It's looking like my blogging may be on hold for a while. Last week I was informed that one of my siblings has been diagnosed with a severe health issue. I am obliged therefore to drop a number of things so that I can fulfill my duty to my family. I don't exactly know yet what will be needed. I am flying to So. Cal. next week to find out.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Precarity, Late Capitalism, And Artificial Intelligence: Pinocchio's Mischief
"...the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite. In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..." These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout. And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible. The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us. The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy..."
- First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence? What is the theoretical basis of AI? How does it work?
- What can AI do and not do?
- What countries are at the forefront of AI deployment in their societies?
- How will AI capabilities likely evolve over the next few decades?
- What effects might AI have on human life and human societies over the next few decades?
- How will AI affect the world of work over the next few decades?
Sunday, September 3, 2023
The Educated Precariat: Why The Mismatch?
This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity. As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession. The most recent previous post in this series discussed the university system as a machine that produces graduates for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those graduates because of the fact that there are more graduates being produced than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.
"Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status." [Emphasis added.]
"The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time. The problem can be viewed two ways. In one sense, we have an “underemployment” problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess. The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'overinvestment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives. The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing moreslowly than the supply of those holding such degrees. Hence, more and more college graduates are crowding out high-school graduates in such blue-collar, low-skilled jobs as taxi driver, firefighter, and retail sales clerks..."
Sunday, August 20, 2023
The Educated Precariat: Mandarin Spoilage
- He or she could become a career scholar, otherwise known as an academic. This academic career could be focused on teaching or on research, or on a mixture of both.
- He or she could become a member of the professional class, the "managers, officials, and professionals" described by Gary Roth in his book The Educated Underclass.
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes
- Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
- These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
- Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
- Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs. Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing. McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.
Friday, July 28, 2023
FOTF Is At It Again ...
Sunday, July 23, 2023
The Educated Precariat: The Modern University - Birth, Growth, Late-Stage Diseases
- The creation of cadres of people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.
- The teaching and research of basic scientific knowledge and skills in such arenas as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.
- It received students from everywhere and not just its own local region.
- It engaged in higher learning, going beyond "the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages" to include the re-discovered teachings and writings of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle as well as Arabic learning.
- "A significant part of the teaching was done by Masters (teachers with a higher degree)." (Peters, cited above; Healey, cited above.)
- It was a self-governing, autonomous institution (a corporation run like the craft guilds) with a high degree of control over its budget and expenditures, and complete academic freedom over what degrees were awarded, and to whom. Indeed, those universities which depended entirely on student tuition had complete control over their own budgets and expenditures. (Axtell, cited above.) This self-governance was usually exercised entirely by the university faculty, that is, the collection of masters who taught university courses. However, sometimes, this self-governance was exercised by students, who could choose which masters to hire or fire in addition to their other administrative powers. (See the University of Bologna, for instance.) Note that there were no early cases of universities being run by "administrators" who were not directly involved in teaching or learning. This point will become important later.
- Its main function was to produce the European equivalent of mandarins and other "professionals to maintain and lead the established social order, secular as well as religious." (Axtell, cited above.) Research was not a major function of the medieval university, although the influence of Aristotelian thought on the university curriculum did produce a spirit of inquiry.
- The individual universities eventually became part of a European university system in which a degree issued by any one university was recognized as valid by any other university and anyone who achieved the degree of master was to be recognized as such by any university and to be allowed to teach at any university without having to undergo further examination.
Although the medieval university system did not deliberately focus on research, the fact is that a large number of scholars who were products (either graduates or professors) of medieval universities went on to do the work that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. These included such figures as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It can be argued that the contributions of such intellectuals were greatly amplified and expanded by the transformation of the German university system, even though the stated motivations for that transformation were not initially the pursuit of practical scientific knowledge. According to Lindsay and Neumann (cited above), the reforms of German universities triggered in the 18th and 19th centuries were "based on an acceptance of the view that the purpose of higher education was to advance as well as to preserve and transmit knowledge." However, another significant motivation for these reforms was the fact that Prussia had been badly humiliated by France during the wars of the early 19th century, and so the German university system was reformed in order to catch up with and pass up the French.
"Universities should view knowledge as incomplete and so subject to discovery, although full or final knowledge could never be attained. Further, knowledge was pure and was tobe found deep within the self. It could not be gained merely by the extensive collection of facts. Only knowledge that came from, and could be developed within, the self formed one's character; and it was character and the manner of behaving that was important for the state and for humanity, not merely knowledge and eloquence ..."
"Over the last decade, university research has gradually changed its character under the influence of cost pressures, ambivalent public attitudes, and increasingly narrow notions of "utility." The natural sciences have received higher priority, and research has been increasingly concentrated in large teams and centers. The proportion of applied research has increased and closer links with industry developed. These trends have contributed to a weakening of the teaching-research nexus. Relationships with government have been marked by increasing bureaucratization and control. The business community and the government both stress the contribution of university research to national economic and social renewal, but the pattern of postwar development in higher education has brought utility into conflict with excellence, the traditional criterion for funding research. The challenge is to incorporate utility into research policy and funding without compromising the pursuit of excellence."
"... corporations of learning [which] set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of theuniversities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers thatdevolve on them."
In other words, even as far back as 1918, American universities were viewed by their administrators as businesses. (For a look at this process in an Australian context, see "How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations", James Guthrie and Adam Lucas, 2022.) (BTW, lemme break one thing down for ya: when Veblen uses the term "captain of erudition," what he means is "business executive as college administrator.")
What's more, even as far back as 1918, the function of governing these universities was being moved away from faculty and students, and was being transferred to administrators who had no direct role in either teaching or learning. Veblen was ruthless in his evaluation of these administrators: "They are needless..." (That's "needless" as in, "useless"!) Yet the ranks of college administrators have grown steadily over the decades, at first slowly, then meteorically during the period from the 1970's onward. I don't have time to write the statistics here (it's late in the day - gotta clean the bathroom and kitchen, and water the vegetables!), but I will leave a list of articles that interested readers can check out themselves if they are curious. Suffice it to say that the administrative function of modern universities has begun to displace all other functions, hogging resources like a cancerous tumor even as faculty tenure is eliminated, faculty input into university policy is marginalized, faculty pay stagnates or declines, the percentage of adjunct faculty relative to full-time faculty increases, and student tuition (along with student debt) skyrockets.
It may well be that the growth of the administrative and non-teaching professional sector of university staff has begun to threaten the long-term economic viability of American universities, both public and private. This would explain two phenomena which I have noticed over the last decade or so and which I identify as possible coping mechanisms: the increasing promotion of university athletic programs (particularly football) in universities which never used to care much about athletics, and the expansion of a bewildering offering of professional graduate degrees and certificates. I suggest that these professional graduate certificates and degrees are producing a glut of mandarins of the Global North at a time in which the job market for these mandarins is becoming saturated.
What is to be done about these new mandarins and their dwindling job prospects? One suggestion comes from Peter Turchin, a corpulent Russian academic who has proposed that elites should limit access to higher education lest their less fortunate yet educated underlings become a source of the kind of upheaval and social transformation that destroys the power of these elites. I can't say that I agree with his moral viewpoint. I argue that education should be made as widely available as possible precisely because of the power of educated people to transform situations of inequality dominated by entrenched elites. But for this to occur, ordinary people must regain a sense of the purpose of education in order that they might produce and revive grassroots expressions of that purpose. More on that in another post.
- "Globalization, Neoliberalism, and International Student Enrolments in Higher Education: Expanding Global Interconnectedness and Academic Commodification", pages 32-42
- "Degrees of Change: How New Kinds of Professional Doctorates are Changing Higher Education Institutions"
- Article by Michael Delucchi, Richard Dadzie, Eric Dean, and Xuan Pham in Review of Social Economy, June 2021 (Language warning!)
- "A Bad Bargain: Administrative Bloat and Low Faculty Pay at UDC"
- "How Much is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs Through Effective Oversight"
- "Report: IU Athletics generated 13th most revenue nationally in 2022"