Master of Arts degree in Economics at John Jay College

The Master of Arts degree in Economics at John Jay College is a new graduate program providing both practical skills for work in economic policy, and a foundation for study at the PhD level. Located in the heart of Manhattan, it is one of a handful of graduate economics programs in the country that makes alternative perspectives a core part of the curriculum. Students at John Jay will study the history of economic thought, Marxian and Post Keynesian theory, economic history, the economics of gender, environmental sustainability, and global inequalities of income and wealth; as well as learning the core technical skills they need for a profession or further academic work in economics.

This is a 36-credit, two year program. Tuition and fees are approximately $4,000 per semester for New York State residents, and $7,250 per semester for out-of-state students.

To apply online, visit here.

Health, Education and Bernie Sanders

There has been for quite a while now discussions on why younger voters prefer Bernie over Hillary in the Democratic contest (see this WAPO piece from last year, or this in the NYTimes, or this more recent by Nate Silver). Maybe someone already noted this before and I missed it, but it seems that the obvious answer is related to Bernie's proposals on health (Medicare for all) and education (tuition and debt free college). The other issues do not have an evident difference in their effects on young versus older voters. One would think that all democrats and left-leaning independents think that corporations have too much power and that inequality is beyond reasonable levels (the one issue in the campaign, arguably).

In the case of health, the US is unique among developed countries to have created a separate health insurance for the elderly. The reasons for that are complex and can only be understood in historical context. In the 1930s, unemployment was the priority and providing and income for the elderly was the main goal, leading to the creation of Social Security, which was seen as having more chances of being approved in Congress than other social reforms. When Truman tried to enact a health care system for all, Southern conservatives, which were part of the Democratic coalition, backed off from it, since it would imply integration of hospitals. As a result, in the US Medicare was developed as part of a plan to extend minimum hospital insurance for the elderly, and was seen as an extension of Social Security.*

The downside of this American peculiarity (yes, in this case exceptionalism is right) is that Medicare created a constituency for the program. There is a fear, sometimes exacerbated by the 'liberal' advisors of Hillary, that universal health care would imply worsening treatment, or more expensive at least, for the elderly. In the case of free access to college education the age divide is even more obvious. It is still unclear that Hillary will be the Democratic candidate, and certainly there is a chance for Bernie, but if he is to win it will depend to a great degree on younger voters, and that is related to his health and education proposals.

* Medicaid was an extension of welfare, and as such had a lower status, since recipients were (and are) seen as less deserving.

More on the War on Tenure

From Inside Higher Ed:

It’s been a tumultuous year for faculty members within the University of Wisconsin System, from threats to the Wisconsin Idea to a proposed $300 million budget cut to Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that professors do more work to compensate for the slash. But many professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday afternoon when the state Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute, along with adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of financial exigency.

Read rest here.

Long-Term Unemployment High, Regardless of Education

By Heidi Shierholz

Job opportunities have been so weak for so long that jobless workers continue to get stuck in unemployment for unprecedented lengths of time. Currently 3.7 million unemployed workers have been searching for a job for more than six months, more than three times the number of long-term unemployed there were in 2007, before the recession began. We often hear the claim that long-term unemployment in this recovery is due to unemployed workers not having the education or skills for the jobs that are available. A look at the data, however, shows that this is not what’s driving today’s long-term unemployment crisis. 

Read rest here
And for another post on the issue, see here 

The Wall-Street/Silicon-Valley/Beltway complex

Eisenhower once warned us of the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex. A bit more sardonically, globalization champion, and Columbia Professor, Jagdish Bhagwati coined the Wall Street-Treasury Complex, often referred to with the addition of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) at the end. When it comes to inequality in the US maybe we should talk about a Wall-Street/Silicon-Valley/Beltway complex or at least that is what the data presented by Galbraith and Hale here suggests.

Looking at inequality between economic sectors the paper suggests that between 1990 and 2012, three sectors are crucial, information technology, finance and the public sector. They argue that there are few main trends in the data:

One is the rise of professional, scientific and technical services in the information-technology boom through 2000. Another is the waning of the public sector, both federal and local, from 1990 to 2000 and then its recovery as a significant contributor to inequality in the early 2000s. It is notable that the Democratic years under Presidents Clinton and Obama were not banner ones for government; this sector fared better under the Republicans. A third trend is the rising importance of finance and insurance during the boom years from 1990 until 2001 but even more so during the run up to the financial crisis in 2007. Thereafter, the relative weight of the financial sector shrinks – and overall inequality also declined a bit. Taken as a whole, the period from 1990 to 2012 was one of rising earnings inequality, with a peak in 2000 and again in 2007. Inequality then subsides, but quickly recovers and by 2012 it was near or at its previous peak.

By the way, the importance of the public sector during the GOP governments goes hand in hand with the fact that Republicans are, for a long time, the party of big government (mostly for corporate welfare and tax cuts for the rich).

More interesting from the point of view of policy, Galbraith and Hale debunk the notion that education is the solution for inequality. They say:

When public discourse admits inequality to be a problem, education is often given as the cure... This is a view with powerful support among economists. But the simple inter-sector dynamics show clearly that, as a solution to inequality, education is a bust.

As we’ve shown, the last two decades have seen significantly slower job growth in the high- earnings-growth sectors than in the economy at large. So even if large numbers of young people do “acquire the skills needed to advance” there is no evidence that the economy will provide them with jobs to suit. Many will simply end up not using their skills.

Inequality is not just the result of lack of skills, since several skilled workers would end up with no jobs, or low paying jobs, and effective demand and government policy are necessary to reduce it.

Education as Pedagogy of Possibility: Shedding Dogma through Reciprocal Learning

A piece on education that I co-wrote with Colin Jenkins has been posted by The Hampton Institute. From the introduction:

Like a snake that sheds its skin periodically throughout its lifecycle, the human mind must develop and shed itself of intellectual skin. Its evolution is characterized by cyclical bouts of learning, reflecting and reconsidering; however, unlike the snake, which is genetically inclined to molting, the mind may not mature and regenerate without being subjected to antagonistic curiosity. This may only be accomplished through frequent and consistent mental cultivation, whereas knowledge is acquired, ideas are processed, and intellectual fruit is born. This process is cyclical in its need for reflection, but most importantly, it is evolutionary in its wanting to refine itself; and it is this constant pursuit of knowledge and validation that drives the mind to absorb substantial information and constant pursuit of knowledge and validation that drives the mind to absorb substantial information and secrete insignificant data. Human intellectualism is inherently anti-dogmatic in its need for constant reflection. This is not to say that substantive beliefs can't stand the test of time, but only that they cannot do so without being incessantly validated along the way. In spite of this, and throughout the course of history, humans have shown a tendency to submit to the crude nature of indoctrination in order to appease their subconscious desire for simplicity. And herein lies the fundamental paradox of the human race: intellectualism is naturally fluid, yet human nature is innately simplistic. We are all blessed with a mind that is essentially limitless, yet we are at the same time limited by our instinctive nature to simplify matters of complexity. And without adequate motivation, the means to confront complex issues become nothing more than a tragedy of unrealized potential. The process of learning, whether in a formal setting or through private exploration of curiosities, is a key motivator and major catalyst in the development of intellectualism.

Read rest here.

Michael D. Yates on Teaching Workers

By Michael D. Yates

Karl Marx’s famous dictum sums up my teaching philosophy: “The philosophers of the world have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” As I came to see it, Marx had uncovered the inner workings of our society, showing both how it functioned and why it had to be transcended if human beings were to gain control over their lives and labor. Disseminating these ideas could help speed the process of human liberation. From a college classroom, I thought that I could not only interpret the world, I could indeed change it.

Thinking is one thing; the trick is bringing thoughts to life. How, actually, does a person be a radical teacher? How, for example, can students be shown the superior insights of Marxian economics in classes that have always been taught from the traditional or neoclassical perspective—taught, in fact, as if the neoclassical theory developed by Adam Smith and his progeny is the gospel truth? My college expected me to teach students the “principles” of economics: that people act selfishly and independently of one another, that this self-centeredness generates socially desirable outcomes. And further, that capitalism, in which we, in fact, do act out of self-interest, is therefore the best possible economic system. Had I refused to do this and taught only Marxian economics, I doubt I could have kept my job.

Read rest here.

CEPR on Union Advantage for Black Workers

By Janelle Jones and John Schmitt

Since at least the early 1970s, and likely earlier, unionization rates for black workers have been higher than for other racial groups in the United States. As sociologists Jake Rosenfeld and Meredith Kleykamp (2012) have recently written, the labor movement has been “a remarkably inclusive institution vital for its economic support of African American men and women.” Nevertheless, the share of unionized black workers has been falling almost continuously since the early 1980s, reflecting a trend also seen in the workforce as a whole. In this report, we review the most recent data available to examine the impact of unionization on the wages and benefits paid to black workers. These data show that even after controlling for factors such as age and education level, unionization has a significant positive impact on black workers' wages and benefits.The union advantage is particularly strong for black workers with lower levels of formal education.

Read the rest here.

Obama's Minimum Wage Hike Excludes Thousands and Fails to Look at Roots of Income Inequality

David Cay Johnston:

It's important that we restore the minimum wage. We're not talking about raising it. We're talking about restoring it. Back in the mid '60s, it was almost $11 an hour. And education is certainly very important and too much neglected in this country. We put huge barriers to bright but poor and middle-class children getting first-rate educations, especially at college. But we have much more fundamental problems than that. Many of these problems involve things like government rules that hardly anybody knows about that take money from the many and redistribute it to the few, the use of tax dollars to build factories, office buildings, and shopping malls, the rules that allow multinational corporations--not domestic, not mom-and-pop corporations, but multinational corporations-- to actually profit off their corporate income taxes by delaying payment of them for 30, 40, 50 years and having you and I let them deposit that money with the government to collect interest while the value of the tax they owe erodes.

Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Millenials

From The Atlantc:

What's are today's young adults really like? For those who've spent too much time gazing into the dark recesses of Thought Catalog or obsessing over "Girls," the Department of Education has a new report that offers up some enlightening answers. In the spring of 2002, the government's researchers began tracking a group of roughly 15,000 high school sophomores—most of whom would be roughly age 27 today—with the intention of following them through early adulthood. Like myself, many of those students graduated college in 2008, just in time to grab a front-row seat for the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic gore fest that ensued. In 2012, the government’s researchers handed their subjects an enormous survey about their lives in the real world. Here, I've pulled together the most interesting findings.

Read rest here

The Privatization of Public Education in America

By Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer

Obama’s contribution to the privatization campaign has centered for the most part on education. But before we can evaluate its impact, it is necessary to consider the different forms privatization can take in relation to schools, since it can occupy different positions on a wide spectrum of possibilities. At one end of the spectrum lie completely privatized schools that provide their own financing and govern themselves. But many schools are more like hybrids, a mixture of private and public. Charter schools, whose numbers are growing rapidly, are funded with public money (that previously would have gone to public schools) but are privately operated. Often they are run by for-profit or non-profit national companies, as opposed to simply a group of teachers who want to break away from traditional schools and experiment with an alternative curriculum. Similarly, essentially public universities or K-12 schools might make use of online courses produced by private, for-profit companies, and, of course, private companies produce textbooks. Another hybrid example is where public universities have aggressively raised tuition fees at public universities so that funding shifts from the public coffers to the students themselves as private citizens. At the University of California at Berkeley students now contribute more for their education than the state does. In the 1960s the state paid for the vast majority of their expenses. Still another example is where a publicly funded and operated school imports the corporate culture from the private sector. For example, many public universities are abandoning their former practice of promoting faculty into administrative positions, paying them only slightly more than before and, instead, are drawing on administrators from the private sector and paying them exorbitant salaries while paying part-time faculty less than a living wage. Some presidents of public universities now make over $1 million a year. Under such circumstances democratic institutions of shared governance are dismantled while power tends to be concentrated at the top, thereby destroying any spirit of collegiality.

Read rest here.

It's Poverty, Stupid! - Teachers Were Never The Problem

Social science research provides the empirical evidence that over two thirds of student achievement is a product of out-of-school factors - among the most powerful of those is economic status.

 By David Sirota

Google the phrase “education crisis” and you'll be hit with a glut of articles, blog posts and think tank reports claiming the entire American school system is facing an emergency. Much of this agitprop additionally asserts that teachers unions are the primary cause of the alleged problem. Not surprisingly, the fabulists pushing these narratives are often backed by anti-public school conservatives and anti-union plutocrats. But a little-noticed study released last week provides yet more confirmation that neither the “education crisis” meme or the “evil teachers' union” narrative is accurate.

Read rest here.

America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth

New book from Monthly Review Press by Henry Giroux exposes the grim reality of how our nation's educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people by way of what Giroux identifies as the “four fundamentalisms”: market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization/commodification of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences, as Bowles & Gintis manifested in their classic 'Schooling in Capitalist America', most plainly in the decaying school system, which is increasingly designed to churn out drone-like future employees, imbued with authoritarian values, inured to violence, and destined to serve corporate feudal lords (more on this, see here and "Violence, USA" by Giroux).