Media soundbites are ever more harsh, drawing a sharper line mostly through caricature. It is a dangerous game to play, since conventional crowd wisdom, once gained, is extraordinarily difficult to dislodge.

Weaknesses of capitalism

One of the prisms of contention concerns capitalism and its weaknesses. And while the popular press concedes that communism was a failure, there remains a significant cross-disciplinary academic crowd that insists a kinder, gentler society is possible, but is left untried. This assertion is becoming more difficult to make given that many forms of government of the leftward side of the spectrum, all versions of socialism, have generally been tried in one European country or the other, and they are all structurally inviable.

Karl Marx from the Library of Congress

And European countries are excellent incubators for experiment; smaller populations, controllable geographies, comparatively non-corrupted, and a healthy, educated populace. These attributes define an open, adaptable and not unwieldy landscape in which to brave a new world. Why then, are they all failing absent serious and drastic reduction in government?

What of Marx does survive? The philosopher Brian Leiter makes the point that the labor theory of value and the theory of the falling rate of profit have both been disproved, albeit there is a small vocal left-libertarian chorus that stands by them. But Mr. Leiter points out that Marx did characterize capitalism correctly:

capitalism continues to conquer the globe; its effect is the gradual erasure of cultural and regional identities; growing economic inequality is the norm in the advanced capitalist societies; where capitalism triumphs, market norms gradually dominate all spheres of life, public and private; class position continues to be the defining determinant of political outlook; the dominant class dominates the political process which, in turn, does its bidding; and so on. (The article, above, includes citations to supporting evidence.)

Particularly important, in my view, remains the Marxian theory of ideology, which predicts that the ruling ideas in any well-functioning society will be ideas that promote the interests of the ruling class in that society, i.e., the class that is economically dominant.

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: What is Living and What is Dead in Marx?

Bureaucracy vs. capitalism

But should we be surprised by the assertions of Marx? Are these actually attributes of capitalism, or of dominant bureaucracies? We could prescribe the same attributes to the Mayan culture, or to Rome, or on a shorter time line, even of Stalinist Russia. That is, any successful bureaucracy inevitably takes on these traits.

As to the assertion that the dominant class eventually structures its ideology to protect itself and its interests, even the YMCA began as an organization with the purpose to help the poor, and now caters to its main contributors. Here Olson in The Rise and Decline of Nations suggests all bureaucracies inevitably fall prey to their most boisterous and influential constituents.

Since so few companies survive either, most of them victims of their own entrenched interests and exigent annuity streams, bureaucracy becomes a prevailing and ultimately damning theme in all of these tales. 

Are we now talking about crony capitalism, or the inherent danger of bureaucracy? Is it possible for a nation, even when it is founded on the rule of law and limited government, to resist the temptation of encroachment and ultimately bankrupt itself in a surreal combination of sentimentality and special interest? For the most damning result is not just the warren of twisted incentives and pay-offs, but the statist mess it makes of the society or organization it governs. We are now in the ironic position that banks can legally hypothecate their client’s assets while Marlene Schmuck cannot sell baked muffins out of her own house.

Taylor and the bourgeoisie

Arguably the most enduring trait of Marxian philosophy still remains. And that is the prevalent dichotomy of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In fact it is difficult to walk the hallways of any company and not hear the unspoken assumption of management vs. worker, even as the media and the current President increase the volume regarding greed, income inequality and capital vs. worker.

The Taylor theory of management actually buttresses this view. Our left brain predilection for process in preference to discernment produces a natural tendency for hierarchy. But there is an argument to be made that here again, Marx was fabulously and gloriously incorrect. For there is no obvious disconnection between capital and the worker. There is only the struggle to add value and emotively, to gain validation.

If value and validation are the key to a vibrant and advancing society, then the natural dichotomy is between the entrepreneur/worker (for what is the difference?) and suffering and statist power or bureaucracy. For it is bureaucracy that limits right brain activity. It is bureaucracy that does not value adaptability or engagement or creativity. And it is bureaucracy that inevitably protects itself, succumbs to special interest, and is especially prone to corruption and favoritism. That Marx did not see that political and bureaucratic totalitarianism was the natural derivative of his socialist theories is the most damning articulation of his tautologies.

Implications for markets and organizations

It is through market induced variation and trial and failure that emergence and innovation; value, is produced. Capital follows. There is a great argument to be made that organizations are decentralizing not as a function of technology, but the other way around. They are discovering that the Taylor model, like the Marxian dichotomy, are incorrect. That cross-functional teams, and now cross-hierarchical teams (in a much flatter topology) are the natural form of congregations and organizations of people.

We may need some hierarchy and bureaucracy. But communication, vision, and some of our other traditional reasons for employing them were never wholly correct. And placing people in such positions of power is, like fame, an extremely unnatural and often self-destructive thing to do. In fact we intuitively sense that the best leaders understand this issue.

Bureaucracy (Lib Works Ludwig Von Mises PB) by Ludwig von Mises

The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation by Ikujiro Nonaka

Guiding insects with technology

Say what now?

DARPA insect guidance

Olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program is aimed at developing technology to provide control over insect locomotion, just as reins are needed for effective control over horse locomotion.

Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems (HI-MEMS)

The control of insect locomotion will be investigated using several approaches, including direct electrical muscle excitation, electrical stimulation of neurons, electromechanical stimulation of insect sensory cells, and presentation of optical cues with micro-optical visual presentation.

Transformers, here we come. For the record, I want to drive Optimus Prime.

Why MF Global Matters makes the argument that too much of our regulation is not built on simple rule of principle that we know will protect ethical and efficient markets and trading. Instead, it becomes a warren of obscurity pressured by both expediency and special interest. It ends up concerning itself with closing barn doors after the chickens already escaped. The problems with this approach are many. It raises the cost of doing business since overhead is needed for discovery, compliance and reporting. Since the law is now deep into gray areas, it forces out-sized volumes of cases to court. It misses other barn doors yet to be opened.

Principles matter

U.S. regulators may soften Dodd- Frank Act rules designed to protect less-sophisticated customers in swap trades after banks, pension funds and municipalities said the original plan could damage the market. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, meeting in Washington today, may grant Wall Street banks a series of exceptions to rules requiring dealers to reasonably believe their derivatives are suitable for clients and in the best interests of endowments and other so-called special entities.

CFTC May Soften Swap Conduct Rules for Pensions, Municipalities – Businessweek

This legislation is not going to get it done. Are we running so scared we cannot accomplish this the right way? From the same article:

MF Global’s failure had an “extremely damaging impact” on futures customers and demonstrated the flaws in allowing futures brokers access to customers’ assets, Anthony J. DeLuca, chief financial officer of Moore Capital, wrote to the CFTC on Jan. 9. BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, urged the CFTC to complete the rules and consider more protections later.

Really? Please read the original link to Why MF Global Matters.

Markets depend on clear, simple ethical rules

CFTC Republican Jill Sommers was the lone vote against the measure. She expressed concern the CFTC was taking “a piecemeal approach” to consumer protection by giving special treatment to swaps customers, but not those involving futures. The rulemaking drew similar skepticism from Congress. “Today’s actions will do little to reassure the many farmers, who have lost their own property, that efforts to mitigate another MF Global are being factored into new rule changes,” said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas. …The CFTC has finalized nearly two dozen rules, but it is behind on completing much of a regulatory framework for the $700 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market required under the Dodd-Frank law. Many of the high-profile and controversial rules remain.

CFTC adds protections to customers’ money – Yahoo!

There can be little to disagree with this statement. Obscurity guarantees we are playing in the gray area, which only increases the number of fights. And fights are expensive. 

Euros and bad debt

A common currency is really very simple both to create and dissolve. After all, the United States of America has had one for quite a while now. And contrary to conventional wisdom, it does not depend on capital flows, central banks or fiscal unions.

Eurozone under pressure. Photo from Wikipedia

The American dollar survives because all its constituents obtain their own debt ratings and therefore credit risks and payment obligations. Just because they share the same currency does not mean that New Orleans gets the capital obligations of North Dakota or New York.

But that is what Europe did. It ignored CAPM. The great international financial (or is that economics?) consortium decided that sovereign debt could ignore any capital requirement. You know, because it was safe.

It also turns out that despite their double dog promises and almost super human ethics, governments run sloppy books. Sometimes they even cook them. In an era where virtually all financial statements are unreadable, it may not be a good idea to rely on them for deal making.

Question: will putting governments on double secret probation help? Brussels seems to think so. The rest of us might be forgiven for viewing that suggestion as a comedy movie script, since ‘stern warnings’ have never worked on other nations no matter how often it is tried.

The Greek option

Both Los Angeles and New York have larger economies than Greece. And both are very likely to go bankrupt in the next decade. We will of course immediately kick them out of the US dollar, allowing them to devalue their new currencies and become ‘more competitive’ with the rest of the USA and the world.

Their populations will cheer their politicians’ prescience as their standards of living plummet even while their debts remain in US dollars. Any further concerns will evaporate as they whistle to work at all the new jobs that flock to the now deflated oasis of prosperity. And all previously unstable economic structures will now be viable at the new lower currency rate.

It is hardly worth mentioning that there is a simpler (and sillier) alternative to this inflationary option. New York and Los Angeles could renegotiate their debts and restructure their obligations and regulations in order to remain solvent in the future.

Countrymen, unite

Another alternative for New York and Los Angeles is to give up their sovereignty. After all, they do deserve to lose something; they led their people on. They have driven huge economies of millions of people to the brink of misery. Better that Texas and Ohio now take over the reins and guide them through their misfortune.

Similarly, Germany can take control of a more centralized European Central Bank (ECB) action which forces a new and decidedly non-sovereign European fiscal union. That way, Mediterranean provinces can adopt whichever austerity pogrom or program seems sensible to their new masters.

There will be two ironies to this new European union. The first is obvious; the world went to war less than a hundred years ago to prevent just such a union. And none of its people want it. But then, the majority of Europeans did not want a European Union either. Call it the wisdom of the crowd.

The second irony is really no less obvious. For it was bureaucratic bungling from the top of the hierarchy that created a financial mess that contravenes grade 9 finance. Now we are led to believe that more bureaucracy and control will fix it.

The other option is to allow failing states to fail. After all, they have been doing so since time immemorial, including quite recently. And contrary to current wisdom, the world did not end.

The benefits of this approach, despite the immediately painful adjustments to the populace, are many. First, it avoids further delay caused by more money printing, which will make the effects of default worse when it inevitably arrives. It allows each state to create solutions and restructuring plans unique to their situations and cultures. It preserves autonomy. It gives all of us the benefit of multiple examples. It avoids further centralization which in humanity’s history has always ended badly. And certainly not least, it tends to marry error with payment.

End of the Euro zone

The discussion of Greek default, which makes up 3% of the Euro zone economy, now includes ending the Euro zone. Think about the incestuous leverage implied in that statement. Now it must be remembered that it is mostly a zone in name only. And if anyone should leave the Euro zone, it should be Germany and some of the other northern states, leaving the Euro to wallow along with Mediterranean debt.

But all that discussion aside, why would a bankrupt state need to leave a common trading zone? The two are totally unrelated.

Perhaps the best irony of the Chicken Little cry of the European crisis is the one move that everyone wants to avoid; Greece should immediately scatter the barnyard by moving to default. Why wait? At least then all the chickens would return to their own roost.

The last thing Greece should do is leave the barnyard. Threatening to do so is exactly the wrong move.

Increasing computation speeds

Until recently, personal computers worked on only one task at a time. Now they work in parallel pipelines. Much of our software still does not take advantage of that capability, a significant portion of 64 bit technology not leveraged.

Most of the advancement of computer speed in the last 30 years has been increasing chip throughput, much of it by making them smaller. Basic chips now run at an amazing 10¹³ bits per second. That is really fast. In fact, neurons only fire at about 100 times per second.

Neuron structure

Parallel processing

Computer technology will continue to increase raw chip throughput. But parallel processing, allowing processors to do many tasks at once, offers even more promise.

Here the brain is a fantastic model. Neurons can communicate with a 1000 other neurons at once. And of course our brains have about 100 billion neurons. Clearly there can be a great deal going on in there at one time; so much that our conscience cannot or does not keep track of it all. Computer designers have been lusting after this model for some time.

Bandyopadhyay at National Institute for Materials Science

Enter Mr. Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. He and his colleagues have been running experiments with a molecule called DDQ.

Instead of the normal binary properties of electronic chips, DDQ has four different conducting states. The states are controllable by electronic charge strength and a surrounding electronic field.

Most pertinent to parallel processing though, DDQ molecules connect to up to 6 surrounding molecules, forming a kind of herd or wave effect. The practical key to this effect is that their configuration is controllable depending on starting states.

Parallel processing application

Mr. Bandyopadhyay and his colleagues have been successful in modeling the way heat diffuses heat diffuses through a typical medium using 300 DDQ molecules. This phenomenon is very much like the parallel effect of neurons and other organic molecules.

The potential for emergent computing could not be more interesting.¹

1A. Bandyopadhyay et al., “Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer,” Nature Physics 6, no. 5 (2010): 369–375.

Figure by Nicolas Rougier (Own work) [GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons

Simplicity, value and clarity

One of the challenges of a democracy is that special interest can quickly reduce regulation to a mishmash of incoherence. Societies, like any organization or team or individual, function much better according to guiding principles. Those principles tend to get lost in a large messy bureaucracy susceptible to outsized pressure on topics with a high degree of specialization and nuance.

Consider the case where Mr. Corzine of MF Global may legally hypothecate customers’ hard won savings in an inter-firm daisy chain which leverages other people’s assets for his gain. And if no untoward or malicious activity is found, Mr. Corzine will keep his billions even though his firm has gone bankrupt. Meanwhile, Joanna Sixpenny cannot even bake and sell muffins out of her apartment, or begin a neighborhood taxi service without incurring significant capital, license and legal cost. God forbid we get taken to the wrong place while our savings our leveraged by firms we do not know.

Capital at risk

For most of society, their reputations and work are backed by everything they own. Regardless of culpability, the small entrepreneur is betting his house and savings on any venture he undertakes. His colleagues who choose to work with him are to a great extent wagering their assets as well.

Both customers and vendors find added comfort in the idea that their transactions are implicitly undersigned in this way. It adds certainty and clarity when folks know the value of their compatriots’ work is explicitly backed up by their wealth.

There is a certain ethical symmetry to a world where value, like one’s word, is backstopped. There is a very good argument to be made that this rule should apply to all voting shareholders and their executive proxies.

Sure, taking senior executives’ millions will not pay off all the creditors in most cases. That is not the point. We just like to know who we are dealing with. There is one simple honorable way to be certain. And losing one’s savings is not the end of the world. Many folks at the bottom of the economic ladder go through it all the time (often by the very executives making the ‘big’ decisions at the top).

Why should that not be the case for everyone?

Capital and Network effects

Plugging into the economic network and adding value begins with contacts. And not everyone knows the CEO. But instead of facilitating those networks for those who have few or no connections, or better yet, allowing them to develop their own, we have decided to make those connections more expensive and difficult. We never choose to encourage new networks. We always choose on the side of established nodes or capital.

Imagine a neighborhood of relationships with no solid nodal connections to anyone who can hire.

There are two clear and destructive consequences of creating these barriers to entry. First, especially for the citizens who do not have capital, we make life more difficult. They must rely on other network connections instead of developing their own. Second, since we protect capital using license, zoning and other regulative methods, we give outsized returns to that capital which greatly favors first movers.

The end result is that since there are far less would-be entrants to markets, we overbuild. That is, our cost of living is drastically higher because we pay capital outsized returns even while poorer entrepreneurs are artificially barred from entry.

What is the cost of breakfast since neighbor Joan cannot make it for everyone on her street? What is the cost of a taxi because Mark cannot ferry his neighbors while he is out of work? What is the cost of office space since Martha cannot convert her 3 unused bedrooms into office space and allow her colleagues to walk to work?

In recessions, all of these restrictions ensure a prolonged state of misery. They do not just restrict wage and price adjustments. They restrict movement. They restrict alternate use, as in the case of overbuilt housing barred from converting to bakery. They restrict the unemployed from entrepreneurial activity. They freeze the economy in a network topography that no longer applies.

They make living more expensive and society less adaptable. And all negative externalities are regressive and born almost exclusively by the poor.

The challenge with a free file sharing program is that exploding server costs can and do drive organizations out of business. BitTorrent plans to avoid this kind of fate by building out its own P2P-powered personal cloud storage system. The idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.

BitTorrent Inc. launched a personal file sharing application called Share Thursday that aims to give users an alternative to paid cloud storage companies and media sharing over social networks. Share makes it possible to transfer files without any size limits to an unlimited number of personal contacts. Files are cached in the cloud, so users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.

On Wednesday, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem told me the company is relying on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to provide this kind of caching infrastructure. Files are taken off the cloud as soon as they are sufficiently shared by peers. The app will initially be Windows-only, but Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same kind of personal file sharing functionality. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will also offer Share functionality.

BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing

This is emergent thinking. The power of the network hive. Free file sharing by using under-utilized resources is brilliant. Further, BitTorrent is leveraging file sharing program code that is proven, efficient and dependable. The challenge for torrent technology is achieving the ease of use that programs like Dropbox demonstrate for their users, although their inherent advantage will be free volume.

Elon Musk of PayPal fame wants to go to Mars. And he is working on it.

That moment may be closer than anyone thinks. Musk declared recently that he could put a human on Mars in 10 to 20 years’ time. It is a remarkable claim, yet even more astonishingly Musk tells me that he could do it for $5 billion, and possibly as little as $2 billion – a snip when you consider that the International Space Station (ISS) has cost at least $100 billion to build and operate, or that $2 billion is roughly the cost of launching four space shuttle missions.

 

Source: I’ll put millions of people on Mars, says Elon Musk – space – 22 December 2011 – New Scientist

SpaceX

SpaceX has already sent rockets into space, and they are profitable. Their next mission is to dock with the ISS space station with their reusable Dragon rocket. Reusability is the key to driving the cost of space flight down.

Spacex Dragon module

Musk knows that his rockets aren’t yet affordable enough for a feasible Mars mission. The reason is that of the $60 million cost of launching a Falcon 9, just 3 per cent is fuel. The remaining $58 million is predominantly hardware – all of which can only be used once. So, Musk admits that with the present Falcon design he has lost the reusability fight.

… “Reusability is ridiculously hard,” he says. “But it’s the thing we’re working hardest at.”

Rand Simberg

After the final flight of shuttle Atlantis, Rand Simberg took the press to task for some of the conclusions they thought the Shuttle proved:

1. Reusable launch vehicles are not cost effective.
2. We must move beyond chemical rockets.
3. Cargo and Passengers should travel on different vehicles.
4. NASA should have stuck with Apollo’s heavy lift vehicle and crew capsule.
5. The worst result of the shuttle program was the death of 14 astronauts.
6. Anything at all.

6 False Lessons Of The Space Shuttle – Atlantis Final Flight – Popular Mechanics

Mr. Simberg feels that what we are doing in space is too important to leave to a single monopoly system, developed and run by a government agency. Mr. Musk and other entrepreneurs are proving him right much faster than many observers dreamed.

Say what now? Self-healing electronics. Major cool.

Broken circuits could fix themselves using an emergency capsule of liquid metal, invented by researchers at the University of Illinois. As a crack propagates in a circuit, a microcapsule breaks open, spilling liquid metal into the gap and restoring electrical flow. The circuit would only be broken for a few microseconds, just as long as it takes for the capsule to fill in the cracks. During tests, 90 percent of the circuit samples healed to 99 percent of original conductivity, even when only a small amount of microcapsules were used, according to the U of I. Watch White explain the system in the video below.

via Video: Self-Healing Electronics Use Liquid Metal to Fix Broken Circuits | Popular Science.

As the cost of education rises, lines continue to form on a variety of issues. There are so many perspectives that it is difficult to refer to the discussion as having sides.

The cost of education is rising faster than any other industry, including healthcare.

Over the last 30 years, while inflation has increased 2.5-fold and medical costs 6-fold, college tuition has gone up 10-fold. Recently, one year at a public university topped $50,000 for an out-of-state resident.

Is College Still Affordable? – Education – GOOD

See full sized graphics at the link.

Subsidy of education supply and demand

Even before the concept of a public good was developed, societies have subsidized education. Now we subsidize supply, demand and the debt that goes with it, at every level of government; local, state and federal. New programs do not attempt to focus education or control its costs. They attempt to make spiraling costs more affordable. The latest put forward by the current administration is a more progressive payback schedule.

Unfortunately, subsidy does not stop there. We subsidize living and sports facilities as well, along with an entrenched research industry which sees only a handful of its hypotheses tested. If part of the government controlled university mandate is creativity unencumbered by reality, we have succeeded beyond all imagination. No private enterprise could withstand even a 100th of the research and development without practical advancement.

Test scores remain flat

Still, virtually every large scale survey and review returns disappointing numbers. If critical thinking and test scores provide any valid goals, we achieved nothing for generations:

With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, ‘Is it safe to eat here?’” Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift.

Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

In an age of declining cost and generally rising quality across all industry sectors, education continues to astound us with rising prices even as test scores remain flat:

Cost of k-12 education rises while test scores remain flat

We spent over $151,000 per student sending the graduating class of 2009 through public schools. That is nearly three times as much as we spent on the graduating class of 1970, adjusting for inflation. Despite that massive real spending increase, overall achievement has stagnated or declined, depending on the subject.

The Impact of Federal Involvement in America’s Classrooms | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Congressional Testimony

Is education top heavy with bureaucracy?

Forget privatizing higher education for a moment. A Faculty Productivity and Costs at The University of Texas at Austin report found, among other things:

• Looking only at the UT Austin campus, if the 80 percent of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads were to teach just half as much as the 20 percent with the highest loads, and if the savings were dedicated to tuition reduction, tuition could be cut by more than half(or, alternatively, state appropriations could be reduced even more—by as much as 75 percent).
• 20 percent of UT Austin faculty are teaching 57 percent of student credit hours. They also generate 18 percent of the campus’s research funding.
• The least productive 20 percent of faculty teach only 2 percent of all student credit hours and generate a disproportionately smaller percentage of external research funding.
• Research grant funds go almost entirely (99.8 percent) to a small minority (20 percent) of the faculty; only 2 percent of the faculty conduct 57 percent of funded research.

It appears there are many issues with higher education. We have not even begun to talk about the lack of technology use. Recently professors from top ten schools on a popular education site were debating how to limit laptops in class because keystrokes were distracting (seriously). They were also dismayed that students asked if the lecture could be emailed to them, which destroyed their incentive to come to class. Is there no better use of lecture time than to listen to a professor regurgitate his notes on Power Point?

In 2005, Tom McClintock wrote a modest proposal for saving our schools in the lee of proposition 98 which threatened to cut school spending from $42.2 billion all the way down to $44.7 billion. It is still one of the most illustrative articles ever written on our public education system.

Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus Higher education must prepare workers for the demanding jobs they will face. Nonsense, respond Hacker and Dreifus. Colleges are the wrong place for vocational training. There is no need for future resort managers, furniture designers or landscape architects to study the basics of those occupations in college. Besides, people can be good at jobs for which they haven’t had any training in college. Although most American colleges and universities have given in to the temptation to draw in students who simply want a credential to help them land a job, some haven’t and the authors name several they found appealing, based on personal visits. These aren’t schools with lofty U.S. Newsrankings, but such rankings are next-to-worthless in my opinion. Have you ever heard of Western Oregon University, Berea College, or Cooper Union? Hacker and Dreifus found them to be places of serious learning without all the frills (and high expense) found at most colleges.

Is consensus on education necessary?

At least some consideration must be given to the possibility that the national conversation for both K-12 and university level education, bubbling now for decades with little discernable result, is itself illustrative of the issue. For the very real possibility is that panels of experts take on an impossible task when they design an education system for jobs that do not exist and a future that changes with increasing rapidity.

This is the world where complexity works most effectively. Our education system provides principally one point of success or failure. A more robust system with multiple experiments on a variety of levels would find effectiveness and give more career choices at various price points more quickly and more adaptively than discussions and endless research. Humans must err on the side of action, and bureaucracy is its antithesis. The research at the University of Austin, probably representative of many public institutions, is not just enlightening. It is shameful, regardless of which side of the fence one sits on.