Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan to Save Capitalism

Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality.

Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.

Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.

Traditionally, she writes in a companion op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” In recent decades they stopped, in favor of a singular devotion to enriching shareholders. And that’s what Warren wants to change.

The new energy on the left is all about making government bigger and bolder, an ideal driven by a burgeoning movement toward democratic socialism. It’s inspired likely 2020 Democratic contenders to draw battle lines around how far they’d go to change the role of government in American life.

Warren supports expanding many of the programs in play, and she’s voted to do so. But the rollout of her bill suggests that as she weighs whether to get into the presidential race, she’ll focus on how to prioritize workers in the American economic system while leaving businesses as the primary driver of it.

Warren wants to eliminate the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. She wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she’s proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions.

Warren hopes this will spur a return to greater corporate responsibility, and bring back some other aspects of the more egalitarian era of American capitalism post-World War II — more business investment, more meaningful career ladders for workers, more financial stability, and higher pay.

As much as Warren’s proposal is about ending inequality, it’s also about saving capitalism.

The Accountable Capitalism Act — real citizenship for corporate persons

The conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability — as is currently conventional in American business thinking.

Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.

The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades.

Business executives, like everyone else, want to have good reputations and be regarded as good people but, when pressed about topics of social concern, frequently fall back on the idea that their first obligation is to do what’s right for shareholders. A new charter would remove that crutch, and leave executives accountable as human beings for the rights and wrongs of their own decisions.

More concretely, United States Corporations would be required to allow their workers to elect 40 percent of the membership of their board of directors.

Warren also tacks on a couple of more modest ideas. One is to limit corporate executives’ ability to sell shares of stock that they receive as pay — requiring that such shares be held for at least five years after they were received, and at least three years after a share buyback. The aim is to disincentivize stock-based compensation in general as well as the use of share buybacks as a tactic for executives to maximize their one pay.

The other proposal is to require corporate political activity to be authorized specifically by both 75 percent of shareholders and 75 percent of board members (many of whom would be worker representatives under the full bill), to ensure that corporate political activity truly represents a consensus among stakeholders, rather than C-suite class solidarity.

It’s easy to imagine the restrictions on corporate political activity and some curbs on stock sales shenanigans becoming broad consensus points for congressional Democrats, and even part of a 2019 legislative agenda if the midterms go well. But the bigger ideas about corporate governance would be a revolution in American business practice to undo about a generation’s worth of shareholder supremacy.

The rise of shareholder capitalism

The conceptual foundations of the current version of American capitalism are found in Milton Friedman’s well-titled 1970 New York Times Magazine article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits.”

Friedman meant this provocative thesis quite literally. In his view, which has since become the dominant perspective in American law and finance, corporate shareholders should be understood to own the company and its executives should be seen as their hired help. The shareholders, as individuals, can obviously have a variety of goals they favor in life. But their common goal is to maximize the value of their shares.

Therefore, for executives to set aside shareholder profits in pursuit of some other goal like environmental protection, racial justice, community stability, or simple common decency would be a form of theft. If reformulating your product to be more addictive or less healthy increases sales, then it’s not only permissible but actually required to do so. If closing a profitable plant and outsourcing the work to a low-wage country could make your company even more profitable, then it’s the right thing to do.

Friedman allows that executives are obligated to follow the law — an important caveat — establishing a conceptual framework in which policy goals should be pursued by the government, while businesses pursue the prime business directive of profitability.

One important real-world complication that Friedman’s article largely neglects is that business lobbying does a great deal to determine what the laws are. It’s all well and good, in other words, to say that businesses should follow the rules and leave worrying about environmental externalities up to the regulators. But in reality, polluting companies invest heavily in making sure that regulators underregulate — and it seems to follow from the doctrine of shareholder supremacy that if lobbying to create bad laws is profitable for shareholders, corporate executives are required to do it.

On the flip side, an investor-friendly policy regime was supposed to supercharge investment, creating a more prosperous economy for everyone. The question is whether that’s really worked out.

The economics of shareholder supremacy

(...) Since 80 percent of the value of the stock market is owned by about 10 percent of the population and half of Americans own no stock at all, this has been a huge triumph for the rich. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared as executive compensation has been redesigned to incentivize shareholder gains, and the CEOs have delivered. Gains for shareholders and greater inequality in pay has led to a generation of median compensation lagging far behind economy-wide productivity, with higher pay mostly captured by a relatively small number of people rather than being broadly shared.

Investment, however, has not soared. In fact, it’s stagnated.

Whether one sees this as a cause or a consequence of poor growth outcomes is up for debate, but the Warren view is that fundamentally, shareholder supremacy is a cause of poor economic performance by starving the business sector of funds that would otherwise be used to invest in equipment or training or simply to pay people more and increase their purchasing power.

But while on an optimistic view, stakeholder capitalism would produce stronger long-run growth and higher living standards for the vast majority of the population, there’s no getting around the fact that Warren’s proposal would be bad — really bad — for rich people. That’s a fight her team says she welcomes. (...)

In exchange, the laboring majority would make important gains.

Most obviously, the large share of the private sector workforce that is employed by companies with more than $1 billion in revenue would gain a measure of democratic control over the future of their workplace. That wouldn’t make tough business decisions around automation, globalization, scheduling, family responsibilities, etc. go away, but it would ensure that the decisions are made with a balanced set of interests in mind.

Studies from Germany’s experience with codetermination indicate that it leads to less short-termism in corporate decision-making and much higher levels of pay equality, while other studies demonstrate positive results on productivity and innovation.

One intuitive way of thinking about the proposal is that under the American system of shareholder supremacy, an executive increases his pay by finding ways to squeeze workers as hard as possible — kicking out the surplus to shareholders and then watching his stock-linked compensation soar. That’s brought America to the point where CEOs make more than 300 times as much as rank-and-file workers at big companies.

by Matthew Yglesias, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
[ed. I can't wait to give her my vote.]

Pat Metheny (feat. Anna Maria Jopek and Pedro Aznar)

What the Year 2050 Has in Store for Humankind

Part one: Change is the only constant

Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them and navigate the maze of life?

Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about 40, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally, and allowed only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from outside. Much the same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history and biology, they represented an immense improvement.

In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to funny cat videos, celebrity gossip or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of western liberal education for centuries, but up till now even many western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils “to think for themselves”. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesise all the data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

Part two: The heat is on

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao”.

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very meaning of “being human” is likely to mutate. In 1848, the Communist Manifesto declared that “all that is solid melts into air”. Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.

In 1848, millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms, and were going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth sense. And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.

By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-the-minute fashions for a 3D virtual-reality game, within a decade not just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken over by AI. So at 25, you introduce yourself on a dating site as “a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you say you are “a gender-non-specific person undergoing age- adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before”. At 45, both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than pride. And at 45, you still have many decades of radical change ahead of you.

Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really predict the specific changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid-21st century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid 21st-century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial, life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even if at 15 you spent most of your day working in the family’s rice field (rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big city and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course, even at 50 you continued to learn new things about rice, about merchants and about conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the 21st century, accelerating change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. “Who am I?” will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.

by Yuval Noah Harari, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Britt Spencer
[ed. See also: Get with the Programme]

Broken Time

It was supposed to be the best day of Richard “Blue” Mitchell’s life, but June 30, 1958, turned out to be one of the worst. The trumpeter had been summoned to New York City from Miami for a recording session with Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, an old friend who was being hailed as the hottest alto sax player since Charlie Parker.

But things started going wrong even before Mitchell arrived at Reeves Sound Studios on East Forty-Fourth Street. First, his luggage went astray en route from Florida. Then there was a surprise waiting for him in the control room: Miles Davis, one of his musical heroes, who had taken the extraordinary step of composing a new melody as a gift to Cannonball. Mitchell was supposed to play Miles’s part.

That wasn’t going to be easy, because the tune, called “Nardis,” was anything but a standard workout on blues-based changes. The melody had a haunting, angular, exotic quality, like the “Gypsy jazz” that guitarist Django Reinhardt played with the Hot Club de France in the 1930s. And it didn’t exactly swing, but unfurled at its own pace, like liturgical music for some arcane ritual. For three takes, the band diligently tried to make it work, but Mitchell couldn’t wrap his head around it, particularly under Miles’s intimidating gaze. The producer of the session, legendary Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews, ended up scrapping the night’s performances entirely.

The next night was more productive. After capturing tight renditions of “Blue Funk” and “Minority,” the quintet took two more passes through “Nardis,” yielding a master take for release, plus a credible alternate. But the arrangement still sounded stiff, and the horns had a pinched, sour tone.

Only one man on the session, Miles would say later, played the tune “the way it was meant to be played.” It was the shy, unassuming piano player, who was just shy of twenty-eight years old. His name was Bill Evans.

And that might have been the end of “Nardis.” Miles never recorded the tune himself—the fate suffered by another of his originals, “Mimosa,” recorded once by Herbie Hancock and never heard from again. In this case, however, the lack of a definitive performance by the composer created a kind of musical vacuum that other players have hastened to fill. Despite its inauspicious debut, the tune has become one of the most frequently recorded modern jazz standards, played in an impressive variety of settings ranging from piano trios, to Latin jazz combos, to ska-jazz ensembles, to a full orchestra featuring players from the US Air Force. For some musicians, “Nardis” becomes an object of fascination—an earworm that can be expelled only by playing it.

Though superb versions of “Nardis” have been recorded by everyone from tenor sax titan Joe Henderson to bluegrass guitar virtuoso Tony Rice, no one embodied its melodic potential more than Bill Evans. For him, Miles’s serpentine melody was a terrain he never tired of exploring. For more than twenty years, Evans played it nearly every night with his trios, often as the show-stopping climax of the second set. Indeed, he became so closely associated with the tune that some of his fans dispute that Miles actually wrote it, insisting that Evans deserves the credit. It’s certainly true that “Nardis” radically evolved over the course of Evans’s career, morphing into new forms, reinventing itself, and achieving new levels of poignancy as it became inextricably entwined with the arc of Evans’s turbulent life.

For this listener, “Nardis” has become a full-on musical obsession. I have more than ninety official and bootleg recordings of the tune stored in the cloud, ranked in a fluid and continually updated order of preference, so they follow me wherever I go. In my travels as a writer, I use “Nardis” as a litmus test of musical competence: if I see a jazz band in a bar or a busker taking requests, I inevitably suggest it. (If they’ve never heard of it, I understand that they must be new at this game.) By now I’ve heard so many different interpretations, in such a far-flung variety of settings, that a Platonic ideal of the melody resides in my mind untethered to any actual performance. It’s as if “Nardis” were always going on somewhere, with players dropping in and out of a musical conversation beyond space and time.

Evans once told a friend that a musician should be able to maintain focus on a single tone in his mind for at least five minutes—and in playing like this, he achieved a nearly mystical immersion in the music: a state of pure, undistracted concentration. Even before writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder made Buddhism a subject of popular fascination in America, Evans saw parallels between meditative practice and the keen, alert state that jazz improvisation demands, when years of work on perfecting tone and technique suddenly drop away and a direct channel opens up between the musician’s brain and his or her fingers. He listened to other pianists closely, but rather than imitate a player like Bud Powell, he would try to extract the essence of Powell’s approach and apply it to different types of material. “It’s more the mind ‘that thinks jazz’ than the instrument ‘that plays jazz’ which interests me,” Evans told an interviewer.

By maintaining a singularly intense focus on “Nardis” over the course of his career, Evans managed to turn the melody that had frustrated “Blue” Mitchell that night in 1958 into a vehicle for dependably accessing “the mind that thinks jazz,” like a homegrown form of meditation that could be performed on a piano bench before rapt audiences in clubs night after night. By bringing the story of Evans’s quest for a kind of jazz samadhi to light, I hope to understand the enduring hold that “Nardis” has on the ever-widening circle of musicians who play it, while reckoning with my own personal fixation.

Pale, bespectacled, and soft-spoken, Bill Evans looked more like a graduate student of theology than a hard-swinging jazzman. He was already working for Miles full-time on the night he recorded “Nardis” for Cannonball. He had been recommended for the job by George Russell, an avant-garde composer whose book of music theory, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, was a decisive influence on Miles’s modal conceptions of jazz in the late 1950s.

When Russell first mentioned Evans’s name, Miles asked, “Is he white?”

“Yeah,” Russell replied.

“Does he wear glasses?”

“Yeah.”

“I know that motherfucker,” Miles said. “I heard him at Birdland—he can play his ass off.” Indeed, the first time Evans played a beginner’s intermission set at the Village Vanguard—Max Gordon’s basement club, the Parnassus of jazz—the pianist was astonished to look up and see the legendary trumpeter standing there, listening intently.

After being invited to sit in with Miles’s sextet at a bar called the Colony Club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Evans got the gig, though he was in for several more rounds of hazing before being allowed to play alongside Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and Miles himself, all at the peak of their powers. At one point, Miles, in his inimitably raspy voice, told the wan young pianist that to prove his devotion to the music, he would have to “fuck” his bandmates, “because we all brothers and shit.” Evans wandered off for fifteen minutes to entertain the possibility, before telling Miles that while he wanted to make everyone happy, he just couldn’t do it. The sly trumpeter grinned and said, “My man!”

Still, the ribbing continued. Miles would counter Evans’s musical suggestions by saying, “Man, cool it. We don’t want no white opinions.” At the same time, the trumpeter became the young pianist’s staunchest advocate, saying that he “played the piano the way it should be played,” and comparing his supremely expressive touch on the keys to “sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” He would sometimes call Evans and ask him to just set the handset down and leave the line open while Evans played piano at home.

But Miles’s hard-core fans continued to shun Evans. They saw a white nerd evicting the beloved Red Garland from the prestigious keyboard chair at a time when black pride and appreciation of jazz as a distinctively black cultural form were ascendant. For months, while his bandmates got thunderous ovations after solos, Evans got the silent treatment, which reinforced his self-doubt. In his eagerness to be regarded as an equal, he accepted a first fix of heroin from Philly Joe, whom Evans respected more than any drummer on earth. He also began dating a chic young black woman, Peri Cousins, for whom he wrote one of his sprightly early originals, “Peri’s Scope.” Cousins observed how quickly the drug filled a crucial role in Evans’s existence, providing a buffer between his acute sensitivity and the realities of life on the road. “When he came down, when he kicked it, which he did on numerous occasions, the world was—I don’t know how to say it—too beautiful,” she said. “It was too sharp for him. It’s almost as if he had to blur the world for himself by being strung out.”

On Kind of Blue, widely regarded as the greatest jazz recording ever made, Evans became a conduit of that unbearable beauty, mapping a middle path between Russell’s Lydian concepts, Miles’s unerring sense of swing, and the luminous romanticism of Ravel and Debussy. His leads on “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches” seem geological, like majestic cliff faces carved outside of time.

By the time he recorded the tracks on Kind of Blue, however, Evans had already decided to leave Miles’s band. After his baptism of fire on the road, he was physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted, but he also felt more confident about pursuing his own vision. He had a specific goal in mind: achieving a level of communication in a piano trio that would enable all three players to make creative statements and respond to one another conversationally, without any of them being obliged to explicitly state the beat. This approach came to be known as “broken time,” because no player was locked into a traditional time-keeping role; instead the one was left to float, in an implied pulse shared by all the players. Evans compared broken time to the kind of typography in which the raised letters are visible only in the shadows they cast.

That kind of collective sympathy, akin to three-way telepathy, demanded major commitment from the trio, and required high levels of personal chemistry. Evans met the perfect fellow travelers in two young musicians named Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.

Ironically, the two men came into Evans’s band on the wings of the worst gig the pianist had ever played, a three-week stand at Basin Street East, on East Forty-Ninth Street, working opposite Benny Goodman. The “King of Swing” was enjoying a revival of interest, and his band was getting the red-carpet treatment, with VIPs arriving in limousines and lavish champagne dinners on the house, while the members of Evans’s trio bought their own Cokes at the bar. Occasionally they’d play a set only to discover that their mikes had been turned off. Evans ran through a series of illustrious accompanists that month as each man decided he could no longer take the abuse. (Philly Joe split when the club owner told Evans to stop letting him take solos.) But when LaFaro and Motian sat in, Evans felt things start to click, and he would look back on the three-week ordeal as a karmic process of eliminating the wrong players from the trio.

Boyishly handsome, six years younger than the pianist, and confident to the point of arrogance, LaFaro was the brazen yang to Evans’s ascetic yin. He spent hours every day commandeering attic rooms and hotel basements to practice, and restrung his instrument with nylon-wrapped strings years before they became standard, which enabled him to get a guitar-like tone and articulation in the upper register. “He was freer than free jazz,” Ornette Coleman said. “Scotty was just a natural, played so naturally, had a love of creation. I’m not only talking about music, but being human. I would say he was closer to a mystic.” Like Evans, who pored over volumes by Plato, Thomas Merton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jiddu Krishnamurti at home, LaFaro was intuitively attracted to Zen. The two men spent hours discussing philosophy on the road.

Motian came of age providing a solid four-four foundation for classic horn men like Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, but had also proved his versatility and ability to handle advanced musical concepts by supporting avant-garde players like George Russell, Thelonious Monk, and Lennie Tristano. He could swing harder with a pair of brushes than most guys could with a whole kit, and he instantly gravitated toward the concept of broken time, which gave an unprecedented amount of expressive freedom to him and his bandmates. This style proved so influential that it has become nearly ubiquitous in jazz even outside of the piano-trio context, though it requires an intense level of dedication.

The enduring effect of Miles’s endorsement ensured Evans a steady stream of gigs, and the three men made a pact: no matter what opportunities came up, their primary commitment for the next phase of their lives would be to the trio.

A warbly-sounding bootleg reel recorded at Birdland in 1960 shows the Bill Evans Trio distilling “Nardis” down to its essence and making it swing. After Evans authoritatively states the theme, he plays rollicking variations on it with LaFaro and Motian close behind. Then LaFaro takes an astonishing lead, climbing the neck of his instrument to make those nylon strings ring. As each member of the trio explores the implications of the melody, the other players lay out or step in as appropriate, so that the whole trio becomes a unified organism, “thinking” jazz as naturally as breathing.

When Evans first met LaFaro, he said, “There was so much music in him, he had a problem controlling it… Ideas were rolling out on top of each other; he could barely handle it. It was like a bucking horse.” On the road with the trio, LaFaro would learn to handle that bucking horse without taming it, expanding the range of possibility for every bass player who followed. He attained such a level of rapport with Evans that tears would come to Motian’s eyes on the bandstand.

As word spread that something special was happening in Evans’s trio, their days of having to buy their own Cokes ended. They began appearing on bills with top-ranked groups, including Miles’s bands, and other musicians flocked to see them on off nights. Keepnews wrote of “a definite feeling in the air… the almost mystical aura that marks the arrival of an artist.”

The constant touring, however, was tough on the pianist, who developed chronic hepatitis in tandem with his raging addiction. The cover photographs on Evans’s LPs became a time lapse of his physical degeneration. On the back of Undercurrent, Evans is depicted urbanely perusing a score with guitarist Jim Hall, a Band-Aid on his right wrist marking the spot where his needle went awry.

Evans was a polite junkie. For decades, he kept tabs on how much money he owed various friends, and he always endeavored to pay them back, even if his benefactor had long forgotten the debt. But among the people disturbed by his accelerating decline was the fearlessly outspoken LaFaro, who had no problem confronting the pianist in the bluntest terms. “You’re fucking up the music,” he would say. “Look in the mirror!”

It was in this combative atmosphere that Evans made his second attempt to commit “Nardis” to vinyl, at Bell Sound Studios, on February 2, 1961, under Keepnews’s watchful eye. Though Keepnews gamely tried to keep everyone’s spirits up, the whole session seemed jinxed, with Evans and LaFaro openly arguing about the pianist’s drug use and Evans suffering a splitting headache. By the time the ordeal was over, both the players and the producer assumed that the tapes would be quietly filed away and never released. “We had a very, very bad feeling,” Evans recalled. “We felt there was nothing happening.”

Listening back, however, everyone was shocked to discover how well the trio had played. Upon the album’s release, Explorations was hailed by critics for its bold, unsentimental reinvention of well-worn standards like “Sweet and Lovely” and “How Deep Is the Ocean,” the dynamism of the group’s interactions, and the sublime sensitivity of Evans’s phrasing and voicings. Humbled by the inadequacy of his own ability to judge how well the session had gone, Evans began to think of “the mind that thinks jazz” as something larger than the consciousness of any individual musician, as if the music organized itself at a higher order of awareness that wasn’t always discernible to the players. The rendition of “Nardis” that appears on the album, a refinement of the arrangement that the trio had been playing on the road, became the default canonical version in the absence of a Miles original—the basis for twenty years of Evans’s performances, and for hundreds of interpretations by others.

Ben Sidran once suggested, somewhat implausibly, that Miles told him that the name of the tune had something to do with nuclear energy. Others have suggested that it’s just a sound, like Charlie Parker’s “Klactoveedsedstene.” Perhaps the most amusing explanation (though it’s almost certainly apocryphal) was offered by bassist Bill Crow in Ted Gioia’s compendium The Jazz Standards. One night when Evans was playing with Miles, Crow reported, a fan requested a tune that the pianist felt was beneath him. “I don’t play that crap,” Evans replied. “I’m an artist”—with Evans’s nasal New Jersey drawl doing the work of eliding the phrase into the song’s cryptic title. (...)

Unlike most of the acts in Keepnews’s stable at Riverside, the young Evans often resisted his producer’s promptings to make a new record, feeling that he had nothing new to say. (That would change later in his career when loan sharks threatened to break his fingers.) But perhaps sensing that the trio had attained an extraordinary level of empathy, the pianist agreed to allow an engineer to record the output of the whole last day of a two-week run, five sets in total, running the gamut from Evans’s unbearably poignant exploration of classic ballads like “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Man’s Gone Now” to cooking modal workouts on angular modern tunes like “Solar” and “Milestones.” LaFaro’s vibrant declarations danced around Evans’s richly harmonized lines as Motian kept the whole thing swinging with subtle shadings and accents. (...)

For Evans, wrote jazz critic Whitney Balliett, improvisation was “a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.” In the trio with LaFaro and Motian, Evans finally found the support he needed to take that music as deep as he felt it to be, and by doing so deepened the subjective possibilities of jazz itself.

Ten nights later, after a few beers, LaFaro and a friend decided it was worth driving eighty miles to Geneva, New York, where another friend had a good stereo. For the next several hours they drank coffee and listened to records, including Bartók’s “The Miraculous Mandarin” and the trio’s Explorations, which LaFaro was proud to show off.

After hearing Chet Baker sing his mournful “Grey December,” LaFaro remarked that Baker had it all—talent, movie-star looks, recording contracts—but because of his addiction, he had ended up another jazz casualty, his teeth knocked out while attempting to buy drugs in Sausalito, ruining his embouchure. LaFaro called Baker “an American tragedy.” The young bass player and his friend were invited to spend the night, but they turned down the invitation, having chores at home.

Driving east on Route 5-20, LaFaro fell asleep at the wheel. The car careened onto the shoulder, struck a tree, and burst into flames. The twenty-five-year-old bassist and his friend died instantly.

by Steve Silberman, The Believer |  Read more:

Video: YouTube

[ed. Nice to see this retrospective, but sad also. I was deeply into jazz for a long time and Bill Evans was (and still is) my favorite (especially, The Village Vanguard Sessions). Also, Pat Metheny, Joe Pass (who I got to chat with after setting up his stage), McCoy Tyner and of course, the Duke (Ellington). See also: Peri's Scope]

Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben

via:

For Voters Sick of Money in Politics, a New Pitch: No PAC Money Accepted

Like many political candidates, Dean Phillips spends hours each day fund-raising and thanking his donors. But because he refuses to accept PAC money from corporations, unions or other politicians, he has adopted a unique approach.

“Norbert?” he asked on the doorstep of a man who’d donated $25 to his campaign. “I’m here with goodies!”

Mr. Phillips, who is running for Congress in the suburbs of Minneapolis, handed over a gift bag containing a T-shirt and bumper sticker. The exchange was recorded in a video that was shared later with his supporters to encourage them to contribute as well. Norbert Gernes, an 80-year-old retiree, was impressed.

“We desperately need to get the money out of the political system,” he said in an interview afterward. “Because I don’t think we have a Congress that’s representing the people any more.”

Campaign finance was once famously dismissed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, as being of no greater concern to American voters than “static cling.” But since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 opened the floodgates for unrestricted political spending, polls have shown that voters are growing increasingly bitter about the role of money in politics.

The issue is now emerging in midterm races around the country, with dozens of Democrats rejecting donations from political action committees, or PACs, that are sponsored by corporations or industry groups. A handful of candidates, including Mr. Phillips, are going a step further and refusing to take any PAC money at all, even if it comes from labor unions or fellow Democrats.

Rather than dooming the campaigns, these pledges to reject PAC money have become central selling points for voters. And for some of the candidates, the small-donor donations are adding up.

In Minnesota, Mr. Phillips, a Democrat, has raised more than $2.3 million, 99 percent of it from individuals, and has used his no-PAC-money pledge to mount a formidable challenge in a district that Republicans have held since 1961. His opponent, Representative Erik Paulsen, who sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised $3.6 million, more than half of it from PACs.

In Texas, Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat running to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, has raised more than $23 million in this election cycle — considerably more than Mr. Cruz — without accepting any PAC money.

“It’s a major theme of the campaign,” said Chris Evans, Mr. O’Rourke’s communications director. “People want to know that you are going to respond to them and their interests, and not the most recent check you received.”

In Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb, a Democrat who pledged not to take corporate PAC money, eked out a victory in a special election in March in a district that President Trump won by 20 points in 2016. In Ohio, another Democrat running in a red district, Daniel O’Connor, made the same pledge, and performed so well in a special election earlier this month that the race is still too close to call.

A recent Pew report found that 75 percent of the public said “there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations” can spend on political campaigns.

“Poll after poll is showing that money in politics has more traction today than it has had in my life time,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonpartisan advocacy group concerned with ethics and accountability, who has been working on the campaign finance issue for decades.

Under current federal rules, a candidate’s campaign cannot accept more than $2,700 from any individual donor or $5,000 from any single PAC. Groups known as Super PACs, however, can legally receive and spend unlimited amounts to influence a race, as long as they do not coordinate their activity directly with a candidate’s campaign. (...)

Candidates can do this in part because of a sharp rise in giving by small donors.

In the last midterm election year, 2014, some 1.5 million small donors contributed a total of $335 million to Democratic campaigns across the country through ActBlue, an online platform that raises money for Democrats. This time around, about 3.8 million small donors have already contributed more than $1 billion, and are on a pace to exceed $1.5 billion before Election Day in November, according to Erin Hill, ActBlue’s Executive director. The average donation is $33.85.

That’s good news for Mr. Phillips in Minnesota, who has staked his candidacy on the proposition that voters care about who he takes money from.

On the campaign trail, he ties nearly every issue back to campaign finance. When people complain to him about the high cost of drugs or health care, he tells them that corporate influence is to blame.

“Can anybody guess how much the big pharma industry spent on lobbying last year?” he asked a group of small business owners at a round-table discussion. “Take a guess.”

He answered his own question. “Two hundred and forty million,” he said, adding: “They all but pooh-poohed any legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.”

His message is particularly potent because his opponent, Mr. Paulsen, has taken in the sixth-largest haul from PACs out of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (...)

Mr. Paulsen’s campaign has tried to make an issue of Mr. Phillips’ wealth.

“Dean Phillips is a hypocrite spending his vast inherited wealth on his campaign, which he’s padded with investments in the very things he campaigns against,” said John-Paul Yates, Mr. Paulsen’s campaign manager.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, Mr. Phillips has contributed less than $6,000 of his own money to the campaign, and given less than $30,000 worth of in-kind donations, including the use of a pontoon boat for campaigning on Lake Minnetonka.

Mr. Phillips says his family fortune is what opened his eyes to the way money influences politics, after he began hearing from candidates who were eager to enlist him as a major donor.

“I watched the Hillary Clinton campaign, and recognized that it was so predicated on spending time with wealthy donors and not spending time in middle-class neighborhoods and rural areas,” he said.

Don Kuster, who said he has ticked the box for Mr. Paulsen in every previous election, now volunteers for Mr. Phillips’s campaign. He drives the pontoon boat and has held a meet-the-candidate party at his home, which was attended by about sixty Republicans.

“I asked him ‘What’s your thing?’ and he said, ‘Campaign finance reform,’” Mr. Kuster recalled from his first conversation with Mr. Phillips. “He said, ‘I’m not taking any PAC money. I’m not taking it from the Sierra Club. I’m not taking money from Planned Parenthood. I want to be able to make my own decisions.’ I thought, ‘Ok, that’s something I can support.’”

by Farah Stockman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jenn Ackerman

Google and the Resurgence of Italian Design

Once upon a time, we had products that were colorful, in shapes that were quirky, whimsical, and expressive. Interesting! And then, almost every tech product became white, silver, gray, black, flat, square, round, and minimalist. Boring.

But there are hints that this is changing. And one of the leaders of this change is, somewhat improbably, Google.

Anybody who’s been paying attention knows that Google has been pretty serious about hardware for a while, and at least as serious about doing quality design in hardware, software, and overall experiences. What fascinates me is the unexpectedly expressive direction the company has taken with its design language.

Google’s emerging design language (obviously still a work in progress) is reminiscent of the Italian branch of industrial design, which we haven’t seen much of in the last two or three decades. Instead, the German branch has dominated. It’s characterized by clean geometric shapes (cubes, cylinders), white and black glossy colors, and smooth unadorned surfaces. Think Bauhaus and — especially — Braun.

It’s a cliché at this point to draw parallels between Braun and Apple’s design languages. But nevertheless, aside from its own diversion into the more expressive realm of Italian-inspired design in the 2000s (original iMac, toilet-seat-shaped original iBook, etc.), Apple has hugely influenced other tech companies to follow the minimalist, German-flavored tradition.

This isn’t a knock against the Braun style — there are many beautiful products that have sprung from that well. It’s just that diversity is the spice of life, and tech products have become too much of a monoculture, stylistically. (...)

With Google’s launch of the Pixel 2 phone, wireless earbuds, VR headsets, Clips camera, and Home products, I was delighted to see touches of color and form that can clearly be traced back to the Italian branch of design, circa 1960s and ’70s. In particular, the pioneering company Olivetti — most well-known for its famous Valentine typewriter — but which had an incredible run of groundbreaking designs, including the world’s first programmable desktop computer (the Programma 101 of 1964).

In this same vein, I was struck by the forms, the playful use of color, and the novel material choices on Google’s new Daydream View VR headset. It’s an even more intimate product in that it mounts to your head and creates a new world in front of your eyes. So it’s only appropriate that it takes on a feel of fashion and clothing, bringing a new soft material to a technological object and heathered colors that are a stark contrast to the edgy gaming aesthetic that dominates VR. It almost announces “This is VR for the rest of us.”

Google’s Home products, which debuted in 2016, began the motif of cloth-covered surfaces that the Daydream extends. The new Home update continues that motif, with bolder use of colors, and a new “fun-size” puck version. Early on there was some joking that Home looks like an air freshener, but it was clearly all part of the plan to make the product blend in to the home and make it less of a sore thumb sticking out.

by Adam Richardson, Medium |  Read more:
Images: Olivetti/Google
[ed. As long as it doesn't descend into kitsch, a fine line.]

Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points

A Nash equilibrium is an outcome in which neither player is willing to unilaterally change her strategy, and they are often applied to games in which both players move simultaneously and where decision trees are less useful.

Suppose my girlfriend and I have both lost our cell phones and cannot contact each other. Both of us would really like to spend more time at home with each other (utility 3). But both of us also have a slight preference in favor of working late and earning some overtime (utility 2). If I go home and my girlfriend's there and I can spend time with her, great. If I stay at work and make some money, that would be pretty okay too. But if I go home and my girlfriend's not there and I have to sit around alone all night, that would be the worst possible outcome (utility 1). Meanwhile, my girlfriend has the same set of preferences: she wants to spend time with me, she'd be okay with working late, but she doesn't want to sit at home alone.

This “game” has two Nash equilibria. If we both go home, neither of us regrets it: we can spend time with each other and we've both got our highest utility. If we both stay at work, again, neither of us regrets it: since my girlfriend is at work, I am glad I stayed at work instead of going home, and since I am at work, my girlfriend is glad she stayed at work instead of going home. Although we both may wish that we had both gone home, neither of us specifically regrets our own choice, given our knowledge of how the other acted.

When all players in a game are reasonable, the (apparently) rational choice will be to go for a Nash equilibrium (why would you want to make a choice you'll regret when you know what the other player chose?) And since John Nash (remember that movie A Beautiful Mind?) proved that every game has at least one, all games between well-informed rationalists (who are not also being superrational in a sense to be discussed later) should end in one of these.

What if the game seems specifically designed to thwart Nash equilibria? Suppose you are a general invading an enemy country's heartland. You can attack one of two targets, East City or West City (you declared war on them because you were offended by their uncreative toponyms). The enemy general only has enough troops to defend one of the two cities. If you attack an undefended city, you can capture it easily, but if you attack the city with the enemy army, they will successfully fight you off.

Here there is no Nash equilibrium without introducing randomness. If both you and your enemy choose to go to East City, you will regret your choice - you should have gone to West and taken it undefended. If you go to East and he goes to West, he will regret his choice - he should have gone East and stopped you in your tracks. Reverse the names, and the same is true of the branches where you go to West City. So every option has someone regretting their choice, and there is no simple Nash equilibrium. What do you do?

Here the answer should be obvious: it doesn't matter. Flip a coin. If you flip a coin, and your opponent flips a coin, neither of you will regret your choice. Here we see a "mixed Nash equilibrium", an equilibrium reached with the help of randomness.

We can formalize this further. Suppose you are attacking a different country with two new potential targets: Metropolis and Podunk. Metropolis is a rich and strategically important city (utility: 10); Podunk is an out of the way hamlet barely worth the trouble of capturing it (utility: 1).

A so-called first-level player thinks: “Well, Metropolis is a better prize, so I might as well attack that one. That way, if I win I get 10 utility instead of 1”

A second-level player thinks: “Obviously Metropolis is a better prize, so my enemy expects me to attack that one. So if I attack Podunk, he'll never see it coming and I can take the city undefended.”

A third-level player thinks: “Obviously Metropolis is a better prize, so anyone clever would never do something as obvious as attack there. They'd attack Podunk instead. But my opponent knows that, so, seeking to stay one step ahead of me, he has defended Podunk. He will never expect me to attack Metropolis, because that would be too obvious. Therefore, the city will actually be undefended, so I should take Metropolis.”

And so on ad infinitum, until you become hopelessly confused and have no choice but to spend years developing a resistance to iocane powder.

But surprisingly, there is a single best solution to this problem, even if you are playing against an opponent who, like Professor Quirrell, plays “one level higher than you.” (...)

In The Art of Strategy, Dixit and Nalebuff cite a real-life application of the same principle in, of all things, penalty kicks in soccer. A right-footed kicker has a better chance of success if he kicks to the right, but a smart goalie can predict that and will defend to the right; a player expecting this can accept a less spectacular kick to the left if he thinks the left will be undefended, but a very smart goalie can predict this too, and so on. Economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta laboriously analyzed the success rates of various kickers and goalies on the field, and found that they actually pursued a mixed strategy generally within 2% of the game theoretic ideal, proving that people are pretty good at doing these kinds of calculations unconsciously. (...)

Here we might be tempted to just leave it to chance; after all, there's a 50% probability we'll both end up choosing the same activity. But other games might have thousands or millions of possible equilibria and so will require a more refined approach.

Art of Strategy describes a game show in which two strangers were separately taken to random places in New York and promised a prize if they could successfully meet up; they had no communication with one another and no clues about how such a meeting was to take place. Here there are a nearly infinite number of possible choices: they could both meet at the corner of First Street and First Avenue at 1 PM, they could both meet at First Street and Second Avenue at 1:05 PM, etc. Since neither party would regret their actions (if I went to First and First at 1 and found you there, I would be thrilled) these are all Nash equilibria.

Despite this mind-boggling array of possibilities, in fact all six episodes of this particular game ended with the two contestants meeting successfully after only a few days. The most popular meeting site was the Empire State Building at noon.

How did they do it? The world-famous Empire State Building is what game theorists call focal: it stands out as a natural and obvious target for coordination. Likewise noon, classically considered the very middle of the day, is a focal point in time. These focal points, also called Schelling points after theorist Thomas Schelling who discovered them, provide an obvious target for coordination attempts.

What makes a Schelling point? [ed.] The most important factor is that it be special. The Empire State Building, depending on when the show took place, may have been the tallest building in New York; noon is the only time that fits the criteria of “exactly in the middle of the day”, except maybe midnight when people would be expected to be too sleepy to meet up properly.

Of course, specialness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. David Friedman writes:

Two people are separately confronted with the list of numbers [2, 5, 9, 25, 69, 73, 82, 96, 100, 126, 150 ] and offered a reward if they independently choose the same number. If the two are mathematicians, it is likely that they will both choose 2—the only even prime. Non-mathematicians are likely to choose 100—a number which seems, to the mathematicians, no more unique than the other two exact squares. Illiterates might agree on 69, because of its peculiar symmetry—as would, for a different reason, those whose interest in numbers is more prurient than mathematical.

A recent open thread comment pointed out that you can justify anything with “for decision-theoretic reasons” or “due to meta-level concerns”. I humbly propose adding “as a Schelling point” to this list, except that the list is tongue-in-cheek and Schelling points really do explain almost everything - stock markets, national borders, marriages, private property, religions, fashion, political parties, peace treaties, social networks, software platforms and languages all involve or are based upon Schelling points. In fact, whenever something has “symbolic value” a Schelling point is likely to be involved in some way.

by Scott Alexander, Less Wrong |  Read more:
Images: uncredited

via:

What is Education For?

Education has no clear purpose. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation that there are numerous conflicting visions of what education is “for.” What are we actually trying to do for kids by making them go to school, and why are we trying to do it? If it’s an attempt to help kids understand things they’ll need to know in their daily lives, much of contemporary education makes little sense: very few of us will use chemistry or algebra or French. But it would be very helpful to know how to cook a good breakfast, negotiate a pay raise, or defuse an argument. If education is about making “model citizens,” well, we would probably expect civics to be treated in a little less cursory a fashion. Maybe education is about teaching job skills, providing abilities that will prove useful in making a living. Maybe it nourishes souls and expands horizons. Maybe it’s just a way to keep as many kids as possible in a room together and therefore out of trouble. Or maybe it doesn’t do much of anything at all.

Libertarian economist, George Mason University professor, Cato Institute adjunct, and Freakonomics contributor Bryan Caplan has written The Case Against Education, in which he argues forcefully that it’s the last one. Education, he says, does very little for kids. Or rather, it teaches them very little, which is different. Caplan says that while there is no doubt that the more years of education you receive, the better off you’re likely to be in life, this is mostly unrelated to anything you’ve actually been taught. One standard view of the value of an education is that because employers are willing to pay more for more educated workers, people must be getting something important out of school that pays off. Caplan points out that this is not necessarily the case. The fact that more education leads to a higher salary does not mean that school is actually teaching anybody anything. It could just be “sorting” students who have relevant traits, “signaling” to employers which people have the most potential to succeed at their jobs.

Think about this like an obstacle course. If we have a group of people clamber up rocks, shimmy down ropes, and, yes, jump through hoops, the ones who make it to the end might have showed that they’re the best candidates for a physically demanding job. But it’s just a test, a selection process designed to expose traits that candidates already possess. It’s a “signal.” It hasn’t actually taught anybody anything, except how good they are at swinging from ropes. For Caplan, this is what education is mostly about. It’s a test of endurance and ability. In contrast to “human capital” theories that emphasize the body of valuable intellectual assets students acquire through schooling, Caplan believes that education is largely a credentialing process. An employer doesn’t want people with high school diplomas because of anything they’ve been taught in high school, but because they want the sort of people who get high school diplomas, i.e. those who have habits like showing up on time, following directions, being able to assimilate new facts quickly, etc. Or, more cynically, they want the sort of people with the financial resources and family support to make it through high school.

This does not mean that school teaches nothing, and Caplan concedes that basic literacy and numeracy are obviously important. But it does mean that a colossal amount of time and resources are being wasted. After all, if you could tell which candidates were going to complete the obstacle course after the first stage, would there be any need for ten additional stages? Plenty of jobs that require college degrees don’t actually require any skills learned in college; there’s no reason they couldn’t be filled by people with high school diplomas, saving the students four years and a pile of money. Caplan asks:

Think about all the classes you ever took. How many failed to teach you any useful skills? The lessons you’ll never need to know after graduation start in kindergarten. Elementary schools teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also require history, social studies, music, art, and physical education. Middle and high schools add higher mathematics, classic literature, and foreign languages—vital for a handful of budding scientists, authors, and translators, irrelevant for everyone else. Most college majors don’t even pretend to teach job skills. If you apply your knowledge of Roman history, Shakespeare, real analysis, or philosophy of mind on the job, you have an odd job.

The “uselessness” of education leads Caplan to downright radical conclusions. While typical criticisms of the existing education system focus on how the system is working, Caplan’s objection is to the system itself. He believes that “there’s way too much education” and that “typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives.” He considers himself the ally of every student who has ever sat in class, looking despairingly at the ticking clock, wondering when they’re ever going to use any of the stuff they’re being taught. You’re not, Caplan says, and that’s the problem.

When Caplan begins talking about the implications of his “signaling” theory, things take a turn for the disturbing. Because he believes education is bad and useless, he supports drastic cuts to public support for it:

Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it. The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies. This would not eliminate wasteful signaling, but at least government would pour less gasoline on the fire.

He believes there should be far more emphasis on vocational schooling, to the point of putting kids to work. He even has a section entitled “What’s Wrong With Child Labor?” in which he says that the employment of children is no worse than school and is far more useful:

When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.

At the college level, Caplan believes that students should be discouraged from pursuing “useless” degrees (i.e. the ones that do not increase their employment prospects):

Why should taxpayers fund the option to study fine arts at public expense? Instead, shut down the impractical departments at public colleges, and make impractical majors at private colleges ineligible for government grants and loans. Deprived of impractical options, some students will switch to practical subjects. Won’t plenty of others respond to narrower options by cutting their schooling short? Hopefully. If students refuse to stay in school unless they’re allowed to waste public money, taxpayers should call their bluff. (...)

Anyone who has watched a roomful of young eyes glaze over during an high school English class might be tempted to agree. But it might not be that students are “philistines.” Rather, it might be that subjects are, in general, taught atrociously, that there are few truly inspiring teachers in the classroom who know how to make ideas come alive. The reason “academics rarely broaden students’ horizons” might have a lot more to do with the academics than the students. Caplan gives up very quickly, and without much evidence, on the possibility of engaging the majority of young people in history, literature, the sciences, and the arts. But showing that students aren’t being engaged isn’t proof that they can’t be engaged.

The truth is that Caplan is probably right that the experience of school, for most students in the country, is boring and useless. When the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence asked high school students how they were feeling, 75% of them answered with negative emotions like “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed.” But that doesn’t mean that they’re a bunch of incurious dopes cut out only for manual labor. The insight that “school sucks” is not original to Caplan, and plenty of critics of education have said it over and over. Unlike Caplan, their response has not been to advocate getting rid of school entirely and sending children to work, but thinking very seriously about what education ought to be like. Alternative schooling models like Montessori and Waldorf schools try to eliminate the tedious, obedience-training aspects of school, and remove the structural barriers that stand between students and real knowledge. The progressive education movement has a century-long history, and has produced thousands of experiments around the world in new ways of organizing schooling. There is variation in whether students enjoy school, have good relationships with their teachers, and see schools as supportive environments. Figuring out ways to investigate and improve those things is central to serious projects for education reform. (...)

Caplan tries to show the uselessness of education by pointing to statistics on how few facts people remember from their school days; they can’t remember whether an electron is larger than an atom, etc. But this may misunderstand what exposure to the sciences actually does. True, very few people use algebra after they finish “learning” it. They do, however, carry away a sense of what algebra is. That may not seem like much, but it could be crucial: there’s a big difference between “not knowing much about biology” and “not even knowing what biology is.” I may not understand a physicist’s equations, but it’s a whole new level of ignorance if she introduces herself and I wonder what physics even is.

If we are to offer a meaningful and powerful alternative to instrumental conceptions of learning, we have to be clear about what that might involve. One reason Caplan’s arguments can be tempting is that we haven’t really articulated what schooling ought to be about. This leaves a big prescriptive vacuum where, after making some empirical and commonsense claims, Caplan can slide in unnoticed and present his slashing and burning as the only available solution. And it can result in liberals and progressives trying to defend school on economic, return-on-investment grounds, insisting that sociology degrees are unexpectedly useful in the workplace, or that the average wage worker will someday use their French subjunctives. (Although they probably will use their Spanish subjunctives, which is why Spanish should be mandatory.) (...)

So what’s the alternative? What is school for? For the first 12 years of kids’ conscious lives, we put them in a room and try to fill them with knowledge. What should that be? What about college? To what extent should learning be driven by the preferences of parents or kids themselves? Also, if public schools start trying to make kids learn interesting things, and private schools keep teaching them the things that will make them rich, won’t the wealth gap worsen? Does capitalism give us no other option but to pursue the bleak Caplan vision?

We shouldn’t hesitate to speculate on radical, even highly unusual possibilities. Though we don’t think it should be strictly “vocational,” education should obviously be more practical and active. There’s no excuse for the fact that students aren’t taught basic skills like tying a knot, sewing a button, defusing a bomb, fixing a toilet, baking a loaf of bread, planting a garden, etc. Animal care should be a requirement; establishing relationships with animals is important and every school should have them. Nathan remembers being jealous of a neighboring high school in Florida that used to have cats on campus. What about plant identification? A high school degree should require one to be able to identify at least 80% of the plant life in one’s community. The fact that nobody knows which plants are which is a disgrace.

We can introduce college-level subjects at a much younger age in simplified form. Kids are perfectly capable of learning philosophy. Not the academic kind, perhaps, but as critical thinking (e.g. asking questions like “How do we know to trust our teachers?” “Why are things the way they are?” “Is a bird a process or a thing?”) Try teaching music and art appreciation; don’t just have kids feebly try to learn to play the recorder, introduce them to Miles Davis, or show them how hit songs are made. We should expand the range of material taught in English class. Give kids books they will actually like, don’t make teens read Nathaniel Hawthorne and forget to introduce them to Kurt Vonnegut. Sparky remembers that in his high school, the literature teacher had the class critically examine Dan Brown books, and the students loved it. Something cool should happen every schoolday, whether it’s an explosion in chemistry class or the examination of a historical artifact or the building of a Rube Goldberg contraption or the performing of a play/dialogue. Bring in less dogma, foster more creativity. Make recess longer. Make things more hands-on. Do more field trips. Reward quality of thinking rather than strict obedience (i.e. it matters more if a student has nothing to say about the reading than if they’re late to class). Don’t do anything excruciating to them. (Caplan seems to endorse a lot of this, actually, saying that unstructured play is good, but his whole scheme will ensure that the rich kids get the fun stuff and the poor kids get busboy lessons.)

It may well be true, as Bryan Caplan argues, that as things stand education is a bad deal, societally speaking. We can buy that a lot of the economic benefit comes from signaling, and that spending money on things like Common Core and standardized testing could be making things worse because the gains are illusory. This doesn’t mean, however, that the solution is drastically decreasing resources. That would just be putting all the burdens education is trying to bear (lifelong return-on-investment and publicly-subsidized training for corporate life) onto the backs of students and parents. Plus, why should only rich kids get to spend four years pursuing an arts degree? It shouldn’t just be the students who are willing to toil to pay off crushing debts who get to spend their college years exploring irrelevant subjects that interest them.

In fact, we need to put more resources into education, but we also need to change our thinking. It’s not because kids are “natural philistines” if they’re bored, but because we don’t prioritize (or spend the money on) the kind of extraordinary learning experiences that would engage even the most intransigent or apathetic child. If foreign language classes aren’t good enough for people to retain languages, then let’s introduce foreign exchange programs. Send them around the world on the public dime.

We’re not cynical about students—we think everyone can be enriched—but to do that we need to turn away from the economic benefits of education and actually focus on that enrichment. Let’s do the things Caplan says he wants (more play, a broader canon), but let’s do it for every child, not make it dependent on family ability to pay. If rich parents think it’s worthwhile to pay for private schools with 15-person classes and seminar environments, let’s guarantee that to the children of Baltimore and Detroit. If teachers are downtrodden and fatigued and not inspiring, then let’s fucking pay them. Teaching should be a prestige job and there’s no reason it can’t be.

There are many possible visions for what education could and should be. But the one thing it shouldn’t be is preparation for wage work. Attempts to destroy education in the name of efficiency are going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of more efficiency, we need less of it. Students should be finding out about all of the fascinating things in our big, wonderful world, not being fitted and measured for future drudgery. What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker.

by Sparky Abraham and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nick Sirotich

See No Evil

Trawling a hotel minibar one night while on a work trip to Amsterdam, I found a piece of chocolate with an unusual name: Tony’s Chocolonely. I giggled at how apt the name was—who eats minibar chocolate unless they are, indeed, a little lonely?—and, on a whim, plugged it into Google.

The results were more sobering than I’d expected. The founder of Chocolonely, Teun (Tony) van de Keuken, founded the company with the goal of making the first (the “lonely only”) chocolate bar produced without labor exploitation. According to the company, this goal actually landed them in legal trouble: Bellissimo, a Swiss chocolatier, sued Chocolonely in 2007, allegedly claiming that “slave-free chocolate is impossible to produce.”

I had heard similar claims about other industries. There was the Fairphone, which aimed at its launch in 2013 to be the first ethically produced smartphone, but admitted that no one could guarantee a supply chain completely free from unfair labor practices. And of course one often hears about exploitative labor practices cropping up in the supply chains of companies like Apple and Samsung: companies that say they make every effort to monitor labor conditions in their factories.

Putting aside my cynicism for the moment, I wondered: What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?

The thing that still confused me is how reliable supply chains are, or seem to be. The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture?

In the past twenty years, popular and academic audiences have taken a growing interest in the physical infrastructure of global supply chains. The journalist Alexis Madrigal’s Containers podcast took on the question of how goods travel so far, so quickly. The writer Rose George traveled the world on a container ship for her book Ninety Percent of Everything. And Marc Levinson’s The Box startled Princeton University Press by becoming a national bestseller. Most recently, Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics offered a surprisingly engrossing history of that all-important industry.

These books help us visualize the physical infrastructure that makes global capitalism possible. But the data infrastructure has yet to be explored. How does information travel through the supply chain in such a peculiar way, so that I know to wait impatiently at my door at the exact moment my new iPhone will arrive—but no one really seems to know how it has gotten to me?

I set out to find the answer, and what I found surprised me. We consumers are not the only ones afflicted with this selective blindness. The corporations that make use of supply chains experience it too. And this partial sight, erected on a massive scale, is what makes global capitalism possible.

A Network of Waterways

The industry of supply-chain management (or SCM, to its initiates) is both vast and secretive. It’s one of the most rapidly growing corporate fields, and the subject of reams of books, journal articles, and blog posts. You can even get a degree in it.

But most companies are leery about revealing too much about their own logistics operations. It’s not only because they are afraid of exposing what dark secrets might lurk there. It’s also because a reliable, efficient supply chain can give a company an invaluable edge over its competitors.

Take Amazon: it’s not so much a retailer as a supply chain incarnate. Its advantage lies in the high speed and the low price with which it can get a set of bath towels to your door. No wonder the retailer is famously tight-lipped about its supply-chain infrastructure. Few people outside of Amazon know much about the software that Amazon uses to manage its logistics operations.

In the supply-chain universe, there are large, tech-forward companies like Amazon and Apple, which write and maintain their own supply-chain software, and there’s everyone else. And most everyone else uses SAP. SAP—the name stands for Systems, Applications, and Products—is a behemoth, less a single piece of software than a large, interlocking suite of applications, joined together through a shared database. Companies purchase SAP in “modules,” and the supply-chain module interlocks with the rest of the suite. Among people who’ve used SAP, the reaction to hearing its name is often a pronounced sigh—like all large-scale enterprise software, SAP has a reputation for being frustrating.

Nevertheless, SAP is ubiquitous, with modules for finance, procurement, HR, and supply-chain management. “A very high percentage of companies run SAP for things like finance,” says Ethan Jewett, an SAP consultant and software developer who helps companies implement SAP modules. “And so, if you’re running it for one part of your business, you’ll default to running it for another part of your business.”

Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of a company called Sourcemap, which aims to help companies map their own supply chains. Bonanni suspects that companies’ inability to visualize their own supply chain is partly a function of SAP’s architecture itself. “It’s funny, because the DNA of software really speaks through,” said Bonanni. “If you look at SAP, the database is still actually written in German. The relations in it are all one-link. They never intended for supply chains to involve so many people, and to be interesting to so many parts of the company.”

This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?

“It’s a staggering kind of undertaking,” said Bonnani. “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries. If you had to be in touch with everybody who made everything, you would either have a very small selection of products you could sell or an incredible margin that would give you the extra staff to do that.”

We call them “supply chains,” but that image is misleading. They really look more like a network of waterways, with thousands of tiny tributaries made up of sub-suppliers trickling into larger rivers of assembly, production, and distribution.

Bonanni explained that while workplace abuses get a lot of attention when they take place in the supply chains of large, prestigious companies like Apple and Samsung, working conditions are actually most opaque and labor abuse is most rampant in other industries, like apparel and agriculture. “Apparel, every quarter they have 100 percent turnover in the clothing that they make, so it’s a whole new supply chain every season. And with food, there’s millions of farmers involved. So in these places, where there’s way too many nodes for anyone to see without a computer, and where the chain changes by the time you’ve monitored it—those are the places where we see a lot of problems and instability.”

The picture that many of us have of supply chains involve state-of-the-art factories like those owned by Foxconn. In reality, the nodes of most modern supply chains look much less impressive: small, workshop-like outfits run out of garages and outbuildings. The proliferation and decentralization of these improvisational workshops help explain both why it’s hard for companies to understand their own supply chains, and why the supply chains themselves are so resilient. If a fire or a labor strike disables one node in a supply network, another outfit can just as easily slot in, without the company that commissioned the goods ever becoming aware of it.

It’s not like there’s a control tower overseeing supply networks. Instead, each node has to talk only to its neighboring node, passing goods through a system that, considered in its entirety, is staggeringly complex. Supply chains are robust precisely because they’re decentralized and self-healing. In this way, these physical infrastructures distributed all over the world are very much like the invisible network that makes them possible: the internet.

by Miriam Posner, Logic |  Read more:

Image: Media Club