.” By being citizens, we are obliged to perform certain functions. That ought not to be taken to mean that we have a moral requirement. The mere existence of an institution cannot be taken to justify this alone. After all, there are plenty of institutional regimes which are unjust and we certainly wouldn’t tell someone they are morally required to obey it because they are born there, even if they are obliged to obey. This is reasonable. This is also important when thinking about the accusation being leveled against Saverin that he owes something to the United States.

This statement comes in two parts.

As I see this, one part is that Saverin has a moral bond with the state through his citizenship. This doesn’t seem right vis-a-vis the above because it seems to suggest that merely by being a citizen one is morally bound, as proposed legislation to remedy this apparent problem is broadly tailored and appears not to account for substantive justification of moral obligation. The logic being forwarded is that Saverin has so obviously gotten so much out of his citizenship, that he should be so grateful for it, he must be punished for forgoing it. The fact of the matter is that Saverin could have made his riches without being a citizen, and maybe would have if we had a more just immigration regime to begin with. Really, the question of whether Saverin is morally bound to the state or bound to be merely grateful are two distinct questions. I don’t think there is a compelling case for either, but Saverin has said (genuinely or not) that he was glad for the time he was citizen.

Yet even if one were to establish that Saverin owed something to the United States by being here — that is, established a strong particularist case for why his positional duties were accompanied by moral duty — it is also necessary to establish a compelling case for limiting consent. This is something I absolutely cannot abide by. Since Locke, the idea of the consent of the governed has been central to Western philosophy and is deeply ingrained in the American foundational myth. Consent has all kinds of problems because you can’t actually ask everyone if they agree to the political institutions they are living under (and why would the status quo want to?), but surely we are pissing on the concept by demonizing and financially penalizing people who want to leave. It is already extremely prohibitive for most people to leave the nation and emigrate, which is one reason why mostly rich people do it now. If we believe in consent, then passing legislation that makes it costly to renounce citizenship and ensures life-long de facto and de jure persecution by many of the nation’s institutions makes us a less just regime. Period.

Salam rightly notes that there are a number of reasons for Saverin to prefer Singapore to the United States. He was never deeply attached to this place, Singapore isn’t going to tax his capital gains, and Singapore has an efficient public sector relative to the United States. If Saverin is ok with the drawbacks of living in Singapore, I can’t think of a conception of justice that suggests he should be coerced into staying here anyway. Surely empty rhetoric such as “you owe us!” can’t count. I myself don’t like to chew gum and eschew nationalism — maybe Singapore is for me, too.

To sum it up: I expect the state to impulsively act to extract wealth from individuals and to seek to prevent them from absolving their civic obligations, or at least exploit their doing so for political gain. The glaringly obvious perverse incentive which gives rise to this gives me pause before simply siding with the pols. I wish our thinkers in the media would do the same.

Straddling marriage.

Molly Ball on how Romney and Obama are both on the wrong side of most Americans’ views on marriage. Only thing I wonder is if it’s symmetric, i.e. is one farther from the median voter than the other? It’s like a simple game but one strategy (Marriage, No unions) is incoherent. And we don’t know any of the payoffs.

Racist blogging is racist blogging.

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

 

That’s the most substantive passage in Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education about black studies. That’s after she makes demeaning statements about theses she hasn’t read based almost entirely on their titles. After initially defending Riley’s right to post on the Chronicle’s blog, she was dismissed.

Conservatives say this is typical authoritarian left wing crap. Lefties only want free speech for their ideas. As RedState put Riley’s dismissal: “This would not be tolerated, if  Ms. Riley was a Marxist.”

What does that matter? That’s my question.

I don’t believe in this sort of relativism. I read Riley’s post, and it’s total crap. It sucks. If Riley had good reasons for bullying the authors of a handful of theses, she didn’t convey them and thus she did a terrible job. The post reads as if it is from someone who actively looks for affirmation that black studies is bullshit. Again, maybe that’s not her, but her inability to portray that is damming. If a Marxist basely bashed a bunch of econ theses for being neoliberal, I would still call it crap. Maybe the Chronicle would have acted differently, and that would say something bad about the Chronicle. But this post, guys, isn’t worth defending.

The Chronicle has and should have the liberty to fire crappy commentators. That people are up in arms because this offensive drivel was cause for a parting of the ways smacks of moral equivalence: more affirmation of the ongoing persecution of conservatives by the monolithic media. Again, maybe that is true, but this post isn’t making the case well.

RedState finds this whole ordeal unconscionable because apparently Riley is much smarter than she lets on in her writing about her thoughts on black studies.

Naomi Riley is a former editor at the Wall Street Journal and has published several books on higher education, including The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For.    WSJ has published Riley’s response to being terminated:  “The Academic Mob Rules.”    You can read Ms. Riley’s bio and contact herhere, and judge for yourself about her credentials.

 

This kind of absurd extrapolation from titles, which are at best a rough metric of actual insightfulness, is pervasive in the culture of higher education. But if your defenders dedicate a post to you and defend your acumen by reading off your resume, not by leaning on the substance of your work, then the battle is already lost.

Hayek and the UBI.

Will Wilkinson has been reading Bleeding Heart Libertarians, where Kevin Vallier has dug up some enlightening words from Hayek about the Universal Basic Income.

From Vallier:

On Hayek’s view, the UBI is required as a condition of democratic legitimacy within the framework of a social contract. I’m not saying Hayek is a social contract theorist, but he sounds like one in this passage. In order for a democratic government to be legitimate it must treat people as equals by imposing only abstract rules on them. Government gives no one special privilege, and this requirement is compatible with providing them with means to secure basic goods and services.

Hayek has a lot of sophisticated reasons for rejecting the idea of social justice in particularist cases. Vallier talks about coal miners: how can you set a floor on their wages in a just way when no one knows what a coal miner’s wage ought to be? They are set by the market, and thus there is no criteria to judge what is distributionally just other than by the outcome of procedurally fair market processes.

On a more abstract level, Hayek had a sophisticated grasp of the complexity of the market, which he termed the catallaxy (a specific incarnation of kosmos, or spontaneous order), and it’s fundamental difference from simpler forms of man-made order, which he called taxis. These are under-appreciated insights, the implication of which is that it is neither just nor prudential to try to interfere in distributional schemes. Because there is no decider is not grounds to appoint one, because it will lead to bad practical outcomes. And it’s philosophically incoherent. According to Hayek.

Again, this is with respect to particular cases. Most people who understand Hayek on a cursory level understate his emphasis on the need for universal abstract rules to govern the complex orders. Here’s a relevant passage that dovetails nicely with Vallier’s post which comes from Chapter 10 of Law, Legislation and Liberty:

The need to rely on abstract rules in maintaining a spontaneous order is a consequence of that ignorance and uncertainty; and the enforcement of rules of conduct will achieve its purpose only if we adhere to them consistently and do not treat them merely as a substitute for knowledge which in the particular case we do not possess. It is therefore not the effect of their application in the particular cases but only in the effects of their universal application that will lead tot he improvement of everybody’s chances and will therefore be accepted as just. [emphasis mine]

This thinking need resurgence (if it was ever more prominent, which I doubt), by both right and left thinkers. However, it won’t happen, because this thinking relegates politics to the pursuit of instituting and maintaining general principles of justice in a system that runs off of particular handouts and the arbitrary appointment of spurious decision makers. That’s a shame: this thinking is an excellent basis for squaring support for the UBI and a wariness of “social justice” as traditionally understood by reconceptualizing it in general, rather than particularist, terms. But that kind of fusionism is also something that institutional political interests have a vested interest in preventing.

Loss and stagnation.

Steve Randy Waldman says in his February 15, 2011 post that he’s late to the game on Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation. That makes me unbelievably late, but I the piece has been linked to again recently and with its minor resurgence I have a few reactions.

I am especially fond of Waldman’s discussion of “information asymmetry industries,” namely government, health care and finance. Waldman elsewhere sings the praises of finance’s lack of transparency as core to its functioning, but he’s right that regardless it makes accounting for the value of finance difficult to untangle from mere transfers. I an age of increased rent-seeking from finance, this is surely a problem for the official accounts.

I’m less amenable to his treatment of technology.

I remain agnostic on the question of whether a slowdown in the pace of technological change is largely to blame for whatever it is that ails us. I wouldn’t rule it out, but like Kevin Drum and others, I see a lot of very real “low hanging fruit” arising enhanced capabilities to coordinate and collaborate via internet and information technologies. These benefits go well beyond “cognitive surplus” and bemused infovoria. [1] Coordination technologies, ranging from assembly lines to the limited-liability joint-stock corporation, contributed mightily to past golden ages of advancement and growth.

I’m not entirely sure what is being said here. On the one hand is a discussion of information technology, but the last sentence suggests other technologies. Because the assembly line revolutionized production, I don’t believe it follows that IT might do the same. In a way, IT has changed our lives dramatically and disruptively. But I think an enormous amount of information technology has entailed minor marginal increases in value. Most of the IT that touches my life involves Apple products. I own the majority of Apple’s product offerings I think. I love my iPhone and iPad and my MacBook, and all of the opportunity they have unlocked through ancillary technologies that utilize them. But I don’t think I’m immensely more productive and indeed much of my time is devoted to utilizing these technologies for leisure. Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history and it’s a website designed for procrastinators. I don’t mean to pick on Waldman but I think the wow factor of technology has made a gross overvaluation of it endemic.

Now I’ll end on a positive note with something that struck me as particularly insightful. Here’s a relevant quote :

the concentration of economic power that attends technological changes demands countervailing state action if any semblance of broad-based affluence and democratic government is to be sustained.

This was opportune that I read this just after reading Jay Cost’s National Affairs essay on The Politics of Loss. Cost believes that our national political future is particularly grim because the chief role of government in the near future will be to allocate losses, instead of the gains of the past century. He warns Republicans that their advocacy of free markets is problematic because

The GOP’s emphasis on free markets inevitably tilts fiscal policy toward capital owners, at least in the short term. This is not because the Republicans have always been “the party of special interests,” as the fiery Truman once put it, but because Republicans believe that the private sector’s allocation of capital is the most progressive force in the world — and that it will produce broad prosperity if given enough time. If that widespread prosperity is not forthcoming, however, the political appeal of the conservative argument collapses, and Republicans suddenly appear to be a party of plutocrats, robbing the poor to pay the rich.

Maybe now is the time for the old refrain: In the long run, we’re all dead.

We blogged elsewhere.

Slightly belated. The College Fix, a right-leaning online college news blog, asked for some reaction about Obama’s appearance on Jimmy Fallon taped here at UNC. the rhetoric was tempered in the editing process and it reads more measured but less stark now. Also not happy with “automated flying death machines” being changed to “automated drones” but hey we all have editors and I defer to judgement.

A taste:

There are many more important issues the president could have addressed. After all, this is a president who continues to abuse civil liberties and who has authorized the killing of American citizens using automated drones. Yet he cares about our student loans—how comforting.

On Tuesday UNC students were granted a unique opportunity to see the President in a setting that was uncharacteristically informal, especially in an election year. Plus we got to experience the taping of an entertaining television show. With all that excitement, it was damn hard to care about anything but the moment. That’s awfully satisfying for people who, considering the current youth unemployment rate, are soon going to have far more serious things to care about.

I also go into some of the election dynamics that make NC a tight and much-desired race for both sides. The overarching point though is that we all had a great time – but that doesn’t change the basic facts about this administration and some of the failures, and atrocities, that have occurred.

College: slouching toward consumption.

Many people find it strange to realize that higher education spending is classified as a consumption item by the government. Clearly it seems much more naturally classified as an investment. We’re cultivating human capital here. Or at least that’s the proximate reason we come to college.

Yet it’s increasingly clear we’re getting ripped off (or maybe we’re ripping off our future employers?). David Brooks is worried that the lack of measurement in collegiate level educational outcomes is going to doom our higher education system.

There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.

This is absolutely true insofar as Brooks is concerned with a few core outcomes: critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. These are from “Academically Adrift,” which Brooks leans on for his assertion that students simply seem to not be learning. He mentions a number of possible remedies, especially (*gasp*) standardized testing. That sounds anathema, but I’m not sure how else we can reach anything close to an objective assessment of learning outcomes that we can interpersonally and inter-temporally compare.

This won’t do, many of my peers cry. College is so much more than answers on a standardized test. It’s four years of incredible experience. We grow as humans. We love, we laugh, we cry. Many travel to foreign lands and do varying degrees of studying there. We network with future leaders in business and politics. We get to see some awesome entertainment events that come to universities to capitalize on scale, especially sports. We also learn a few intellectual things along the way.

This kind of experience is very meaningful for people. But it’s hard to value and definitely hard to assess. Also, its value lies with the student, and not with future employers. However, what we do know is that this kind of life experience might be one of the most valuable things money can buy. This I now turn over to Garrett Jones, who argues persuasively to me that memory ought to be classified as a consumer durable.

People often shrink from driving to a distant, promising restaurant, flying to a new country, trying a new sport–it’s a hassle, and the experience won’t last that long. That’s the wrong way to look at it. When you go bungee jumping, you’re not buying a brief experience: You’re buying a memory, one that might last even longer than a good pair of blue jeans.

Psych research seems to bear this out: People love looking forward to vacations, they don’t like the vacation that much while they’re on it, and then they love the memories. Most of the joy–the utility in econospeak–happens when you’re not having the experience.

One more thing he says: we should accumulate memory as much as we can when we’re young. It’s durable. You get more years to enjoy it the younger you get it. And since it’s the original experience is ephemeral, you don’t get bored of it like many other purchases you buy. It doesn’t lose it’s shine.

Jones doesn’t mention higher ed, but it seems like the perfect candidate to me for this kind of spending. Increasingly, it appears that a justification for college by college students is the accumulation of a treasure trove of memories they intend to cherish. These memories make them happy, and they believe that the experiences they remember helped them to flourish, which makes them all the more gratifying.

I don’t see this is a retort to Brooks though. College has traditionally been an investment in one’s personal human capital. For those who are looking at a person and measuring up the value of their education, they are still likely to be solely interested in how much they learned. I think we can increasingly see college today as having both a consumption and investment component. We’re building our knowledge, and we’re buying memories. Those are memories that mean something to us, and they are instrumental — we get to signal our status in society by sharing our collegiate memories. They pay huge dividends. Almost no one except prospective employers cares what you got out of college other than knowing that you went, and finished, and feel good about it. This unlocks productive dinner conversations with people of privilege who can advance us even further in life.

That’s well and good. But it doesn’t change the fact that the proximate reason for college — to learn — is not being delivered upon. Learning, monetarily, happens to be the most valuable part. Memories have value, but knowledge is what delivers humans to the highest paid levels of the modern service economy. So with college cost inflating, and students increasingly substituting out the most valuable aspect of college for the more temporally gratifying, but subsidiary component, something’s not adding up. What I believe Brooks is saying is that actual transparency about how college is delivering on the things future employers value will help bring that equation into balance. I tend to agree. Without the data, employers can still perform their own assessments, but often take our intellect for granted. We’re screwing them with every marginal increase in beer consumption at the expense of study hours, even as college becomes more and more about professional accreditation. We’re laughing all the way to the bank.

I think my peers would actually agree as well, even though they don’t want to. Like I said, it feels intuitively wrong to call college a consumption purchase. On some level, we know what we’re supposed to be here for. If things keep going along this trajectory, though, college will authentically be pure consumption before long. That means it’s value lies almost solely with the consumer.