Shorter Lucy Caldwell

Speaking Truth to Test Scores, 10/7/08:

• Evidence clearly tells us that poor people are stupid. This means our meritocracy is working.

Above: Meritocracy.

I hate Harvard so much.

...Lucy Caldwell has written some egregious shit in her career, but this shit is among the most egregious of all. Go read it and you'll see what I mean. Her reasoning is just wrong -- anyone with any sense could tell Lucy Caldwell that poorer people get lower SAT scores because they have less access to quality education (not just test prep) and live in less intellectually hospitable environments. It is not, in fact, because they's just dumb. The level of innate elitism and perversity it must take for Caldwell to reach that conclusion -- the mind reels.

Why does the Crimson think it's acceptable to continually publish this tripe?

BONUS CRIMSON TRIPE: Read David Golding arguing, I am not making this up, that Democrats aren't going to win Virginia¹ because it's full of "inbred yokels," even though -- this is a direct quote -- "I've never actually met any Appalachian Virginians." And then Golding pronounces that the way to win these mythical yokels' votes is lunatic-libertarian "radically reduced federalism." Do these people listen to themselves when they talk?

1. Contra Golding, Pollster.com's estimate has Obama leading in Virginia by 2. But God forbid the Crimson should print, you know, facts.

More about Ivy admissions and privilege

As a corollary to last week's post about the social roots of Ivy League elitism, here's an interesting article from the New York Post about how some ultra-privileged Manhattan parents are upset that their kids aren't getting into Harvard, Yale and Princeton as much these days. This is the heartwarming part:

it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”

“Our low-income initiative has repositioned us,” agrees Marlyn McGrath, Harvard’s director of undergraduate admissions. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and other top-tier schools have replaced loans with grants in financial aid packages, which has encouraged students who wouldn’t have been able to afford the schools in the past to apply. “A lot of people are starting to think about Harvard when otherwise their state university might have been on the top of their list.”

One local example of this brave new world is public school student Lukasz Zbylut, who just graduated from Brooklyn’s New Utrecht High School. After rejecting offers from 18 top colleges, including Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Dartmouth, he plans to attend Harvard University come fall. Lukasz’s parents are Polish immigrants, and his father works in construction in Brooklyn to support his wife and three children.

Now, one working-class student from Brooklyn does not a fair admissions policy make -- especially when we're still accepting (per this article) six from the Trinity School and eight from Horace Mann, which have graduating classes of 107 and 173 respectively, and which both cost around $30,000/yr. (Here's something that will blow your mind -- at Horace Mann, which costs $29,000/yr, only 18% of students get financial aid. Everyone else, one assumes, pays it out of pocket. My God.) The economic elite is still way, WAY overrepresented at places like Harvard.

But, even if it's not a substantial change, it's at least satisfying to read that people who spend $46,000 on admissions counseling -- I'm not making that up, it's in the article -- aren't automatically guaranteed a seat at the nation's best universities. (Don't expect me to have any sympathy for these people, either. They get into Johns Hopkins and they're disappointed? Fuck them.) Education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America, and any increase in meritocracy at these places is a good thing.

On William Deresiewicz's article & Ivy League entitlement

There's been a lengthy debate on Mather-Open, and maybe other email lists too, about this article from The American Scholar, in which Yale English professor William Deresiewicz decries how life in the Ivy League fosters classism and intellectual laziness among those who go there. Now, I'm sympathetic to this argument -- my regular readers will know that I've always believed Harvard is a sickening manifestation of the worst American elitism -- and most of Deresiewicz's article is a helpful reality check for those of us who live inside it. You should read it.

BUT, I submit, Deresiewicz has got his causation mixed up. This paragraph is the giveaway:

...it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

Okay, that is not a function of your education. That is a function of you being a douchebag. I'm sorry, but throwing up your hands and saying "The Ivy League MADE me an elitist! I couldn't help it!" is no excuse. There are plenty of us at Harvard who, for various reasons, manage to maintain an identity that's quite separate from the ruling-class Harvard Club sensibility, and the worst we suffer is a little bit of cognitive dissonance and a desire not to give any money to this place after we graduate. To be sure, arrogant, privileged douches who think in Deriesiewicz's terms are the overwhelming majority at places like Harvard, but that's not a reflection on the insitution itself, it's a reflection on its admissions policy.

So while Deriesiewicz is much more comfortable than most critics with the magic word that actually explains this problem -- class -- he still winds up overlaying it with a bunch of bunkum about how Ivy League schools somehow produce intellectual torpor in their students by the nefarious means of grade inflation and, wait for it, imposing architecture. (You must read this to believe it.) The argument is transparently ridiculous. Harvard, an institution where most of us barely go to class, would be well served if it produced ANYTHING intellectual in its students.

The problem is that a large, and socially dominant, proportion of our student body (and I am extrapolating here from Harvard to the rest of the Ivy League) was elitist and privileged well before it ever came here. They grew up in places like Westchester, went to school at places like Exeter, and spent high school summers driving one of their father's BMWs around places like Cape Cod. Of course a person with a background like that will wind up thinking and acting entitled. It'd happen to them at any college: the only difference at the Ivy League is, they reach critical mass here thanks to their built-in admissions advantages and subsume the rest of the student body. The subsequent failure of Harvard classrooms to produce a real liberal education is solely because Harvard has filled them with people who are incurious.*

Deriesiewicz has identified the right phenomenon -- his description of it as "entitled mediocrity" is absolutely perfect, and I'm going to start using that phrase -- but it's not, as he argues, an intellectual or institutional problem. It's a social problem. And you cannot sensibly analyze an Ivy League school until you recognize that fact.

Now, to lighten the mood, here is a dancing walrus.

*I should add, by way of a disclaimer, that I personally am also enormously intellectually lazy. My Harvard education is wasted on me; as far as I can discern, I'm here because the admissions office finds rural Canadians an amusing novelty. If I could restructure Harvard admissions to my own standards, I would not have accepted myself.

That explains it then

Crimson:

Last week’s resignation of Mark J. Penn ’76 could have dealt a blow to Harvard’s presence in the political world—that is, if Hillary Clinton’s lead campaign advisor hadn’t been replaced by a fellow former resident of Matthews Hall.

Penn resigned his spot as chief campaign strategist on Sunday after revelations that he had advised the Colombian government on a trade treaty that his long-time client opposed. Early the next week, Penn was replaced by another former Crimson writer and prominent pollster, Geoffrey D. Garin ’75...

No wonder she's losing.

Sympathy from the bottom of my heart

A message, from me, to those Harvard sellouts students who'd landed I-banking internships and jobs at the prestigious Bear Stearns, just to see their ambitions cruelly dashed. Ahem:

"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA HA! AHH, HA HA HA. HA."

UPDATE: From the Crimson article:

[J.P. Morgan spokesman Brian] Marchiony tried to assure prospective applicants that future recruitment would not be affected by the recent downturn in the market... Marchiony added that the troubles with Bear and the takeover by J.P. Morgan was a “unique situation."

"Unique situation." And if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you. This whole system is on the verge of collapse and there's only so much the Fed can do...

Coming back to Harvard after a couple weeks with your family, you notice--

--how utterly repulsive Harvard Square actually is. Jeebus. I guess we get inured to it, but JFK Street seen through clear eyes is a hellscape of fashion boutiques, redundant banks, overpriced restaurants with names like "Z-Square", and all the other hideous blight that comes from living with pretentious wealthy people. You can't walk down those sidewalks without bumping into either a douchebag or a hipster, usually both, and you can't buy a cheap hamburger to save your life. This is supposed to be a college town! What the hell?

I think I would have liked Harvard Square better when it looked like this:

or at least this:

(Dig the tiny snowplow in front of the bus there. That was really the best they could do?) (Both these pictures are from the Cambridge Historical Commission, by the way, and their history of Harvard Square is worth reading if you're bored.)

That's all I have to say. How was your vacation?

Garrett Smacks the IOP in Today's Crimson

Read read read read read:

On its face, the IOP purports to support exactly what the misty-eyed memoirists of the activist Sixties want Harvard students to be doing. In the style of the civic-minded academy, it implores Harvard students to “examine critically and think creatively about politics and public issues.” The entire circus operates under the spiritual aegis of President John F. Kennedy ’40, who, one imagines, looks down with rolled-up sleeves and a winning smile upon the IOP’s noble young activists.

Marketing, however, can’t gloss over the truth forever. What transpires down at the end of JFK Street is not the catalysis of idealism but rather a sort of cotillion for political nerds. It absorbs every freshman looking to exercise their obligations as a citizen and churns out a mixture of political technicians, professional hand-shakers, and disillusioned burnouts.

[...] the IOP inculcates a worrisome catechism of centrism in its followers. The maxim of political involvement IOP-style is to mold yourself into just the right mixture of sensible sentiments and professional suavity. Of the nineteen members of the IOP’s Student Advisory Council, for example, only four choose to identify as “liberal” or “conservative” on their Facebook profiles. Nine, apparently, have no political views whatsoever.

And having a corral for the political set on JFK street means Harvard mirrors a problem endemic to the nation: the consigning of civic duties to a self-contained class of “political people.” This flies in the face of the very notion of democratic society: that we are all political people. Political mobility is a sentiment which needs to boil through everyone who comes to Harvard College, a trade school of citizenship.

Absolutely right. Plus Garrett is much more intellectual and pragmatic about it than I can ever bring myself to be -- my solution to this problem has never grown much past "burn the motherfucker down", which for the record is also how I feel about the Crimson, the final clubs, and the GODDAMN NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS -- so you should really just go read his piece.

Though I would add that the IOP is ultimately not a cause of our political inertia so much as a symptom; there is a whole social and economic order that demands just those centrist sycophants the IOP churns out. (Let's not pretend the Dems are innocent on that front either.) After all, the all-inclusive "democratic society" Garrett proposes does not coexist well with a capitalistic one...

...For a palate cleanser, make sure also to read Jarret's fun column comparing the GOP presidential race to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- though I do think Jarret seriously underestimates the impact of Ron Paul. He has a blimp, people! A BLIMP! HOW CAN HE LOSE??!?

Economist, Analyze Thyself

Nothing scares an ivory-tower liberal like facing the reality of a failing economy. Today's example: UC Berkeley's Brad DeLong, a gifted and insightful "reality-based" econoblogger who took quite a leap -- off a cliff -- the other day in trying to criticize the NYT's Bob Herbert.

Herbert wrote a typically understated column (and if you don't read him regularly, you should; he and Paul Krugman are usually the only voices of sanity on the Times editorial page) arguing that the economy is in severe trouble, and that Washington's statisticians and Fed functionaries are in abject denial about it. This is self-evidently true to anyone who's been to the Midwest lately (or really, anywhere other than Cambridge, Manhattan/Westchester, northwest D.C., and coastal California); but it prompted DeLong to call (quite literally) for Herbert's forcible retirement.

Specifically Herbert wrote this:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards. The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking...

All of which is true. DeLong, however, wants to argue that "this is at most one-quarter true", and goes on to rebut exactly one of Herbert's points (on weakness of the job market, which is endlessly debatable) as well as a couple things Herbert never said (DeLong is right, real disposable income is not falling, though it's not exactly growing like gangbusters either -- and yes, inflation has been low, but Herbert's not talking about 2002). DeLong never discusses bankruptcies, homelessness, the auto industry, cost of food & fuel, the debt crisis, falsification of statistics, or any of the other inconvenient truths Herbert raised; instead, he adds a pedantic note about defining the word "recession" (missing Herbert's point entirely), smugly points out that Herbert confused CPI with core inflation (a mistake two degrees from a typo), and calls it a rebuttal. Convincing it's not.

As for the statistical reality of the situation, DeLong's commenters do a much better job of discussing the details than I could, so I'll just refer you there. Except for this one graph (from the Economic Policy Institute), which basically sums up the problem:

So if you're in the top quintile -- which means, as of 2004, that your family earns over $88,000 a year -- things are peachy keen. But everybody else has been seeing their income slide; and the poorer you are, the faster you're sliding (and thus more likely to get buried under mountains of debt just to keep your house, car and fridge). Households in the bottom quintile, which earn under $18,500, are on a steady and steep path downwards. (To underscore the gravity of that: 41% of the bottom quintile households are families with children. The poverty line as of 2006 for a family of three is $17,170, which is just below the maximum for that quintile. So yes: the fastest-declining group in our society is families in poverty.)

This divide is a serious problem, because the vast majority of our policymakers and opinionmakers fall into that top quintile; somehow I doubt there are very many members of the Fed who make less than $88,000/yr. And (more importantly), these elites inevitably surround themselves with more of the same; people like Brad DeLong in Berkeley or Ben Bernanke in Washington, D.C. are highly unlikely to ever see economic instability firsthand. To compound the problem, the purported empirical reality-check for these segregated elites -- statistics -- are unfailingly skewed by self-interested administrations in order to minimize or hide whatever problems may arise (and sorry folks, Clinton was just as shameless about this as his Republican counterparts). The result: nothing exists to force our policymakers out of their economic bubbles, and meanwhile working Americans suffer in silence.

(Don't get too cocky, Harvard students: this place is an egregious example of precisely the myopia we're talking about. Did you know that, as of 2004, over 85% of our student body came from the top two income quintiles? Summers' financial aid reforms helped, I'm sure, but it's telling that among the Class of 2011 -- "the most economically diverse to date" -- just a quarter of students were eligible for the financial aid programs given to households under $80,000/yr. Besides, Harvard is incredibly bubbled-in; I realized a while ago, and this blew my mind, that I don't know what the price of gas is anymore because there's not a single gas station in Harvard Square. Nor do we buy our own food; I doubt that many of us could pass the gallon of milk test. And we're the people who are supposed to graduate and lead the nation's economy? God help us.)

Thus, I think, we see the extent to which someone like Brad DeLong will repress his considerable intellect in order to ignore the reality of economic collapse -- since, absent clear and tangible evidence to the contrary, it's MUCH more comfortable to assume that everything is fine and the country is functioning properly. (This is especially likely to happen to economists, since the facts on the ground stand in direct opposition to so many of their discipline's basic principles. The cognitive dissonance must be awful.) But it is absolutely critical to defeat that assumption -- especially for Democrats, not only because of our ideological obligation to economic fairness (we are, after all, the party of the working American), but also because if we fail to recognize this disastrous economic situation before it metastasizes, we will be right there with all the Republicans on the list of its political casualties. And we cannot let the biases that affect Brad DeLong -- and the Harvard Economics Department -- get in our way.

As Goes Harvard...

“The faculty retreat was a bit of a disaster,” one [Expos] preceptor said. “David Pilbeam came in and gave an obviously unprepared speech where he talked about how we shouldn’t be worried about losing our jobs, that everything was okay, and that everything would stay the same in Expos. I think that was the moment that suddenly we preceptors saw ‘behind the curtain’ what a mess everything is in, how no one knows what they’re doing, and how we’re in more trouble than any of us realized.”

Chadbourne also said that administrators appeared to be inauthentic in their reassurances. “I don’t understand it. I feel that we keep hearing from people saying, ‘We care. We care.’ It seems a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ It is frustrating.”

Pilbeam declined to be interviewed about Expos. Administrators maintain that they are committed to the writing program.

“David Pilbeam cares deeply about our Expos Program, and effective teaching of writing and speaking in our undergraduate curriculum,” Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs Georgene B. Herschbach said in a written statement.

Every now and then you get a glimpse of Harvard without the usual mountains of accompanying bullshit -- this, from the Crimson, is such a glimpse (and it's the best thing I've read in the Crimson for some time). Get it through your head: we go to a university whose one and only priority is keeping up appearances...

I-Banker Journalism

Coming to this a bit late, but Tyler Cowen has an interesting post responding to Henry Farrell on economic biases among journalists. Farrell mentions (in the context of a larger discussion) that the media tends to swing right on economics, citing some Jon Chait work; Cowen, a libertarian, responds with some cogent points as to why journalists would swing more left on the issue. As follows:

2. Journalists are more likely to be suspicious of corporations and indeed more likely to be suspicious in general. People lie to them every day, repeatedly and often without shame.

[...]4. If anything, it is the odd mix between cynicism and idealism that defines the journalistic political point of view.

5. Most journalists work in a declining sector -- newspapers or TV -- and this does not augur well for their belief in progress and the virtues of economic growth. They are not well-positioned to enjoy "creative destruction."

6. Not many top journalists are "far left Democrats." But most are Democrats. I also do not think many journalists would endorse the economic proposals of the rational wing of the Republican Party, say Greg Mankiw or Martin Feldstein. Journalists are likely to think those proposals do not show enough concern for the poor.

[...]In sum, the left-right spectrum is not the best way to understand the economic views of journalists. But, when it comes to economic issues, it is hard for me to put journalists on the right side of that line.

Fair enough. But there's a distinction to be made, that I don't see Farrell or Cowen picking up on: between journalists as individuals, and the people who shape opinions and reporting in media organizations (that is, owners, editors, and commentators). Journalists may have these characteristics that make them more skeptical of free-market economics, but I certainly don't think the opinionmakers do.

At Harvard we are privileged to observe these people in their larval stage, where their thought processes can be easily analyzed. They are the people who hang around the Crimson and the IOP, and who enjoy things like "networking"; they will on graduation almost immediately aquire jobs at prestigious publications or think-tanks. You know exactly the type of person I'm talking about. (In my experience, they have a sizable but shrinking representation in the Dems; and they are almost completely absent from the Harvard Republican Club, which is greatly to the HRC's credit.) If they were less intellectual they'd be future consultants hanging out in final clubs; if they were more intellectual they'd be those annoying people in section who never stop talking. As it is they're able to interact quite well with the rest of us, but their motivations are the same: they want prestige and they want attention, and that -- though of course they'll tell you otherwise -- is what drives their politics.

These people -- let's call them I-Banker Journalists -- are often brilliant and tremendously fun to argue with, but their thinking (especially on economics) is establishmentarian and elitist, as befits someone who's trying to to get ahead. And this kind of status-quo triumphalism is it's a natural fit for Harvard College, where everyone is either already fabulously wealthy or assumed to be on the way towards it; the IOP, where calm, placid centrism has been elevated to an art form; and the Crimson, which reads less like a student paper than a wannabe Washington Post. It is a whole self-reinforcing world that is convinced of its own power and infinite wisdom, Harvard uber alles. Things like the Stand for Security campaign -- which called all those precious assumptions into question -- frightened and confused these people, which is why they all (including so many Dems, look at the mailing list archives if you don't believe me) reacted violently against it. We are talking about people who are unfailingly SERIOUS, as Atrios would say, and they feel obligated to look "sensible" by distancing themselves from radicals in their own parties. They simply know better, after all. Here is their platonic ideal:

You see what I'm saying. This is a class of people who pursue a certain kind of un-provocative intelligence, one that can be found only in the Ivy League and our elite media. (Anywhere else, of course, these people would be immediately recognized and beaten up by unwashed Middle American hoodlums, or at least that's what I assume they're afraid of. No other reason to stay in those godawful places like Manhattan and Georgetown all the time.) Unlike regular journalists, I-Banker Journalists carry none of the traits Tyler Cowen writes about; addicted to power and prestige, they naturally lack any kind skepticism or cynicism. They are certainly not "suspicious" of corporations or the elite, since they ARE that elite, and they have no reason to worry about economic fairness ("creative destruction" to them only means a generous severance package from whatever conglomerate they're currently at). They take the free market as absolute gospel, prompted by -- just as Cowen mentions -- Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw. (After all, how could two such SERIOUS Harvard professors possibly be wrong?) We are not talking about Woodward and Bernstein here; we are talking more about Chris Matthews.

And the end result is a tangible bias toward establishment economics in our media -- cloaked in limousine liberalism sometimes, of course, but still ultimately in the mode of Ec10. Think about it; how many pundits can you think of that really question economic orthodoxy? Other than populist bomb-throwers like David Sirota (who now has a column, incidentally, not yet widely syndicated), you're pretty much out of luck. The closest mainstream pundit I can think of is the excellent Paul Krugman, and even he still works largely within a free-market mindset. Real economic dissent is pretty much confined these days to places like the World Socialist Web Site, which (while often insightful and valuable) is not really something you want to be citing in a argument.

Garrett wrote a while ago about Harvard's "liberal" mentality, and he's quite right, but I submit that there are specific people who drive this mentality -- through Harvard and right out into our media, dominating the discourse no matter how tiny a minority they may be. Whether this can be stopped, and whether it's a problem of the people or the environment, are questions for another post, but the trend is worth noting and worth observing if you want to really understand our college and our media climate.

(Feeling bad about Harvard economics? Remember, we may be stuck with Mankiw, but we also have Dani Rodrik. Read his blog.)

(h/t Reihan Salam pretending to be Ross Douthat)