re: "How Do You Know You Have Been “Educated”?"

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz addressed the swindle at the heart of the education bubble.

Money quote(s):

"(M)any of these young people may not understand that they aren’t really, despite the time and money spent, actually educated.

The liberal arts of today are those fields with little or no empiricism. In other words, if the field doesn’t have a lot of math, the information it deals with is subjective and untestable. Even supposed “soft” sciences in the liberal arts like sociology or psychology lack true scientific rigor. Given that, how do liberal-arts graduates know that they’ve really been taught something worthwhile? How do they know they haven’t been loaded up with gibberish?"

I recall my freshman 5-hour engineering calculus professor explaining that the reason for learning all that math was simply so that people couldn't lie to you, that you would be able to tell when something wasn't mathematically so, that you would know what was true (and what wasn't).

"Most of what is taught in the liberal arts does not equip the student with objective skills. Instead, most of what students learn are elaborate hypotheses validated only by a popularity contest among the professors themselves. Most of those hypotheses will end up judged by history to be gibberish — e.g., Marxism.

Most degrees in the liberal arts, especially the advanced degrees, really just equip the student to become a liberal-arts professor. Given how few professorships open up, most liberal-arts graduates don’t actually end up with marketable skills.

I think a lot of liberal-arts graduates have been convinced they have learned something of great value. Why should they believe otherwise? We are taught since childhood how wise and wonderful all our teachers are. We are told how uplifting and ennobling education is. Why would students question whether their trusted professors are teaching them anything true and/or valuable in the future workplace?

What a horrible realization to find out that you haven’t actually been educated. What a horrible realization to find out you owe tens of thousands of dollars and you don’t have any skills to compensate. What a horrible realization to find out you are no more employable than someone who never went to college in the first place.

These kids feel cheated and they are right. They were told they were actually getting “educated” but they weren’t. They borrowed tens of thousands of dollars for nothing."

Postgraduate studies are a mechanism for producing more academics; professors, in other words. And since there simply aren't enough professorships to go around, it amounts to something of a Ponzi scheme run by universities.

11/8

re: "College As Ritual"

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz examined the consequences of faulty assumptions.

Money quote(s):

"A constant refrain is that young adults went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees and now they can’t find even minimum wage jobs. I don’t think they really understand the purpose of education."

The purpose of education, from the standpoint of a student (and their long-suffering parents) is to prepare someone to enter "the professions." From a societal standpoint, such as that envisioned by the Morrell Land Grant Act, was to train tomorrow's leaders of society, to include the training of militia officers.

"Carefully missing from most of the complaints is the type of degree they got, but I think it’s fairly clear that most of these people got liberal-arts degrees. Moreover, there is no evidence that they pursued these degrees with any eye towards practical economic returns for their considerable financial investment.

I really get the sense that many of these people simply don’t understand that an education is supposed to equip you with skills that make you valuable to other people. Instead, I think these kids have somehow got the idea that college is more of a ritual you have to go through, a kind of right of passage, that entitles you to a middle-class or better life-style while pursuing a job you find interesting and emotionally fulfilling."

The mindset isn't all that new, and it wasn't all that long ago (just a few short years) that possession of the sheepskin itself was a sufficient credential to guarantee a middle class job (or better) and the lifestyle that went with it.

The availability of massive amounts of student loan money has allowed universities to ramp up their fees many times the rate of inflation; after all, the students would simply borrow the money anyways. What matter that the universities and our government have successfully created the country's first nation-wide debtor class of indentured servants.

"We need to think long and hard how so many young people simply don’t understand the purpose of education. Where did they get the idea that a liberal-arts degree automatically entitled them to a middle-class income that could easily pay off tens of thousands in student loans?"

The first part (liberal arts degree = middle class income) is somewhat unfair to lay all of the blame for on the students, given that it had been true not so long before.

The second part is newer; there never used to be that much student loan money available. Taking on that kind of debt without learning a "hard" degree such as in engineering, science & technology, accounting, or at least business, was an iffy proposition at best. It betrays something of a fantastical mindset, as if all of them expected to marry into money or something.

11/8

re: "Unhappy Medium: The Perils of Annoyance as Your Strategic Default"

Joseph Fouche at Chicago Boyz examined some intellectual sandtraps to which American strategic thinkers are irresistably drawn.

Money quote(s):

"In its nineties heyday, techno-opiates promised a future where U.S. forces moved freely like network packets across an antiseptic information battlespace. These force “packets” would be effectively omniscient since enemy forces would continue to unheedingly mass Soviet style forces in large formations across flat, treeless, and unpopulated terrain. There the enemy could be anesthetized in detail with precision, with laser-guided fluffy down pillows lulling enemy soldiers gently to sleep. The American military would simply interpret resistance “as damage and route around it“. The result of such thinking was an American military that could deter a large country, destroy a medium-sized country, or occupy a small country.

This policy shift from the mass armies of mid-century America to its smaller and more élite just-in-time replacement assumed a strong ability to accurately see the future. This is understandable: part of any defense plan is building the force you want that lets you do what you want to create the future you want. Unfortunately, the most neglected yet important part of a defense plan is building the force you need to survive what you don’t want to do in a future you don’t want. Building a magic bullet force assumes you’ll always enjoy the luxury of fighting whoever, whatever, wherever, whenever, and however you want, protected by an all-seeing eye so powerful and so pervasive that it provides perfect predictive power. The power of prophecy will free you from the margin of safety supplied by the quantitative outputs of the 20th century with just-in-time margins supplied by the qualitative outputs of the 21st.

If the last decade should have taught Americans anything, it should have taught them that contemporary American can’t predict the future. However, the correct solution (stop treating false prophecy as gospel) has been widely ignored in favor of the wrong solution (bet everything on false prophecy, only this time more aggressively)." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA)

In the era of specialization (and over-specialization), military capabilities are best kept across a range of generalizations. To do otherwise creates opportunities for an assymetric opponent.

"In the wars of the 21st century, thousands died and trillions were spent based merely on the authority of prophecy that was little more predictive than the steely glint of Donald Rumsfeld’s bespectacled eyes and the firmness of his jaw. The result was a force that manfully struggled its way to relative operational success despite the obstacles the Pentagon put in its way. The military danced dreadfully close to the edge but escaped operationally unscathed. Strategically, however, the military’s combat forces are depleted by repeat overseas visits, its hospitals are packed with lifelong (patients), and its weaponry has a decade of wear and that will be expensive to replace if it ever is replaced. Such is the fate of a magic bullet force that found itself in wars that were more manpower and resource intensive than anticipated by Pentagon prophets."

Remember going "to war with the army you have"? And that bit of wisdom came from someone who'd had some considerable time to design and develop the sort of army he should have, rather than continuing on his pre-war quest for transformation.

( I was hotly furious when I first heard that soundbite from Sec. Rumsfeld and remain at least coldy so even today.)

" It may turn out that alternative forms for applying social violence like the mass participatory conscript armies that dominated between the American Civil War and Vietnam and the mass participatory electorates that coalesced to sustain them are obsolescent in today’s political economy as the Mongol hordes or the Greco-Macedonian phalanx.

The general principle remains: Master Sun wisely advised the warring kings of the late Spring and Autumn period to mix orthodox and unorthodox to produce victory. However, he would have never advised them to be all unorthodox all the time. The emphasis on élite formations on the scale envisioned by America’s most enthusiastic magic bulletheads seeks to institutionalize the unorthodox. Master Sun would have scoffed at this long-nosed red-headed Eastern barbarian idiocy. He knew that the unorthodox, when overemployed, ceases to be unorthodox and becomes orthodox." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

7/9

re: "Unhappy Medium: The Perils of Annoyance as Your Strategic Default"

Joseph Fouche at Chicago Boyz discussed some pitfalls of U.S. strategizing.

Money quote(s):

"This policy shift from the mass armies of mid-century America to its smaller and more élite just-in-time replacement assumed a strong ability to accurately see the future. This is understandable: part of any defense plan is building the force you want that lets you do what you want to create the future you want. Unfortunately, the most neglected yet important part of a defense plan is building the force you need to survive what you don’t want to do in a future you don’t want. Building a magic bullet force assumes you’ll always enjoy the luxury of fighting whoever, whatever, wherever, whenever, and however you want, protected by an all-seeing eye so powerful and so pervasive that it provides perfect predictive power. The power of prophecy will free you from the margin of safety supplied by the quantitative outputs of the 20th century with just-in-time margins supplied by the qualitative outputs of the 21st.

If the last decade should have taught Americans anything, it should have taught them that contemporary American can’t predict the future. However, the correct solution (stop treating false prophecy as gospel) has been widely ignored in favor of the wrong solution (bet everything on false prophecy, only this time more aggressively)." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

The application of business concepts to military organizations has been a U.S. characteristic since at least the U.S. mass mobilization of World War II. War on an industrial scale invited industrial engineering solutions. The over-influence of corporate business concepts on America's conduct of the Vietnam War need not be further discussed, except when/where lessons-learned are stubbornly resisted.

"In the wars of the 21st century, thousands died and trillions were spent based merely on the authority of prophecy that was little more predictive than the steely glint of Donald Rumsfeld’s bespectacled eyes and the firmness of his jaw. The result was a force that manfully struggled its way to relative operational success despite the obstacles the Pentagon put in its way. The military danced dreadfully close to the edge but escaped operationally unscathed. Strategically, however, the military’s combat forces are depleted by repeat overseas visits, its hospitals are packed with lifelong, and its weaponry has a decade of wear and that will be expensive to replace if it ever is replaced. Such is the fate of a magic bullet force that found itself in wars that were more manpower and resource intensive than anticipated by Pentagon prophets." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

(7/9)

re: "What, Precisely, is the Issue with "Elites"?"

David Foster at Chicago Boyz solicites your thoughts on the topic of elitism.

re: "Unsung American Hero: Cadet Matthew Joseph La Porte"

Joseph Fouche at Chicago Boyz has the untold story of Matthew Joseph La Porte, Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets.

For all the fun that can be made of Air Force ROTC, this cadet stood up when it counted.

Frankly, I think the Air Force and the Commonwealth of Virginia are missing a step by not decorating this young man, posthumously.

re: "Could We Just Buy Off Gaddafi's Mercenaries?"

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz has clearly been reading her Machiavelli.

Money quote(s):

"Gaddafi is relying on foreign mercenaries to serve as his security troops just like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu relied on hired Palestinians. This is a sure sign that his regime has little to no internal support.

My spouse and I were explaining this to our son who asked, “So, since they’re mercenaries, couldn’t we just outbid Gaddafi?”

We laughed at the idea at first but then stopped to think. Back in the day when mercenaries were far more common, they could sometimes be bought off especially if it looked like their current employer would never be able to pay up. The basic economics of a mercenary life has not changed so maybe Gaddafi’s mercenaries would be just as susceptible to financial inducements as their historical predecessors. Gaddafi supposedly has a lot of money to pay his mercs with but I think it safe to say we have more and a much better track record of paying off."

re: "There Is No Place Like Home"

James R. Rummel at Chicago Boyz ("Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit.") notices a recent personnel action.

Money quote(s):

"(S)ome of the diplomats assigned to her post actually requested reassignment to Afghanistan! Give up the cushy conditions in a modern European city, and trade it for the poverty and physical danger found in Kabul. Anything to get away from that harridan!

The author of the news article linked to above says that such is the danger when amateurs meddle in a field that clearly calls for career diplomats. I think it shows the danger of passing out important positions to political supporters without first bothering to ask if they are suited for the job."

It certainly doesn't sound good when career officers are jumping ship to Kabul and other rough neighborhoods to get out of Luxembourg. A lot of officers spend many years building up the kind of street cred and "equity" (by serving in tough posts) necessary to get a plum like Luxembourg.

Consider, for a moment, some of the likely French-speaking garden spots an officer might go just for the chance of a Luxembourg, Brussels, or Paris.

The thing about going to Kabul or other AfPak/Iraq posts is that it's sort of like hitting the Re-Set button or "Pass Go - Collect $200." These days you can link that service to onward assignment at, hopefully, one of your "dream posts" (think Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg-under-new-management).