Public intellectuals in France and the US

What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010?  And has that role declined in the past several decades?  Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space?  The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" (link).

The line of thought is a complicated one.  Jacques Julliard frames the question by proposing that the public imagination of the intellectual involves a narrative of precipitous decline since the active engagements of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.  There was a conception of the engaged intellectual who brought his/her ideas and convictions into opposition when state and society were going wrong -- Algeria, Vietnam, capitalism.  And, Julliard suggests, the common view is that the current generation of intellectuals have not succeeded -- perhaps have not even attempted -- at bringing theory, critique, and value into the public sphere.  Jean Daniel captures the idea in his editorial: "Faut-il rire des 'intellos'?"

But -- here is the complexity -- Julliard refutes this idea.  The tradition of the public intellectual is not attenuated or corrupted in France; rather, the current generation of intellectuals are in fact engaged and involved.  It is nostalgia for a golden age -- the age of Liberation, Communism, and Existentialism -- that foreshortens the reputation of the intellectual today.  But the golden age is a myth.

Tout cela est faux, archifaux, et prouve seulement que Saint-Sulpice n'est séparé de Saint-Germain que par quelques enjambées et par la piété du souvenir. Et revenons aux faits. [All this is false, badly false, and only proves that Saint-Sulpice is only separated from Saint-Germain by a few steps and the piety of memory.  Let us return to the facts.]

Julliard points out five salient facts. First, we sometimes confuse the intellectual and the literary artist.  The artist is valued for the aesthetic quality of his/her works, whereas the intellectual is valued for the significance of the impact of his/her ideas.  Second, the impact of Sartre and Camus on France's wars in Algeria or Vietnam was minimal, and later generations of French intellectuals have actually exercised greater influence.  In fact, Julliard argues that Lévy, Glucksmann, and Finkielkraut were more effective in their own interventions about policy in Bosnia than Sartre or Camus on the colonial wars.  Third, Julliard argues that modern media, including the blogosphere, have provided the contemporary intellectual with a much more powerful platform for disseminating ideas and values than was available to Zola, Sartre, or Camus.  He cites debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict, global warming, immigration, European governance, and even philosophy and literature, as locations of debate where modern media have amplified the voices of intellectuals.  Fourth, there is the question of designation: who decides who the "intellectuals" are?  The media select their talking heads; what confidence can the public have that these are the best voices available?  Julliard even suggests that there has been an inversion of quality; the telegenic pundit acquires reputation as a savant, rather than the savant being sought out as a pundit.  And fifth, there was a tendency of the "engaged" philosophers of the generation of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, to be engaged in service to a cause -- Communism, most commonly.  So the positions offered by these intellectuals were often enough not "intellectual" at all; they did not follow from the principles, ideas, and methods of the thinker, but rather derived from the position of a party or camp.  Today's intellectuals, Julliard suggests, are interested in ideas rather than ideologies.  And with this commitment they have returned to the real vocation of the intellectual:

En rompant avec l'idéologie abstraite au profit de l'universel concret, les intellectuels, du moins les plus novateurs d'entre eux, sont revenus à leur fonction essentielle : la critique sociale, et d'abord la critique de leur propre pratique. [Dispensing with abstract ideology, today's intellectuals have returned to their essential function: social criticism, and especially criticism of their own practice.]

So Julliard's telling of the story expresses several key points: France needs public intellectuals; there are several overlapping generations of thinkers who are filling this role (and more to come); and in fact, the decline of ideology and the rise of media and the Internet makes the voices of intellectuals more effective rather than less.  In his editorial in this issue Jean Daniel reaches a similar conclusion: "En un mot: depuis que nous n'avons plus confinace dans des idéologies, nous avons un frénétique besoin des idées. C'est-a-dire des intellectuels." [In a word: since we no longer have confidence in ideologies, we have urgent need of ideas; which is to say, intellectuals.]

In continuing the theme, Nouvel Obs returns to the debate of 1980 by talking again with several of the young intellectuals it consulted in that year.  Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, and Gilles Lipovetsky offer their perspectives on the role of ideas and intellectuals in French society from the vantage point of 2010 (link).  And there is a challenging interview-discussion with Alain Badiou and Alain Finkielkraut on communism (link).  So Nouvel Obs is doing its part -- it is helping to bring to the fore debates and thinkers who can help France navigate into the twenty-first century.

There is one form of practical proof of the importance of intellectuals in contemporary France that is not so visible from the United States: the depth and pervasiveness of the presence of deeply thoughtful scholars and writers on French radio and television.  For a taste of the breadth and depth of the voices of intellectuals in French society today, consult the list of podcasts made available from radio programming at France Culture (link).  Particularly rich are Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance (link) and Repliques (link). These programs exemplify serious voices, serious debates, and nuanced and extensive discussions.

In the United States it seems that the whole issue of the public intellectual plays out differently than in France.  To begin -- the great majority of the "public" have virtually no interest in or respect for academic discussions of issues.  Fox News, talk radio, and blistering political blogs fill that space.

Second, however, there is a subset of the American public that does have an appetite for more detailed and nuanced treatment of the issues that face us.  Slate.com has between 5 and 8 million unique readers a month; the Huffington Post logged about 10 million visitors in December, 2009; and NationalReview.com logs about 4.5 million readers a month.  The Facebook page for "Give me some serious discussion and debate about crucial issues!" could be huge.

Looking at the question from another angle -- the academic world in the United States is itself a meaningful segment of the workforce.  There are about 1.5 million post-secondary teachers (professors and lecturers) in the United States, and the majority of these have doctoral degrees.  Of these, a smaller number fall into traditional "intellectual" disciplines: English literature (74,800), Foreign literature (32,100), History (26,000), Philosophy and Religion (25,100), and Sociology (20,300), for a total of 178,300.  In engineering, mathematics, and the sciences there are another 262,600 post-secondary teachers.  (These data come from a Bureau of Labor Statistics snapshot for 2008 (link).)  So a small but meaningful proportion of the US population have advanced degrees and intellectual credentials.  They are a core segment of the audience for public intellectuals. And, of course, you don't have to be an academic to be an intellectual.

Further, there are a host of specialists and experts on specific crises -- environment, finance, globalization, war -- who are called upon to comment on specific issues, and there are specialized "think tanks" that promote and disseminate research on critical public issues.  Moreover, voices like that of Bill Moyers have offered critical and nuanced perspectives on public television (link) (regrettably, now off the air).  And the United States has a number of prominent academics who speak to a broad public -- Henry Louis Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, Michael Walzer, and James Gustave Speth, to name a few.  So there is a domain of intellectual discourse that succeeds in escaping the confines of the academic world and the limiting echo-chamber of cable television; this domain helps to create and feed an intellectual public.

Overall, it seems fair to say that public intellectuals have little influence on public opinion and public policy in the US today.  Perhaps Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) still has a lot of validity.  But maybe, just maybe, it is also possible that the Internet is beginning to offer a bigger footprint for serious analysis and criticism for the American public and American policy makers.  Perhaps there is a broadening opportunity for intellectuals to help define the future for the United States and its role in the world.  And perhaps we can be more like France in this important dimension.

Varieties of economic progress

The study of economic history reveals a number of different patterns when it comes to agricultural production and the standard of living of a given population in a region.  Let's think about the issue in very simple terms.  Imagine that the standard of living for a population in a region is determined by the amount of grain that each household is able to acquire in a time period.  Grain is produced on farms using labor and technology (water, traction, fertilizer, pesticides, harvest tools).  Output is influenced by the existing agricultural technology and the quantity of labor expended in the farming process.  At a given level of technology and a given practice of labor use, a certain quantity of grain Q can be produced for the population P (farmers and their families).  If population is stable and if land area, technology, and labor use remain constant, then the total amount of grain produced remains constant as well and the standard of living remains level at Q/P.

Now several things can begin to change.  First, consider a steady population increase over time.  If land, technology and labor remain constant, then the standard of living falls, since Q remains constant while P increases.  So how can this population sustain and perhaps improve its standard of living?  It needs to increase the output of grain at a rate at least equal to the rate of increase in population.  And this can be done in several ways.

First, the population can bring more land into cultivation.  Population increase leads to more farm labor; more farmers can farm the additional land; and if agricultural technologies and practices are unchanged, then output will increase proportionally to the increase in population; so the standard of living will remain constant.  This assumes, however, that the new land is of equal productivity to existing land; but as the physiocrats observed, generally new land is of lower productivity.  So in this scenario, output would increase more slowly than population, and the standard of living would slowly decline.  We might call this extensive growth; technique and labor practices remain constant, but the arable land area increases (at the cost of deforestation and loss of common lands).

Second, more labor can be applied to the process of cultivation to increase output, using traditional farming practices.  More frequent weeding and destruction of pests takes time, but it increases output.  So if population is rising and land extent and productivity are constant, it is possible to offset the tendency for average output to fall, by applying more labor to the process.  Family labor, including children, can be expended more and more intensively in order to achieve additional gains in output.  But, of course, the marginal product of these additional hours of labor is small.  This process is familiar from the history of agriculture; Chayanov calls it "self-exploitation" (The Theory of Peasant Economy) and Clifford Geertz calls it "agricultural involution" (Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia).  The standard of living may remain fairly constant, but the work load for the farm family increases over time.  Naturally, this process reaches a limit; eight hours a day of farm labor is sustainable; twelve hours is difficult; and eighteen hours is unsupportable.  (Here is an explanation and application of Chayanov's theory to the circumstances of Sri Lanka; link.)  We can call this involutionary growth or labor-intensive growth.

A third possibility is somewhat more positive for the standard of living and quality of life.  Intelligent farmers can recognize opportunities for improving and refining existing techniques and practices.  A better kind of sacking material may do a better job of protecting the harvest from rats; a bicycle-powered irrigation pump may increase the amount of water available for crops, thus increasing the harvest; a different form of labor cooperation across households may permit more effective seeding during the appropriate season.  So the traditional practices can be refined, permitting an increase of output with a constant quantity of land and labor.  This is what Mark Elvin refers to as "refinement of traditional practices" in his pathbreaking analysis of the "high-level equilibrium trap" (The Pattern of the Chinese Past).  It is an incremental process through which the productivity of the traditional farming system is increased through a series of small refinements of practice and technique.  Improvement in productivity permits an improvement in output per person; but if population continues to increase, then soon these gains are erased and the standard of living begins to decline again.

A fourth possibility is even more dramatic.  The fundamental technologies in use may be qualitatively improved: manure may be replaced by bean curd, which in turn may be replaced by chemical fertilizers; seed varieties may be significantly improved through selective breeding; electric-powered pumps may improve the availability of irrigation; small tractors may replace oxen and many person-hours of labor.  This kind of improvement in productivity can be represented as a jump from one of the heavy curves above to a higher "production possibility frontier."  And this enhancement of agricultural productivity can result in massive increases in the quantity of grain relative to the farming population -- thereby permitting a significant improvement in the standard of living for the farming population.  This can be referred to as modern technological productivity growth.

Two problems arise at this point, however.  First is Elvin's fundamental point about Chinese agriculture: these significant technological improvements require a significant social investment in scientific and technical research.  And if a population has already approached a subsistence trap -- a level of population at which intensive labor and existing farm technology only permits a near-subsistence diet for the population -- then there is no source of social surplus that can fund this research investment. (This is the core of his theory of the high-level equilibrium trap: farming techniques and practices have been refined to the maximum degree possible, and population has increased to the point of subsistence.)

Another problem is equally important.  The sorts of productivity improvements described here are "labor-expelling": the size of the labor force needs to fall (unless more land is available).  So the standard of living may rise for the farm population; but there will be a "surplus population" that is excluded from this improvement in productivity.  (This is a process that James Scott describes in Green-Revolution Malasia in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.)  And at this point, the only hope for improvement of the standard of living for this segment of the population is for economic growth in another sector -- manufacturing or service -- where the labor of displaced farmers can be productively used.

So there are three large patterns, with several structural alternatives among the growth scenarios.

(See several earlier posts on farming, agriculture, and development; link, link, link.)

System safety engineering and the Deepwater Horizon

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, fire, and uncontrolled release of oil into the Gulf is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude.  This disaster in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be more serious in objective terms than the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 -- in terms both of immediate loss of life and in terms of overall harm created. And sadly, it appears likely that the accident will reveal equally severe failures of management of enormously hazardous processes, defects in the associated safety engineering analysis, and inadequacies of the regulatory environment within which the activity took place.  The Challenger disaster fundamentally changed the ways that we thought about safety in the aerospace field.  It is likely that this disaster too will force radical new thinking and new procedures concerning how to deal with the inherently dangerous processes associated with deep-ocean drilling.

Nancy Leveson is an important expert in the area of systems safety engineering, and her book, Safeware: System Safety and Computers, is a genuinely important contribution.  Leveson led the investigation of the role that software design might have played in the Challenger disaster (link).  Here is a short, readable white paper of hers on system safety engineering (link) that is highly relevant to the discussions that will need to occur about deep-ocean drilling.  The paper does a great job of laying out how safety has been analyzed in several high-hazard industries, and presents a set of basic principles for systems safety design.  She discusses aviation, the nuclear industry, military aerospace, and the chemical industry; and she points out some important differences across industries when it comes to safety engineering.  Here is an instructive description of the safety situation in military aerospace in the 1950s and 1960s:

Within 18 months after the fleet of 71 Atlas F missiles became operational, four blew up in their silos during operational testing. The missiles also had an extremely low launch success rate.  An Air Force manual describes several of these accidents: 

     An ICBM silo was destroyed because the counterweights, used to balance the silo elevator on the way up and down in the silo, were designed with consideration only to raising a fueled missile to the surface for firing. There was no consideration that, when you were not firing in anger, you had to bring the fueled missile back down to defuel. 

     The first operation with a fueled missile was nearly successful. The drive mechanism held it for all but the last five feet when gravity took over and the missile dropped back. Very suddenly, the 40-foot diameter silo was altered to about 100-foot diameter. 

     During operational tests on another silo, the decision was made to continue a test against the safety engineer’s advice when all indications were that, because of high oxygen concentrations in the silo, a catastrophe was imminent. The resulting fire destroyed a missile and caused extensive silo damage. In another accident, five people were killed when a single-point failure in a hydraulic system caused a 120-ton door to fall. 

     Launch failures were caused by reversed gyros, reversed electrical plugs, bypass of procedural steps, and by management decisions to continue, in spite of contrary indications, because of schedule pressures. (from the Air Force System Safety Handbook for Acquisition Managers, Air Force Space Division, January 1984)

Leveson's illustrations from the history of these industries are fascinating.  But even more valuable are the principles of safety engineering that she recapitulates.  These principles seem to have many implications for deep-ocean drilling and associated technologies and systems.  Here is her definition of systems safety:

System safety uses systems theory and systems engineering approaches to prevent foreseeable accidents and to minimize the result of unforeseen ones.  Losses in general, not just human death or injury, are considered. Such losses may include destruction of property, loss of mission, and environmental harm. The primary concern of system safety is the management of hazards: their identification, evaluation, elimination, and control through analysis, design and management procedures.

Here are several fundamental principles of designing safe systems that she discusses:

• System safety emphasizes building in safety, not adding it on to a completed design.
• System safety deals with systems as a whole rather than with subsystems or components.
• System safety takes a larger view of hazards than just failures.
• System safety emphasizes analysis rather than past experience and standards.
• System safety emphasizes qualitative rather than quantitative approaches.
• Recognition of tradeoffs and conflicts.
• System safety is more than just system engineering.

And here is an important summary observation about the complexity of safe systems:

Safety is an emergent property that arises at the system level when components are operating together. The events leading to an accident may be a complex combination of equipment failure, faulty maintenance, instrumentation and control problems, human actions, and design errors. Reliability analysis considers only the possibility of accidents related to failures; it does not investigate potential damage that could result from successful operation of the individual components.

How do these principles apply to the engineering problem of deep-ocean drilling?  Perhaps the most important implications are these: a safe system needs to be based on careful and comprehensive analysis of the hazards that are inherently involved in the process; it needs to be designed with an eye to handling those hazards safely; and it can't be done in a piecemeal, "fly-test-fly" fashion.

It would appear that deep-ocean drilling is characterized by too little analysis and too much confidence in the ability of engineers to "correct" inadvertent outcomes ("fly-fix-fly").  The accident that occurred in the Gulf last month can be analyzed into several parts. First is the explosion and fire that destroyed the drilling rig and led to the tragic loss of life of 11 rig workers. And the second is the uncalculated harms caused by the uncontrolled venting of perhaps a hundred thousand barrels of crude oil to date into the Gulf of Mexico, now threatening the coasts and ecologies of several states.  Shockingly, there is now no high-reliability method for capping the well at a depth of over 5,000 feet; so the harm can continue to worsen for a very extended period of time.

The safety systems on the platform itself will need to be examined in detail. But the bottom line will probably look something like this: the platform is a complex system vulnerable to explosion and fire, and there was always a calculable (though presumably small) probability of catastrophic fire and loss of the ship. This is pretty analogous to the problem of safety in aircraft and other complex electro-mechanical systems. The loss of life in the incident is terrible but confined.  Planes crash and ships sink.

What elevates this accident to a globally important catastrophe is what happened next: destruction of the pipeline leading from the wellhead 5,000 feet below sea level to containers on the surface; and the failure of the shutoff valve system on the ocean floor. These two failures have resulted in unconstrained release of a massive and uncontrollable flow of crude oil into the Gulf and the likelihood of environmental harms that are likely to be greater than the Exxon Valdez.

Oil wells fail on the surface, and they are difficult to control. But there is a well-developed technology that teams of oil fire specialists like Red Adair employ to cap the flow and end the damage. We don't have anything like this for wells drilled under water at the depth of this incident; this accident is less accessible than objects in space for corrective intervention. So surface well failures conform to a sort of epsilon-delta relationship: an epsilon accident leads to a limited delta harm. This deep-ocean well failure in the Gulf is catastrophically different: the relatively small incident on the surface is resulting in an unbounded and spiraling harm.

So was this a foreseeable hazard? Of course it was. There was always a finite probability of total loss of the platform, leading to destruction of the pipeline. There was also a finite probability of failure of the massive sea-floor emergency shutoff valve. And, critically, it was certainly known that there is no high-reliability fix in the event of failure of the shutoff valve. The effort to use the dome currently being tried by BP is untested and unproven at this great depth. The alternative of drilling a second well to relieve pressure may work; but it will take weeks or months. So essentially, when we reach the end of this failure pathway, we arrive at this conclusion: catastrophic, unbounded failure. If you reach this point in the fault tree, there is almost nothing to be done. And this is a totally irrational outcome to tolerate; how could any engineer or regulatory agency have accepted the circumstances of this activity, given that one possible failure pathway would lead predictably to unbounded harms?

There is one line of thought that might have led to the conclusion that deep ocean drilling is acceptably safe: engineers and policy makers might have optimistically overestimated the reliability of the critical components. If we estimate that the probability of failure of the platform is 1/1000, failure of the pipeline is 1/100, and failure of the emergency shutoff valve is 1/10,000 -- then one might say that the probability of the nightmare scenario is vanishingly small: one in a billion. Perhaps one might reason that we can disregard scenarios with this level of likelihood. Reasoning very much like this was involved in the original safety designs of the shuttle (Safeware: System Safety and Computers). But several things are now clear: this disaster was not virtually impossible. In fact, it actually occurred. And second, it seems likely enough that the estimates of component failure are badly understated.

What does this imply about deep ocean drilling? It seems inescapable that the current state of technology does not permit us to take the risk of this kind of total systems failure. Until there is a reliable and reasonably quick technology for capping a deep-ocean well, the small probability of this kind of failure makes the use of the technology entirely unjustifiable. It makes no sense at all to play Russian roulette when the cost of failure is massive and unconstrained ecological damage.

There is another aspect of this disaster that needs to be called out, and that is the issue of regulation. Just as the nuclear industry requires close, rigorous regulation and inspection, so deep-ocean drilling must be rigorously regulated. The stakes are too high to allow the oil industry to regulate itself. And unfortunately there are clear indications of weak regulation in this industry (link).

(Here are links to a couple of earlier posts on safety and technology failure (link, link).)

Repression in China

The Chinese government signaled a major escalation in its policy of repressing dissidents with this week's conviction of dissident intellectual Liu Xiaobo on charges of subversion (New York Times link).  Liu's eleven-year sentence on charges of subversion sends a chilling message to all Chinese citizens who might consider peaceful dissent about controversial issues.  Other dissidents have been punished in the past year, including environmental protesters, advocates for parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake, and internet activists.  But Liu is one of the first prominent activists to be charged with subversion.  Liu is a major advocate of Charter 08, and his conviction and sentencing represent a serious blow to the cause of political liberalization in China.  Regrettably, the regime of citizen rights of expression, association, and dissent has not yet been established in China.

What is Charter 08?  It is a citizen-based appeal for the creation of a secure system of laws and rights in China, and has been signed by several thousand Chinese citizens (New York Review of Books translation).  The central principles articulated in the Charter include:

• Freedom
• Human rights
• Equality
• Republicanism
• Democracy
• Constitutional rule

The specific points included in the Charter include:

1. A New Constitution
2. Separation of Powers
3. Legislative Democracy
4. An Independent Judiciary
5. Public Control of Public Servants
6. Guarantee of Human Rights
7. Election of Public Officials
8. Rural-Urban Equality
9. Freedom to Form Groups
10. Freedom to Assemble
11. Freedom of Expression
12. Freedom of Religion
13. Civic Education
14. Protection of Private Property
15. Financial and Tax Reform
16. Social Security
17. Protection of the Environment
18. A Federated Republic
19. Truth in Reconciliation

What is involved in advocating for "legality" and "individual rights" for China's future? Most basically, rights have to do with protection against repression and violence. These include freedom of association, freedom of action, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and the right to security of property.  History makes it clear that these rights are actually fundamental to a decent society -- and that this is true for China's future as well. Moreover, each of these rights is a reply to the threat of violence and coercion.

Take the rights of expression and association.  When a group of people share an interest -- let's say, an interest in struggling against a company that is dumping toxic chemicals into a nearby river -- they can only actualize their collective interests if they are able to express their views and to call upon others to come together in voluntary associations to work against this environmental behavior. The situation in China today is harshly inconsistent with this ideal: citizens have to be extremely cautious about public expression of protest, and they are vulnerable to violent attack if they organize to pressure companies or local government to change their behavior.

The use of private security companies on behalf of companies, land developers, and other powerful interests in China is reasonably well documented. And these companies are largely unconstrained by legal institutions in their use of violence and gangs of thugs to intimidate and attack farmers, workers, or city dwellers. It's worth visiting some of the web sites that document some of this violence -- for example, this report about thugs attacking homeowners in Chaoyang. Similar reports can be unearthed in the context of rural conflicts over land development and conflicts between factory owners and migrant workers.

So this brings us to "legality." What is the most important feature of the rule of law? It is to preserve the simple, fundamental rights of citizens: rights of personal security, rights of property, rights of expression. What does it say to other people with grievances when private security guards are able to beat innocent demonstrators with impunity? What it says is simple -- the state will tolerate the use of force against you by powerful agents in society. And what this expresses is repression.

It is also true that the state itself is often the author of repression against its own citizens for actions that would be entirely legitimate within almost any definition of core individual right: blogging, speaking, attempting to organize migrant poor people. When the state uses its power to arrest and imprison people who speak, write, and organize -- it is profoundly contradicting the core rights that every citizen needs to have.

It should also be said that these legal rights cannot be separated from the idea of democracy. Democracy most fundamentally requires that people be able to advocate for the social policies that they prefer. Social outcomes should be the result of a process that permits all citizens to organize and express their interests and preferences -- that is the basic axiom of democracy. What this democratic value rules out is the idea that the state has a superior game plan -- one that cannot brook interference by the citizens -- and that it is legitimate for the state to repress and intimidate the citizens in their efforts to influence the state's choices. A legally, constitutionally entrenched set of individual civil and political rights takes the final authority of deciding the future direction of society out of the hands of the state.

Give the Chinese people democratic rights and they can make some real progress on China's social ills -- unsafe working conditions, abuse of peasants, confiscation of homeowners' property, the creation of new environmental disasters. Deprive them of democratic rights, and the power of the state and powerful private interests can create continuing social horrors -- famine, permanent exploitation of workers, environmental catastrophes, development projects that displace millions of people, and so on. The authoritarian state and the thugocracy of powerful private interests combine to repress the people.

(Here is a very interesting audio interview with Perry Link on the NYRB website about the context of Charter 08. Also of interest is a piece by Daniel Drezner (post) on Charter 08 on the ForeignPolicy blog.  See also this very extensive analysis of the Charter by Rebecca MacKinnon at Rconversation.)

Defining the university curriculum

What is the purpose of a university education? And who ought to answer this question when it comes to the practical business of maintaining and reforming a university curriculum?

The second question is the easier of the two. In the United States university, the faculty generally have the responsibility and authority to make decisions about the curriculum -- from the content of a particular course to the requirements of a disciplinary major, to the nature of the general education requirements to the university's graduation requirements. To be sure, there are other significant sources of influence and constraint on this faculty-centered process. Accreditation agencies like the HLC (Higher Learning Commission), ACS (chemistry),  AACSB (business), and ABET (engineering) constrain various levels of curricular design at the university level and the professional or disciplinary levels. Schools of business, colleges of engineering, and chemistry departments are constrained and guided by the agencies that control their accreditation. But it is the faculty of a particular university, school, or department that fundamentally drive the process of curriculum design and maintenance.

It could have been otherwise, of course. Other nations have implemented more centralized processes where ministries of education determine the structure and content of a university program of study. And we could imagine vesting this authority in the hands of local academic administrators -- deans and provosts. But in the United States the role of the academic administrator is largely one of persuasive collaborator rather than authoritative decision-maker when it comes to the curriculum. And the reason for this is pretty compelling: faculty are experts on the content and structure of knowledge and it makes sense to entrust them with the responsibility of organizing the educational experience.

But let's go back to the harder question: what is our society trying to accomplish through a university education? Why is this a worthwhile goal? And how can we best accomplish the goal?

Most fundamentally universities exist to continue the intellectual and personal development of young people; to help them gain the skills and knowledge they will need to carry out their plans of life; and to help them fulfill their capacities as citizens, creators, and leaders. A university education ought to be an environment in which the young person is challenged and assisted in the process of expanding and deepening his or her intellectual capabilities.

We might put these ideas in more practical terms by saying that a university education should allow the student to develop the capabilities he or she will need to succeed in a career and to make productive contributions to the society of the future.

And what do these goals require in terms of a curriculum? What are those skills, capabilities, and bodies of knowledge that young people need to cultivate in order to achieve the kinds of success mentioned here?

This is the point at which there is often disagreement among various academic voices and non-academic stakeholders. There is a very career-oriented perspective that holds that there are specific professional skills that should be the primary content of a university education. On this approach, the specialized major needs to be the focus of the undergraduate's work, and the bulk of the student's effort should be directed towards acquiring these specific skills.

But there is also an approach that emphasizes the importance of breadth and pluralism within the university curriculum. On this "liberal learning" philosophy, the university student needs to be broadly exposed to the arts, humanities, mathematics, and the social and natural sciences.  Here the emphasis is on helping the student acquire a broad set of intellectual capacities, not tied to a particular professional body of knowledge.

The reasons offered for this answer to the question are pragmatic ones. A leader or creator -- in whatever career -- needs to have an understanding of the social and historical context of the problems he or she confronts. He/she needs to have a rich imagination as he confronts unprecedented challenges -- within a startup company, a non-profit organization, or a state legislature. He/she needs to have the ability and confidence needed to arrive at original approaches to a problem. And he/she needs a broad set of skills of analysis, reasoning, and communication, as he works with others to discover and implement new solutions. So a liberal education is a superb foundation for almost any career -- engineer, accountant, doctor, community activist, or president.

This picture argues for breadth in the undergraduate experience. It also argues for two other curricular values: interdisciplinarity and multicultural breadth. It is evident that the difficult problems our civilization faces do not fit neatly into specific academic disciplines. Climate change, mortgage crises, and the legacy of racism all pose dense, "wicked" problems that demand cross-discipline collaboration. And likewise, the advantages created for US society by the racial and ethnic diversity of our population will be wasted if our young adults don't learn how to see the world through multiple perspectives of different human circumstances. A university isn't the only place where multicultural learning takes place, but it is one very important place. And to date universities have only scratched the surface in creating a genuinely multicultural learning environment.

So these are a few leading values that can serve to guide decisions about what an effective university education for the twenty-first century ought to include: breadth, imagination, historical and social context, rigorous reasoning, and a genuine ability to live and work in a multicultural world.  And most great universities in the United States have placed their bets on some version of this philosophy of liberal learning.  This bundle of features should lead to flexibility of mind, readiness for innovation, preparation for working collaboratively, and a set of intellectual skills that support effective problem solving.  (Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education lays out a very similar educational philosophy; her book is worth reading by everyone with an interest in university curriculum reform.)

Malthus blogging on the Corn Laws

I think that Thomas Malthus would have been very much at home in the blogosphere. He weighed in on the issues of the day, bringing careful logical analysis of economic theory to bear on the policy issues that were up for debate. And he was very interested in making the connection between economic principles and real empirical evidence. This is particularly true in his contributions to the debate on the Corn Laws in 1814 and 1815. Malthus authored pamphlets on these issues in 1814 ("Observations on the effects of the corn laws"; link) and 1815 ("Grounds of an opinion on the policy of restricting the importation of foreign corn"; link), and they repay scrutiny today; they are powerful instances of a very smart economist probing the theory and the facts surrounding a complex policy issue. (Here is a nice survey of Malthus's theories; link.)

The Corn Laws might be thought of as a form of "stimulus package" for the British economy in the early nineteenth century. By setting a high tariff on the import of wheat and other grains, Parliament aimed to protect the agricultural sector and to encourage the expansion of grain production to make Britain more independent from external grain providers. One might also compare the debate to the NAFTA debate or to policy deliberations in the 1960s concerning "import substitution" strategies. Opponents argued that removal of the tariffs would bring down the price of grain, a central component of the wage basket; this would help the poor and would also permit a significant reduction of the wage as well. So the issue divides the interests of land owners, industrialists, and the poor.

Malthus's position in the two essays is somewhat different. In the first article he promises to lay out the issue dispassionately, dispelling false opinions about what the effects of the proposed policy might be and diving into the advantages and disadvantages of the policy. He writes that "some important considerations have been neglected on both sides of the question, and the effects of the corn laws, and of a rise or fall in the price of corn, on the agriculture and general wealth of the state, have not yet been fully laid before the public." A bit further on, he writes:

My main object is to assist in affording the materials for a just and enlightened decision; and whatever that decision may be, to prevent disappointment, in the event of the effects of the measure not being such as were previously contemplated. Nothing would tend so powerfully to bring the general principles of political economy into disrepute, and to prevent their spreading, as their being supported upon any occasion by reasoning, which constant and unequivocal experience should afterwards prove to be fallacious.

So--"let's do rigorous and systematic analysis based on the principles of political economy and our best understanding of the facts." Good advice for a policy debate.

Quite a bit of the analysis is devoted to refuting an idea that Malthus attributes to Adam Smith -- that "corn" is a unique commodity because increases and decreases in its price have no effect on agricultural production. The idea seems to be that the price of corn determines the wage and thereby determines all other prices in the economy; a small increase in the price of corn immediately causes an equal increase in the price of labor and all other prices. So corn is a "numéraire" to the whole economy; therefore the economy cannot be influenced by tariffs that alter the money price of corn. This is a notion that Malthus quickly and efficiently dispatches. Referring to the poverty studies of Frederick Morton Eden (1797) (whom Marx also relies on in the Grundrisse), Malthus examines the budget of the laboring poor and finds that only 40% of this budget is directly influenced by the price of grain. So the effect of the price of grain on the wage is only partial. (If we assume that the wage is at equilibrium when it equals the cost of the minimum wage basket, then an increase of 10% in the cost of the bread in the basket (40%) will have only 4% effect on the total cost of the wage basket.) Moreover, he points out that labor markets are different from many other commodity markets in the sense that it is not possible to quickly decrease the supply of labor; so the effect of changes in the price of corn will work only slowly into changes in the price of labor. "It is manifest therefore that the whole of the wages of labour can never rise and fall in proportion to the variations in the price of grain."

Second, on the production side, Malthus goes into quite a bit of detail in the micro-economics of farming: land quality, choice of crops, improvements of land, amount of hired labor and draft animals. And he demonstrates that an increase in the price of the crop will give a clear economic incentive to investors to expand and intensify agricultural production. so quantity responds to rising prices. Higher prices => higher profits => rational incentive to invest more capital in expanded production. In short, the Smithian idea that "corn is unique" is untenable.

The central "general principles" of political economy that Malthus attributes to Smith -- and which he endorses himself -- are essentially these: that the price of a good varies over time according to fluctuations in supply and demand; that the quantity of a good increases when producers have a price-based incentive to invest more capital in its production (and vice versa); and that capital will flow across productive uses in such a way as to bring about an equal rate of profit across sectors and industries. Malthus argues that the idea that corn is a unique commodity directly contradicts these principles. "Corn is subjected to the same laws as other commodities, and the difference between them is by no means so great as stated by Dr Smith."

This conclusion has a direct relevance to the topic of the corn laws. Malthus hereby concludes that a tariff or other restriction on imported grain will in fact have the effect of stimulating additional domestic production. So Britain's grain production would increase under this set of laws. However, here Malthus makes a point about Britain's agricultural potential and the density of its population:

On the whole then considering the present accumulation of manufacturing population in this country, compared with any other in Europe, the expenses attending enclosures, the price of labour and the weight of taxes, few things seem less probable, than that Great Britain should naturally grow an independent supply of corn.

So food self-sufficiency is impossible for Britain (in 1814!). Moreover, there is a Malthusian demographic consequence of free trade in grain that Malthus directly recognizes:

As one of the evils therefore attending the throwing open our ports, it may be stated, that if the stimulus to population, from the cheapness of grain, should in the course of twenty or twenty five years reduce the earnings of the labourer to the same quantity of corn as at present, at the same price as in the rest of Europe, the condition of the lower classes of people in this country would be deteriorated.

Malthus explicitly avoids coming to a conclusion of the overall advisability of the corn laws in this essay; but it is hard not to feel that the balance of arguments here appear to favor "open ports" -- no tariffs or restrictions on the import of grain.

So it is surprising to turn to the second essay, less than a year later ("Grounds of an opinion"), because here he lays out a specific argument in favor of the tariffs. He offers as a central reason for this conclusion the fact that protection will stimulate more agricultural production which will make Britain more nearly grain-sufficient. The argument turns less on economic principles and more on the predicted behavior of grain-producing nations such as France in times of dearth. Recent historical experience demonstrated to Malthus that countries will limit their exports of grain at times when the supply is short and prices are high; but this is precisely when Britain would need to continue to have unfettered access to foreign grain markets. In effect, we might read the first essay as creating the argument in principle for free trade in grain, and the second essay as an argument based on the specific historical facts of international trade that make the free trade policy unwise. Here is how Malthus tries to reconcile theory and empirical experience:

I am very far indeed from meaning to insinuate, that if we cannot have the most perfect freedom of trade, we should have none; or that a great nation must immediately alter its commercial policy, whenever any of the countries with which it deals passes laws inconsistent with the principles of freedom. But I protest most entirely against the doctrine, that we are to pursue our general principles without ever looking to see if they are applicable to the case before us; and that in politics and political economy, we are to go straight forward, as we certainly ought to do in morals, without any reference to the conduct and proceedings of others.

It is interesting to observe that Malthus refers on more than one occasion to the effect that a proposed policy will have on the condition of the poor; he affirms that it would be decisive in favor of free trade in grain if it could be shown that this would improve the standard of living of the poor.

If I were convinced, that to open our ports, would be permanently to improve the conditions of the labouring classes of society, I should consider the question as at once determined in favour of such a measure. But I own it appears to me, after the most deliberate attention to the subject, that it will be attended with effects very different from those of improvement.

However, he believes he can show that this is not the case. (The passage quoted above, for example, follows a line of argument something like this: cheaper food => larger families => more competition for work => lower wages.) Moreover, free trade in grain would have the effect of rapidly reducing British agricultural production, and expelling more thousands of agricultural workers from the farm economy. But industrial labor is unlikely to increase sufficiently to absorb this influx in the medium term:

Our commerce and manufactures, therefore, must increase very considerably before they can restore the demand for labour already lost; for a moderate increase beyond this will scarcely make up the disadvantage of a low money price of wages.

Malthus offers something of a paean to the positive effects of industrialization that is worth quoting from "Observations":

Yet, though the condition of the individual employed in common manufacturing labour is not by any means desirable, most of the effects of manufactures and commerce on the general state of society are in the highest degree beneficial. They infuse fresh life and activity into all classes of the state, afford opportunities for the inferior orders to rise by personal merit and exertion, and stimulate the higher orders to depend for distinction upon other grounds than mere rank and riches. They excite invention, encourage science and the useful arts, spread intelligence and spirit, inspire a taste for conveniences and comforts among the labouring classes; and , above all, give a new and happier structure to society, by increasing the proportion of the middle classes, that body on which the liberty, public spirit, and good government of every country must mainly depend. If we compare such a state of society with a state merely agricultural, the general superiority of the former is incontestable.

Who says economics is the dismal science?

What is Alsace?

It may seem like a strange question: What is Alsace? It is a region of France. It is a culturally and linguistically distinct population of 1.8 million people. Most visitors would observe that there is a distinctive Alsatian style in life, in architecture, and in culture. It possesses one great city (Strasbourg), many middle-sized cities (Hagenau, Wissembourg, Colmar), and hundreds of small villages. It is a beautiful collection of landscapes, villages, fields, forests, and vineyards. It is the homeland of Hansi and Marc Bloch. It is a region that has suffered acutely in warfare -- eastern Alsace was the site of most of the battles of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and it was the site of the final stages of the Battle of the Bulge and the German counteroffensive, Northwind, with intense tank fighting and destruction in dozens of villages. The sufferings of World War II are still remembered by the octagenarians. It is a border culture, with influences from Germany and France establishing aspects of culture and social attitudes over several centuries. And there is always choucroute, kougelhopf, and Kronenberg. In short, Alsace has a history and a set of traditions that set its people apart.

So from the point of view of travel-writing, the question has an easy answer. But the social reality is more complex and fluid. The social reality of Alsace today is highly heterogeneous, within and across villages, towns, and cities. And ongoing processes of nation-building and globalization raise the question of its cultural survival.

Take the issue of language. Stop into any grocery store or hospital in rural Alsace and you will find elderly people gossiping and talking in Alsatian. For many of these people Alsatian was their native language; for some it remained their only language. But the situation is different if you pause to watch boys playing ball in the public square; their chatter is in French -- or sometimes Arabic. So it is an open question whether the Alsatian language community will remain a vital one, or whether it will retreat into the archives. Current estimates indicate that fewer than 10 percent of children in Alsace are fluent in Alsatian. So the question arises, whether the language will reproduce itself into the the next several generations.

Or consider folkloric customs and cuisine -- the colorful costumes and dancing that are still very much a part of village festivals. How long will these customs survive in an age of mass-based entertainment and a homogenizing media culture? How are the customs transmitted across generations? How long can tarte flambée persist as an Alsatian specialty in the face of an onslaught by Pizza Hut?

And how about the distinctive modes of class relations that you find in Alsace -- the ways in which the local bourgeoisie dress and interact with each other, and how they relate to other social strata -- farmers, bus drivers, shop clerks? In what ways are these class relations distinct from those of Bourgogne? And how distinct are they from their counterparts in the United States?

More fundamentally, consider the range of contemporary social problems that Alsace faces, in both its cities and its villages: drug use, youth unemployment and disaffection, hooliganism, poorly assimilated immigrant communities. How will Strasbourg or Hagenau deal with these problems? And will "Alsace" remain? Or will the national strategies of social services, public policy, and legislation lead to a more socially uniform Alsace -- just a quaint set of historical markers on the autoroute?

So really, the question posed here has two distinct parts, both very interesting. The first is historical: what were the rich pathways of culture formation through which Alsace came to be Alsace? How did this particular mix of values, attitudes, modes of behavior, language, and culture come together?

The second part of the question is forward-looking: where is Alsace going? Will it preserve its cultural distinctiveness and its language? Or will it become simply another interchangeable part of France and the world? How much staying power does a traditional culture have in the face of the impulses of nation-building, mass communication, and globalization of consumption that the contemporary world imposes?

These questions are interesting in consideration of Alsace. But they are even more interesting in the context of thinking about globalization itself. Is it possible for local and regional cultures to successfully negotiate the challenges of the twenty-first century in ways that permit the survival of their cultural uniqueness? Or is the global world of the future destined to look more like a very large shopping mall, with the same foods, clothes, and ethics everywhere?

Israel's complexity

A first visit to Israel has been a fascinating experience in trying to begin to understand a different society.

I've met with university administrators and professors; reporters and media people; young people with a passion for social justice in Israel; a senior official in the foreign ministry; and a senior leader in an Israeli NGO devoted to securing greater social equity in East Jerusalem. I've met Israelis of many backgrounds: people with seven generations of family in Israel and Palestine, third-generation Kurdish Jews, recent Ethiopian and Sudanese immigrants, American and Canadian immigrants from the 1970s and 1980s, recent European business immigrants -- even a French producer of Yiddish art performances in Ein Karem.

I've seen high-tech zones in Herzliya, slums in Tel Aviv, stunning new luxury apartment complexes in central Jerusalem, and the dense and squalid reality of East Jerusalem. I've seen the wall -- the security fence -- and have witnessed how it bisects neighborhoods in a tightly packed urban core. I've seen children in East Jerusalem who plainly have very limited futures -- and I've seen new settlement apartment complexes in East Jerusalem, apparently sited precisely in order to make it virtually impossible to divide Jerusalem along the lines of the Clinton plan.

I've talked with university secretaries in Haifa who nonchalantly mentioned racing down the stairs six times a day to take cover from rockets -- with only 60 seconds of warning. I've seen the student cafeteria at Hebrew University that was blown apart by a bomb in 2002, and the touching memorial to the students who lost their lives there. And I've seen a major hospital in Jerusalem with a trauma center encapsulated in bomb-blast concrete and ventilation adequate to fend off chemical weapons. I've talked with Israeli citizens who are very committed to making progress on peace and justice for Palestinians, and who are equally passionate in supporting Israel's obligation to secure its citizens against violent attack. I've visited an appealing restaurant on the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv -- only to find that it's been closed for several years following a string of deadly suicide bombings there. And, of course, I've seen armed security guards in every cafe, restaurant, and hotel, trying to assure the safety of the guests.

There are quite a few social types I haven't been exposed to in more than a passing way in this brief visit: Bedouins, Russian political bosses, human traffickers preying on girls from Eastern Europe, and settler organization activists, for example. So there is a lot of Israel's current sociology that I haven't gotten an exposure to yet. But it is clear that there are deep social problems just under the surface -- in Israel's cities no less than other cities in the world. There are many examples -- corruption, organized criminal activity, misuse of urban land use procedures, persistent inequalities of opportunity for some Israelis.

Israel has achieved many enormous successes since its founding sixty-some years ago. It has created a robust democracy -- though one in which the Palestinians of East Jerusalem do not yet choose to participate. It has created and nurtured great universities -- the Technion, Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute, to name just three. And it has committed in formal and informal ways to making a university education accessible to all Israelis. It has somehow nurtured an ethic of service and engagement in community among many young people -- the School of Social Work at Hebrew University, for example, is a lively place for community-based activism by students and community members. And it has embodied an entrepreneurial spirit in the high-tech world that has lent great impetus to economic growth. So these are great achievements.

But it is hard to see how Israel's future can be as bright as it could be unless the Palestinian conflict is resolved. A continuing status quo seems entirely unsustainable. The conflict needs to be resolved in ways that establish a fair foundation of life for all the communities and people of the region. And it needs to be resolved in a way that fundamentally respects Israel's rights of security for its citizens and institutions. Surely basic social justice is an irreplaceable prerequisite of a harmonious social order; likewise, the acceptance of nonviolence by all members of society is fundamental to a sustainable society.

There isn't much that one can learn in a fundamental way in just a brief exposure to a complex country. But here's a preliminary thought: Israel's course is being set today by a very wide range of actors: the Knesset and prime minister, city authorities, settler organizations, business investors, educators, NGOs, orthodox activists, and ordinary Israeli citizens. And where the policies will come out is deeply unpredictable. Will Israel succeed in solving the problem of a just solution for the people of greater Jerusalem? Will it succeed in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians that lays the basis for harmonious shared regional life? Or will disruptive actors on both sides continue to make enduring compromise impossible? The sad reality, from many other historical examples, is that passionate minorities and self-interested private interests may well prevail in creating structures that make lasting peace and justice impossible, for their own self-interested reasons. And that would be a tragedy, for all the people of the region.

Engaged youth

A while ago I posted on the subject of "disaffected youth". I don't have a basis for estimating the percentage of the youth population that falls in this category, but surely it's a fairly small number in most places. Here I want to focus on the other end of the spectrum -- the relatively small but meaningful percentage of young people who have a significant level of "civic engagement" in their blood.

You can identify some of these young people in almost every city and suburb in America. They are the high school and college students who feel passionately about community service, civic engagement, and "giving back". They are involved in activities like alternative spring break, Habitat for Humanity, and the United Way. They are involved in community service in a major way -- through mosques, temples, and churches, through social justice organizations such as Amnesty International, Big Brother/Big Sister, and Oxfam, and through organized community service programs at universities and high schools. And they are to be found in a big way in nationally organized programs for community service like AmeriCorps, Teach for America, and CityYear.

I've met quite a few of these engaged young people over the past ten years, and they are truly inspiring. They are idealistic in a thoroughly practical way. They see the impact they can have through service, and they understand the importance of designing and implementing service programs in the most practical way possible. They care about the individual people they help -- children, elderly, impaired, impoverished -- in very specific human terms. They understand the value of working together in collaboration and teamwork to accomplish great things, and they understand deeply the values and rewards of racial and religious diversity. Finally, they have very little of the crass materialism of "youth America" as it was portrayed on Beverly Hills, 90210 or other examples of this genre. So this group of young people gives a truly optimistic perspective on our society for the future.

I don't take these points to lead to a generalization about American youth as a group. In fact, what is striking is exactly how atypical these young people seem to be relative to the population as a whole -- and how similar and compatible they are with each other. But it remains the case -- whether 5% or 25%, there is a meaningful minority of today's generation of young people who give a remarkable level of commitment to social engagement.

My question here concerns the social psychology of this group. This is a question about the circumstances of social development that are in place today: where do these young people and their values come from? How has this wonderful mix of optimism, service, and respect for racial differences come about? And how can it be furthered?

One thing is immediately clear: it seems to be unrelated to affluence, race, or neighborhood. A cross-section of the CityYear corps is instructive: young people with very similar social values are showing up from middle-class suburbs, impoverished inner cities, and towns that are neither urban nor suburban. And it is easy to find white kids, rich and poor, brown kids, African-American kids, and Asian-American kids -- all coming together into a corps of 60-150 young people in a given city. None of these groups seems either more or less concerned about social justice, none seems more readily open to learning from peers from other races, and none seems socially and culturally more ready for a serious commitment to engagement and service. In other words, class, race, and income don't seem to be critical in defining today's youth social engagement.

A couple of factors are probably highly relevant to the degree of engagement and civic values that is displayed by young people involved in AmeriCorps and CityYear.

First, there have to be strands of American culture that are creating a "pulse" of concern about social justice and individual involvement in community among young people. This set of dispositions can't be a totally random result. Whether it's a generation of young people acculturated by Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, or by the broadening circle of awareness of the injustice of racism and poverty, or a "bounce" from the social activism of the sixties generation -- there must be some cultural currents that are making many of today's young people more ready for social involvement and more concerned about social justice. Somehow our society, our families, our schools, and our media are producing a certain fraction of the youth cohort that possess these values and commitments. (Though crucially, we can ask whether that fraction is greater than years past or is pretty much constant.)

Second, recruitment certainly plays an important role in explaining this observation about the similarity of corps members from very diverse backgrounds. AmeriCorps and CityYear members are by no means a random sample of the general population. Instead, they are young people who have actively sought out the opportunity for service presented by these organizations, and they have responded favorably to the very explicit expressions of value commitments they represent.

Another factor that seems to be operative in generating the value orientation of AmeriCorps and CityYear members is the nature of the training and bonding that occurs within the experience. Young people may come to CityYear with positive attitudes about race relations -- but their understanding, commitment, and concrete skills in working in multiracial teams certainly deepens enormously through their year of service. Likewise, what may have been a somewhat thin "will to serve" at the time of recruitment seems typically to deepen into a robust, life-changing involvement in community organizations. The experience of the organization, its leaders, peers, and the service itself leads to a profound deepening of personal engagement.

It's worth dwelling on the causes of youth engagement, because it seems very likely that many of the social problems we will face in the future will only be solved if we can come together as communities of concern, giving our time and our energy to address the serious challenges that are just over the horizon. And these young, engaged people are demonstrating how it can be done.

Creativity, convention, and tradition

images: Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906); Courbet, Burial at Ornans (1849)

Conventions define how to do things correctly -- trim the hedges, choose an outfit for an evening at the opera or the racetrack, how much to tip the server. They also define or constrain productions in the arts -- writing a short story or a sonnet, performing a Brahms quintet, participating in an Andean flute group. We might define a convention as a stylized but unwritten rule of performance. A tradition is an extended set of conventions for a given area of performance. We can refer to traditions of classical German chamber composition, Japanese landscape painting, or hiphop street performance. A conventional act or performance, then, is one that directly and consistently expresses the relevant conventions.

So -- at any given time, a particular set of conventions drive the creation of works of culture and guide the interpretation of the product. These conventions are somehow embedded in the community of creators, viewers, and critics. And innovation, breaking or stretching the rules, creates the possibility of novelty and creativity within the process. It is important to notice, though, that conventions generally don't govern every aspect of a performance. The convention of the sonnet mandates a form and meter and gives some constraint on subject. But it would certainly be possible to write a sonnet in deviant meter in praise of a farm tractor; the audience would be able to make sense of the production. So the artist always has a degree of freedom within the tradition.

I find several specific ideas to be useful in analyzing cultural conventions and their products -- in particular, "idiom", "voice", and "novelty". Within a given medium, there is an existing stock of shorthand ways of expressing an artistic or symbolic idea. We may refer to these modes of expression as "idioms" of the genre. When the stranger in the 1950s western is wearing a black hat, the audience understands he is the villain. When the soundtrack swells in an ominous minor key the audience knows there is trouble coming. These idioms aren't natural signifiers; rather, they are conventions of the B movie. So the idioms of a genre are a particularly direct form of convention within the semiotics of the genre.

"Voice" is a counterpart of originality. It is the intangible "signature" that the individual artist brings to his or her work -- what Eisenstein brings to many of his films, distinctive from Bergman and Kurosawa. Voice represents a kind of consistency over time, but it is not defined by homage to tradition; instead, it is an expression of the specific sensibility of the individual artist, the specific way in which this artist forges together his/her material and vision within the resources of the genre and its conventions. Eisenstein's films aren't formulaic, even though one can recognize a common sensibility running through them.

What about novelty and creativity? Novelty is the break outside of convention that the artist brings to the production in order to express a particular idea or perspective in a new and forceful way -- for example, the transition from sepia to color in The Wizard of Oz. The original and genuinely creative artist or writer finds ways of bringing novelty and his/her own originality into the production, giving the audience new and unexpected insights and ideas. The element of innovation needs to point the audience towards its signification without relying wholly on the existing traditions of reading. (Picasso's portrait above of Gertrude Stein displeased some friends of the writer because "it doesn't resemble Gertrude Stein." Picasso is said to have replied, "It will.")

But here is an apparent conundrum of creativity and convention. Any performance or artistic work that is wholly determined by the relevant conventions is, for that reason, wholly uncreative. It is like a conversation in a Dashiell Hammett novel: no surprises, each gambit programmed by the conventions of the crime novel. Or it is like a string quartet composed by an earnest follower of Beethoven, with no phrase breaking the flow, no note out of place. And for the careful listener, each is ultimately boring; there is no novelty in the work. And there is no opening for the original and creative voice of the creator. Originality and new perspective have no place.

But now the other half of the conundrum: novelty without regard to the frame of tradition is incomprehensible and meaningless. The classical composer of 1800 who somehow heard the world atonally, arhythmically, and to the accompaniment of falling trash cans and who then wrote a symphony in thirty movements on this basis -- this composer is innovating, all right. But he/she is not creating works that any existing audience could hear as "music". There is no bridge of meaning or hermeneutic practice to facilitate interpretation.

It is relevant here that we are led to refer to the audience. Because cultural products require the conveying of meaning; and communication of meaning requires some reference to conventions shared with the audience -- whether in music, painting, literature, or hiphop. Meaning of any cultural performance is inherently public, and this means there have to be publicly shared standards of interpretation. The audience can only interpret the performance by relating it to some set of conventions or other. These may be conventions of representation, structure, or mythology; but the audience needs some clues in order to be able to "read" the work.

There are, of course, periods in art history where it appears that innovation is all and continuous convention is nothing. For example, Courbet and the realist painters were evidently shocking to the viewing public for their dismissal of the classical values of the Salon -- in the Burial at Ornans above, for example. But really, there was a great deal of continuity within the context of which the realist manifesto was shocking to the public. (T. J. Clark does a great job of "reading" the painting for its continuities with previous traditions of painting and the sources of its originality; Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, pp. 80-83.)

So what does all of this imply about "creative breakthroughs" in the genres of the arts? It seems to imply that major and culturally significant breakthroughs occur when talented people fully absorb the semantic (and historically specific) conventions that define the genre at the current time; he/she finds ways of squeezing every bit of new meaning out of these conventions in the production of the cultural product; he/she plays with the limits of the convention, testing them for the possibility of forging new meanings; and sometimes, he/she breaks a convention altogether and substitutes a new meaning maker in its place (presenting Julius Caesar in the garb of fascist Italy of the 1930s, for example).

These topics are relevant to understanding society, because this dialectic of convention, innovation, and meaning-making is virtually pervasive in everyday life. Jokes, business meetings, and street demonstrations all have some elements of this dance of meaning, convention, and originality. So it is important to gain greater understanding of the intersection of convention and innovation.

(There are numerous unanswered questions raised by this topic. How is a tradition of painting or composition related to a scientific or technological tradition? How is a literary or artistic tradition related to a "style" of technology or a scientific research programme? How can we take measure of "radical innovators" in the arts such as Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism, or John Cage and American experimentalism in composition? And how do beauty or aesthetic value come into this equation? What are the qualities of a work of art that lead us to say, "That is beautiful!" or "that is hideous!"? What are the threads of convention, form, meaning, and originality that contribute to great aesthetic value?)

Education and careers

Secondary and post-secondary education plays a crucial role in the economic activity of any complex society. Kathleen Thelen provides a very fine description of the different talent regimes of Germany, Britain, Japan, and the United States in How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. She highlights the very significant differences that exist across countries with respect to the internal and external structure of educational and training institutions and their relations to industry. Young people acquire the knowledge and skills they will need in order to play a productive role in the economy in these institutions -- which is to say that these institutions perform the function of preparing young people for jobs. This implies, in turn, that schools ought to be well informed about the skill and talent needs of the economy within which they exist -- what basic and advanced skills young employees need to possess in order to fulfill expectations within the workplace and contribute value to the organizations they join.

However, this expectation of linkage between schools and firms seems to be somewhat over-optimistic in the United States. Educators and policy-makers appear to rely primarily on their own judgments about what a high school or college education ought to convey -- or what knowledge and skills a graduate ought to have achieved -- rather than gathering more systematic intelligence about what employers want and need in prospective workers. Sociologist James Rosenbaum argues in Beyond College For All: Career Paths For The Forgotten Half that this is an important weakness in the American system of secondary and post-secondary education -- in contrast to countries such as Germany or Japan, where such linkages are well established and effective. Better linkages in both directions -- from employers in designing curriculum, and towards employers, in recommending graduates for employment -- would result in a substantially more effective system of education and work in the United States, according to Rosenbaum.

In fact, some academic leaders take the view that "career preparation" is secondary to "development of the mind" as a priority in a college education. The educational philosophy in selective universities (in arts and sciences, anyway) is premised on the cultivation of the intellectual breadth and maturity of the student and the nourishing of fundamental skills such as reasoning, communicating, quantitative ability, cultural sensibility, and moral awareness. The underlying idea of this philosophy of liberal education is that these foundational skills, cultivated through a broad liberal education, will provide the intellectual resources necessary for the young person to succeed in a variety of careers and professions. Martha Nussbaum expresses this philosophy very eloquently in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

And, in fact, this is a good educational philosophy -- for a part of the total task of preparing all young people for work. University graduates in history, sociology, biology, chemistry, philosophy, or literature can make immediate productive contributions in many organizations -- so the educational system that prepared them is plainly working well for this segment of the population and the job market. This educational experience is best suited for preparing young people for additional study in graduate and professional programs, and for beginning jobs in professions where good analytical, reasoning, and communications skills are most important (e.g., consulting, banking, public relations, journalism, social justice organizations, non-governmental organizations, government agencies). The work associated with these careers usually involves research, writing, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and leadership; and graduates with the general intellectual and personal skills associated with a liberal arts education are usually well prepared in most or all of these areas.

But it is perhaps a fallacy to imagine that this educational philosophy is suited to every individual. There are important differences across individuals -- personality, curiosity, determination, ambition, and intellectual capacity -- that imply that individuals will differ in the degree to which this educational philosophy will further their talents. Ideally, we would like to see an educational system that provides substantial realization of the talents and traits of each individual -- recognizing that there are substantial differences across individuals. And it is likely that the "liberal education" philosophy is poorly suited to some individuals.

Second, it is equally fallacious to imagine that the educational philosophy of liberal education is the best foundation for every possible career -- from professor to physician to welder to fire warden to real estate agent. And, in fact, this seems to be the central argument of Rosenbaum's book -- conveyed in his title, "Beyond College for All." This idea is unpacked in two related ways: first, that secondary schooling needs to improve substantially in order to achieve the outcomes it promises -- literacy, numeracy, and basic social skills of the workplace for all graduates. Here the point appears to be that there are still a large number of jobs in the modern economy that require only the skills of a well-educated high school graduate. And he believes that American secondary schools ought to have substantially tighter linkages with industry and employers. And second, the logic of Rosenbaum's argument leads to the idea that post-secondary education ought to be more differentiated, with opportunities for a wider range of personalities and talents. Here the theory of the "applied baccalaureate" is perhaps a natural extension of Rosenbaum's argument (see this report from the Higher Learning Commission). The applied baccalaureate is a four-year degree offered by a community college in a practitioner discipline (e.g., occupational therapy, nursing, computer-aided design, numerically controlled manufacturing). And the background theory is that the program of study is designed in order to achieve the degree of specialization needed for immediate inclusion in a technically demanding job, with the degree of background scientific and technical knowledge that will permit the worker to grow in the job.

This idea is likely to encounter criticism from thinkers such as Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life), who argued quite a few years ago that the American system of education was stratified by class, with "elite" education going to young people destined for professional (high-paying) jobs, and vocational education going to young people destined for working-class jobs. They argued, further, that the social psychology promoted by the two educational environments was itself class-specific: independence and creativity are encouraged in elite colleges, whereas docility and obedience are encouraged in vocational schools. But I suppose that the best remedy to this critique is to aggressively pursue real equality of opportunity for all young people, so that individuals find their way to the various sectors of education according to their own talents and characters rather than the markers of class origin that they bear. (Charles Sabel provides a different take on the relationship between class, education, and work in Work and Politics: The Division of Labour in Industry. Among other things, Sabel challenges the "elite/non-elite" distinction when applied to different kinds of work.)