Latest column: What Adam Smith really thought about capitalism

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January 30, 2010

CURRENTS

Selling Short a Humanistic Economist

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — One evening late last year, the conservative American television personality Glenn Beck was venerating capitalism once again. He pointed to one of the folds under his jaw.

“If I could sell sponsorships on this chin right here, I would,” he said. “It would just say, ‘Third chin sponsored by Goodyear.”’ He called himself “the most enthusiastic capitalist since Adam Smith.”

Not long before, on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, Steve King, an Iowa Republican, had similarly resurrected the Scottish philosopher. “On this side of the aisle are the people that believe in free enterprise, the invisible hand, Adam Smith’s vision, Adam Smith’s dream,” he said. “You folks,” he told his Democratic colleagues, “do not.”

Adam Smith, free-market partisan: this image dominates, even in market-weary times. Politicians invoke him as a near-deity. Think tanks and consulting firms use his name as a synonym for free-market policies. So dogmatic is he imagined to be in his famous book “The Wealth of Nations” that the feminist writer-activist Riane Eisler not long ago wrote a corrective titled “The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics.”

The implication that his economics was uncaring might have disturbed Adam Smith, for he was hardly the man that many now think him to be.

While he believed that markets could channel self-interest into efficient aggregate outcomes, he argued that this was no excuse for selfishness: “When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many.” That quotation is not from “The Wealth of Nations,” Smith’s best-known work, but from “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his lesser-known opus. It was republished by Penguin this week to mark its 250th anniversary, and it offers a reminder that Smith was a subtle, complex thinker whose ideas about markets and those who use them would embarrass many of his present-day devotees.

“The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is about human nature, not markets. It was published before “The Wealth of Nations,” but brought out by Smith in several editions after that other book was published. Yet the humanistic book fell into obscurity in the 19th century, and Smith became singularly known for his economic doctrines, and above all for his assertion that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Today, according to data from Google, people look up “The Wealth of Nations” 120 times more often than “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” “While some men are born small and some achieve smallness, it is clear enough that Smith has had much smallness thrust upon him,” Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist and Nobel laureate, writes in the introduction to the new edition. (Disclosure: Dr. Sen is one of my teachers at Harvard.)

Smith is often treated like the philosopher of the Goldman Sachs bonus, as the defender of an anything-goes capitalism. But in “Moral Sentiments” he tartly criticizes the idea that self-interest is enough.

A healthy society, Smith believed, requires trust, so that bankers lend. It requires care for the poor. It requires sympathy: the book’s first words extol the feelings in every person that “interest him in the fortune of others.” It requires prudence: simplicity, honesty, thrift, the deferral of gratification, industry, a refusal to risk fortune and tranquillity “in quest of new enterprises and adventures.” And it requires regulation, transparency and other mechanisms of fair play.

“In Smith’s vision, greed is socially beneficial only when properly harnessed and channeled,” Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. “When these conditions fail to hold,” he added, “greed is not good.”

But “Moral Sentiments” does more than just balance our understanding of Smith. It is also a thorough analysis of money and the human character. If “The Wealth of Nations” was Smith the economist describing the workings of the market, “Moral Sentiments” is Smith the social psychologist describing how humans actually employ that market.

In it Smith serves as a kind of economic Tocqueville, offering sharp insights into the behavior behind the present economic crisis.

“To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” Smith asks. We ever insist on “bettering our condition,” he writes, not out of necessity, not to feed or clothe ourselves, but for vanity: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy.” Even as Washington and other capitals speak of tightening the regulation of banks worldwide, Smith reminds us of the mingling of economic and noneconomic desires that makes banking culture so hard to change. His words seem strangely relevant to this age of elusive dinner reservations and fractional jet ownership and nightclub bottle service — the outward trappings of a banking culture that seems, on Smith’s view, to mask a lonely burning for validation underneath.

Smith saw, as well, how the powerful — think Tiger Woods or the nameless bankers once adulated as “masters of the universe” — are encouraged in their vanity by the rest of us: how we puff them up, hang on their deeds, pay more attention to them than to the unfortunate, and gradually make them sense that they can get away with anything. The ambitious man, Smith writes, comes to believe “that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation.”

It is this sense of impunity that worried Smith about the wealth pursuit. And he wrote in “Moral Sentiments” of a rage and resentment that rise from such behavior — not unlike the feelings now stirring in the ailing, job-shedding, bonus-giving countries of the West.

“If you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects,” he wrote. “We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling.”

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January 6, 2010

CURRENTS

Delivering Fusion Food for Thought

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA — We tend to think that machines connect the world, but it is really in fact people. In the past, it was pilgrims and explorers and colonizers who, in variously benign and cruel ways, drove interchange among peoples. It was they who gave this pastel-hued city on the Caribbean its Spanish-Islamic arches, a cuisine that might blend tamarind and steak and corn in a single dish, and salsa songs equally indebted to the European and African pasts.

Today it is not pilgrims or colonizers who bind us, but a new class of the globally connected who are relentlessly cross-pollinating the human community. They are becoming some of the world’s most culturally consequential people, but we know little about them as a class.

I have had close encounters with them in Mumbai and New Delhi, Washington and Cambridge, Bangkok and Hong Kong, and now in this percussive Colombian city. I have seen how they are stitching the world together one restaurant recommendation and friend request at a time, and this column is in their honor.

They come in several types, though some of them straddle more than one:

THE ANOINTERS They are geographic early adopters: investors who bet on places still thought risky, then see fat returns when the fearful finally join the bandwagon; tourists who venture to countries thought unsafe, as Colombia is thought by many, benefiting from the lower prices and thin crowds, and then spreading word of the new reality to the less-daring; buyers from Bergdorf Goodman who decide whether Moscow’s or Cape Town’s fashion week has become big enough to attend; event managers who decide where to gather a film festival, software conference or corporate confabulation.

THE REPLICATORS They are corporate colonials: expats, country heads and corporate transfers seeking to spread not civilization but best practices. They come from New York and Seoul to build foreign offices of Goldman Sachs and Hyundai. HSBC has a special squad known as the “Marines,” who must be ready to relocate on a few days’ notice. Replicators bring world-class managerial techniques to the countries they inhabit; the best of them imbibe new ideas from the locals that they relay to headquarters. They often spend a disproportionate amount of time ensconced in five-star hotels, but they are adventurers doing business where it is not yet fashionable and raising everybody’s game.

THE APPRENTICES They travel abroad from less-connected countries, apprentice in the best universities or companies in the world, then rush home to apply their discoveries. They are not interested in hanging around. They have worked back home; they know the opportunities and gaps; they come to learn what cannot be learned easily at home. Upon returning, they tend to bring in better systems and processes, and they adapt alien models to local realities. If Replicators bring cellphone towers from the West to India, Apprentices create Indian companies that let village-dwelling farmers bank on their phones.

THE DOCKS They are the globalized locals in less-connected societies who serve as receivers for the outside world. They are in a place to stay. They are the keepers of its institutional memory, but speak in a language that foreigners understand. They know what in their society will most appeal to outsiders; they are expert explainers who do not tire of giving the same late-night tour. They live on the social-networking sites Facebook and Orkut and aSmallWorld. They possess insider knowledge: in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, they will tell you which local dive is best and which tailor won’t rip you off. They are respected within their societies because they broker access to foreigners and foreign opportunities.

THE SWITCHBOARDS They do not live in interesting, out-of-the-way places themselves, but they know everyone who does. When in university, they make friends with the foreign students; five years later, they have a guest room awaiting them in a dozen countries. They are collectors of internationals, and connectors, too. Someone working on children’s issues in Zimbabwe may be too enmeshed in the cause to come upon someone similarly engaged in Bolivia. Their mutual Switchboard friend will insist that they connect and perform a Switchboard’s favorite art: the intro e-mail, with a clever subject line.

THE FUSIONISTAS They are bi-everything, or almost everything — biracial, bicultural, bilingual. They are diplomats’ children, first-generation immigrants, the returned offspring of émigrés. They long agonized over a split identity, and perhaps suffered through high school with their inability to answer the question “Where are you from?” Now it’s payback time. They have figured out how to turn hyphenated confusion into a competitive advantage by serving as cultural bridges. They own East-meets-West fashion boutiques in the developing world; they throw dinner parties with soul food and kimchi in rooftop New York apartments.

This connective population deserves further study. They are not necessarily the richest people in their societies, but they often belong to the educated upper-middle class. They share a restless bent of personality. They fancy themselves as adventurers, although in a way they are quite conservative: far from being hippies and backpackers, they roam the world for the sake of work, not play. They hope to join the establishment, not overthrow it.

They can fear commitment — tending to be renters, not buyers, for example, even when they can afford to buy. They find it hard to mate with those less restless and seafaring than they. But they also struggle to hold steady relationships with others of their ilk, bouncing around the world. Video calls on Skype soothe the anomie that comes with ambition.

At first, it was an extra-helpful, eccentric friend here and there. Then there seemed to be more and more such people, but clustered in particular cities like New York and Shanghai. But, increasingly, they are everywhere, connecting, bridging, even in out-of-the-way tropical towns like this one.

So the next time you eat Greek-French food in Tokyo or watch a Chinese-American’s avant-garde film about Beijing or hear in Berlin that Beirut is the new vacation spot, you will be watching the pilgrims and explorers of our own age at work.

On India, China, climate and leapfrogging

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/weekinreview/20anand.html

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December 5, 2009

CURRENTS

Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

When calendrical milestones pass, however arbitrary they are, they induce reflection. We look back with a feeling of incredulity at all that happened in what feels like no time. We peer into the fearsome, onrushing future. We catalog and schematize and make lists.

List-making for the end of the first decade of the 2000s is in full swing. At least in the United States, which loves to order priorities, we are being told who were the most important celebrities, the crucial leaders, the most corrupt tycoons. But when those celebrities and leaders fall from memory, what will be the decade’s legacy in ideas?

What follows, with thanks to several thoughtful interlocutors, is an admittedly rough draft of a brief history of ideas for the 2000s.

THE END OF EXCEPTIONALISM: It dawned on the West in these years, and America especially, that its preeminence and specialness could end. Cave-dwelling clerics and ragtag insurgent squads waged war against the great Western powers, often making up in brutal effect what they lacked in sophisticated firepower.

Vigor and energy seemed to transfer to a resurgent third world, which began to export not just things, but also innovations like a $2,000 car. Western politicians found themselves pledging to discover jobs that other countries could not do for less; fewer and fewer were found.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP: Public and private purpose blurred. Governments worldwide outsourced public duties — in the case of the United States, even warfare — to private firms, while private firms turned to public coffers to socialize their risks. In George W. Bush, the United States had its first M.B.A. president. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, leaped from public service to making millions, while doing more to fight AIDS through private organizing than as president. A social enterprise, blending the profiteering and do-gooding instincts, became a vocation of choice for educated elites globally.

Market dogma saturated the former socialist world, where governments imposed capitalism from above. A new culture of ethical consumption offered the promise of serving public ends through private buying.

THE FUSION CLASS: If identity politics defined earlier decades, identity straddling defined this one. The traditional brain drain became brain circulation as developing-world émigrés began to move back and forth between adopted and home countries. The United States elected president a biracial man whose present-day relatives speak Cantonese, French, German, Hebrew, Igbo, Indonesian, Luo and Swahili.

The writers who dominated prizes and imaginations were products, and chroniclers, of in-betweenness: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk.

The words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, channeled by Ms. Lahiri, became an anthem: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.”

THE CLASH OF PAROCHIALISMS: As the fusion class air-kissed, parochialisms also flourished, offering the promise of return to a simpler, often imaginary or illusory past. It was the parochialism of those who waged jihad and the parochialism of those who fought back, leaders who could not pronounce “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” but believed they could change them.

It was the enthusiasm for proudly parochial politicians, from Sarah Palin in America to Euroskeptics or Islam-bashers across the Atlantic to Evo Morales in Bolivia. The world seemed bound to be stewarded by a new crop of rising powers, led by India and China, of a more parochial bent, less interested than the West, for good or ill, in transcendent rights or injustices or in other nations’ business in general.

VIRTUALLY ANONYMOUS: The decade contained a milestone: The human population became majority-urban for the first time, defined ever less by the tight weave of village society and ever more by the city’s anonymity. Anonymity thrived in the workplace, too, with the growth of outsourcing and offshoring, which chopped large tasks like making an iPod into tiny pieces performed in different countries by colleagues who might never meet.

Such virtual connectedness quietly became ordinary around the world: We grew comfortable with virtual mate-seeking, virtual business meetings, virtual friends and friending, virtual trading of credit-default swaps. Anonymity became human.

LIVE NOW, PAY LATER: Mortgage was an important word for the decade, but as a verb, too, not just a noun. The 2000s were in so many different ways about a present financed by the future. The future financed an archipelago of indebtedness from Dubai to Iceland. The world’s poor were taught, to much celebration, to take micro-versions of the loans that addict the rich.

Some of the decade’s most impressive new companies commanded huge valuations in the present based on future hopes, not present-day profits. An awareness dawned that present human consumption levels amounted to a massive redistribution of wealth from future generations to ourselves.

TRUTH IS SOCIAL: Humans have always wondered what makes something true. We have imagined truth to come from what the ancients wrote, what our ancestors believed, what repeatable experiments established.

But truth became social — truth as what we collectively think it is, with the most important truths being those about us. The idea of professionally produced, neutral, paid-for information about situations not related to the self suffered. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, crowd-sourcing, Wikipedia and LonelyGirl15 filled the void.

Public and private happenings traded places: the former seemed to bore a new generation. Exhibitionism become a mainstream ethic. “Yes, You,” Time Magazine said when it made “you” the person of the year in the middle of the decade. “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

A modest healthcare idea

I want to get your feedback for a healthcare idea I have been batting around:

What if we picked a random basket of 535 Americans, representing all shades of the country, all regions, socioeconomic classes, races, health conditions. A government office would keep track of what health insurance they managed to have year to year – which policies, what was covered and what wasn’t, how reliable reimbursement was, quality of service. And then, on a random basis, members of the U.S. House and Senate would be assigned, for a one-year rotating term, to a real American family, to enjoy the health insurance for themselves and their own families that the corresponding family enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy). The members would be forbidden to buy additional insurance. And so if some Americans were uninsured, that same fraction of the House and Senate would go uninsured. If the uninsured were suddenly insured through an act of policymaking, then the members would all be insured the following year. If premiums rose or fell, if service improved or declined – whatever would happen, the legislators would live the consequences just like everyone else.

Might this align incentives and encourage lawmakers to pass health legislation that would satisfy not just one party’s base or another’s, but a vast coalition of people who could reasonably believe that Congress felt their pain?

A radio and a television appearance

TVO television in Canada, on "buycotting"

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CBC Radio in Canada, on the Age of Metrics:

November 21, 2009

CURRENTS

Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — The Trixie Telemetry company believes in hard, quantifiable truths. It believes that there is a right time and wrong time to breast-feed a baby. It believes that certain hours and rooms are better for a child’s naps than others and that data can establish this, too. It believes that parents should track how long their infants have gone without soiling a diaper and devote themselves to beating this “high score.”

To these ends, the company sells what is a coveted service in this age: a dashboard. It invites you to enter data on your baby’s life, and it produces color-coded charts, Sleep Probability Distributions, digestive analysis and such, to help parents make data-based decisions.

Don’t laugh, because Trixie Telemetry is made from the essence of our age.

Computers have become an extension of us: that is a commonplace now. But in an important way we may be becoming an extension of them, in turn. Computers are digital — that is, they turn everything into numbers; that is their way of seeing. And in the computer age we may be living through the digitization of our minds, even when they are offline: a slow-burning quantification of human affairs that promises or threatens, depending on your outlook, to crowd out other categories of the imagination, other ways of perceiving.

Self-quantification of the Trixie Telemetry kind is everywhere now. Bedposted.com quantifies your sexual encounters. Kibotzer.com quantifies your progress toward goals like losing weight. Withings, a French firm, makes a Wi-Fi-enabled weighing scale that sends readings to your computer to be graphed. There are tools to measure and analyze the steps you take in a day; the abundance and ideological orientation of your friends; the influence of your Twitter utterances; what you eat; the words you most use; your happiness; your success in spurning cigarettes.

Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.

These services are wondrous. They also risk lumping us into clusters of the like-minded and depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.

In the Age of Metrics, vocation after vocation is discovering numbers. Doctors are going quant with evidence-based medicine, which promises to improve care by quantifying different treatments’ probabilities of success. Wall Street has gone quant, with financial models automating trading — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously. Academia has gone quant, with once-humanistic fields like politics, on which I work at Harvard, studied in a more rigorous way, but at the price of having ever less to say about the world’s big questions. Even charity, built on the instinct of altruism, has gone quant.

Philanthropists were once satisfied with a fuzzy feeling and, in the United States at least, tax benefits. Increasingly, though, they insist on precise metrics of their “social return on investment.” They want to know how much money is funding vaccines and not staplers at the charity’s offices. And so the Rockefeller Foundation and other groups have created the new Impact Reporting and Investment Standards, a set of metrics that make causes rigorously comparable.

“The power of metrics is that it enables us to deploy our marginal dollar to the best problem-solver, not just the best storyteller,” said Antony Bugg-Levine, a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation.

But there are also worries. What will be the fate of causes, like women’s empowerment, that produce something not easily counted? Will metrics encourage too much outside second-guessing of charities? Will metrics encourage charities to work toward the metric (acres reforested), not the underlying goal (sustainability)?

Focusing on the wrong metrics already distorts policy-making around the world, according to a fascinating new study commissioned by the French government.

We use gross domestic product to measure everything. It makes it easy to compare economies, but it makes us undervalue what cannot be measured, the report said. Trees are killed because the sales from paper are countable, while a forest’s worth is not. Unemployment grants are cut because their cost is plain, while the mental-health cost of idleness is vague.

In short, what we know instinctively, data can make us forget. But the commission’s solution was revealing of our times: not more balance between qualitative and quantitative, but more metrics: new statistics on human well-being and economic sustainability to contend with data on production.

The commission’s chairman, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of a forthcoming book, “Freefall,” on the Great Recession, has been a critic of the world’s saturation by business logic. I asked him what he made of metricocracy. He said metrics were valuable tools but were in danger of squelching other ways of perceiving. But he argued that his commission had no choice but to speak in metricese.

“In this world in which we are so centered on metrics, those things that are not measured get left off the agenda,” he said. “You need a metric to fight a metric.”

Technology brings ever more metrics. The strange thing is that nothing in them prevents us from using other lenses, too. But something in the culture now makes us bow before data and suspend disbelief. Sometimes metrics blind us to what we might with fewer metrics have seen.

The future’s challenge to us — when we are rearing children, making economic choices, picking the songs to live and dance by — may be to decide how metrics might inform our decisions without becoming them.

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November 7, 2009

CURRENTS

Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — In the autumn of 1963, the American magazine Popular Mechanics heralded an innovation that seemed bound to change the world: the “teacherless classroom.”

The magazine told of a new building at the University of Miami, doughnut-shaped and carved up into 12 rooms. Professors stood in the hole and had their image projected into every room simultaneously. Faculty productivity was said to have soared. What was lost in intimacy would, readers were assured, be made up for by feedback buttons on students’ chairs, including one for “I don’t understand.”

Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that.

Today the dream has returned. Thanks to broadening Internet access, advances in multimedia and the market potential of millions of historically underserved learners among the developing world’s youth and the rich world’s adults, modern versions of the doughnut building are flowering globally: systems through which chunks of teaching can be “scaled up,” in business jargon, and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.

The Open Courseware Consortium, started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has enlisted universities around the world, from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa to the University of Tokyo, to post courses online free, including professor’s notes, video and exams. The portal iTunes offers lectures from Berkeley and Oxford and elsewhere. The new University of the People, founded by an Israeli entrepreneur, provides tuition-free bachelor-level degrees through what it calls “peer-to-peer teaching” — students learning not from teachers but each other, trading questions and answers online.

Teacherless or virtual-teacher learning is described by enthusiasts as a revolution in the making. Until now, they say, education has been a seller’s market. You beg to get in to college. Deans decide what you must know. They prevent you from taking better courses elsewhere.

They set prices high to subsidize unprofitable activities. Above all, they exclude most humans from their knowledge — the poor, the old, people born in the wrong place, people with time-consuming children and jobs.

Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

“This is putting the consumer in charge as opposed to putting the supplier in charge,” said Scott McNealy, the chairman of Sun Microsystems, the technology giant, and an influential proponent of this approach. He founded Curriki, an online tool for sharing lesson plans and other materials, and was an early investor in the Western Governors University, which delivers degrees online.

It is hard to say whether this technology-tinted vision is friendly or hostile to teachers. A market in instruction will help the best teachers extend their audience far beyond campus. But if you’re a second-rate physicist at a middling university, the sudden availability of free M.I.T. courses could feel threatening.

Mr. McNealy compared university instructors today to the tens of thousands of pianists who performed in movie halls during silent films a century ago. “Technology figured out how to play music in a film, and all of a sudden two piano players moved to L.A. and took all of the business,” he said. The result was a higher average music quality for audiences but many instantly obsolescent pianists. “They had to go and do more productive things,” he said — more productive things being, for Mr. McNealy, not piano-playing.

He argues that many teachers will have to re-imagine themselves as coaches, not content creators, focused on motivating and customizing material to students, while piping in others’ superior teaching.

This view is increasingly commonplace among business leaders and free-market champions. But it has triggered vociferous criticism from educators and educational traditionalists.

Some of the anxiety about the market approach is territorial, from . Some of it is about the repercussions of unbundling the university: profitable offerings like introductory courses subsidize less-profitable undertakings; and, if low-cost competitors lure “customers” away from these offerings, the larger project of the university might suffer, from laboratories to free-thinking tenured faculty to the campus environment itself.

But there is a further worry that a market in instruction will alter education’s very meaning, will degrade it even as it disperses it more widely.

Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.

Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”

As the digital classroom comes, we will face hard questions. What will happen when teachers, like banks and retail outlets, are consolidated by the market, with favored professors teaching hundreds of thousands and regular Joes relegated to night school? Will there be a night school? Will a freer marketplace generate more ideas, or narrow the diversity of ideas as certain teachers crowd out others?

How will students design their curriculums? Does a 20-year-old know what she wants to know at 40? Will the most-downloaded lectures become the new equivalent of the classics?

How will teachers change when the goal becomes to titillate the widest audience, not just connect with the room? Will teaching for the cameras undermine pedagogy or widen knowledge’s appeal?

Will the best teaching, beamed globally, silence voices that might otherwise have spoken? Or, in spreading knowledge, will it help the silent speak?

A Webliography of further reading on the teacherless classroom

For those who are interested, some good resources on the subject of the virtualization of education:

Time Magazine on the future of the classroom

Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school

The Cost of Education

The 1963 Teacherless Classroom

Ideal Classroom for Video-Based Instruction

An Education Stimulus for the Developing World

New Meaning for Night Class at 2-Year Colleges

Stephen’s Web

The South Asian Idea Web blog

The Theory and Practice of Digital Theory

Center for History and New Media

Digital History

Education Week

Rethinking Schools

Teaching Thursday

Higher Education and Research in India

Tech Blogs:

Academhack

The Salt Box

Edwired

Savage Minds

43 Folders

Clips

Academic Productivity

digital digs

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

http://www.uopeople.org

http://www.curriki.org/

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

http://www.wgu.edu/

http://p2pu.org

Around the World:

http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/03/12/links-from-the-talk-open-education-around-the-world/

http://www.elearning-africa.com/themes.php

http://www.obhe.ac.uk/the_obhe_global_forum__malaysia/welcome

http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/knowledgenetwork.asp

Distance Learning in Developing World:

http://members.tripod.com/stewart_marshall/index.html

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October 24, 2009

CURRENTS

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The American economy is having what doctors call an acute episode.

Employment won’t throb. The circulation of capital remains weak. Industry is breathing, but barely. And if we can agree on anything one year into this mess, it is that there is little we can do when the patient arrives already this bad.

That is why the talk now is so often of prevention. Prevent the next crisis through health insurance and a green-energy sector, the American president says. Prevent it by cutting spending and nurturing personal responsibility, American conservatives retort.

But the truth is that politicians, and not just in the United States, are rarely willing to invest in a problem that hasn’t occurred. Consensus and action are easier to come by after a 9/11 or a Lehman Brothers than before. Problems in the embryonic, soluble phase don’t interest us; and those that do interest us are often too big to solve.

Which is where acupuncture comes in.

Western medical practices have attracted similar criticisms in recent years, for an emphasis on intervening in disease rather than preventing it beforehand and promoting quotidian well-being. But in health, unlike politics, an alternative approach called wellness has emerged, focused on investing in health before it breaks down.

What can wellness tell us about our present economic malady? As it moves from fringe to mainstream — with wellness programs in the health care reform proposals now in Congress, wellness manifestos on the best-seller lists and a U.S. Army wellness program that asks soldiers to introspect and meditate — I asked experts about the approach’s core tenets and how they might be applied to the body politic.

Nip it in the bud. Wellness argues for cultivating health a little every day, not just restoring it during calamities. We increasingly accept that it is better to monitor a diabetic’s blood sugar with regular clinic visits than to amputate her limbs. We accept that businesses can avoid costly cancer treatments by encouraging workers to stop smoking. But in our political life, we prefer to wait until things reach the emergency room.

We barely regulate financial markets for years, thinking regulation oppressive, until we are compelled to nationalize private firms. We avoid expensive investments and controversial new methods in public education, then pay the price in lower social mobility and vast prison populations. We neglect building roads and bridges and Internet highways, fearing the cost, and then reap the much greater costs of whole regions falling off the economic grid.

“With a lot of social problems, we’re not sure how to prevent it, and therefore we don’t spend money on it, because we always have a lot of other priorities,” said David Cutler, a Harvard economist who has advised both the Clinton and Obama White Houses on health care.

Go to the roots. Western medicine tends to fight symptoms, whether suppressing coughs or flooding the brains of the depressed with serotonin. Wellness is interested in underlying causes. It is inclined to see an infertile woman, for example, as a stressed woman rather than a woman with defunct ovaries, and may suggest that she eat and work differently rather than take ovary-manipulating pills.

In public policy, a symptom bias rules. A housing crisis? Enact a tax credit! Bank failures? Bail them out!

There is nothing wrong with such steps — except for what they leave out, as most economists will tell you.

Even amid all this action, we have virtually ignored the complex weave of issues beneath the issues: meager savings, a debt addiction, a congenitally spendthrift political system, an almost pathological craving for stuff. And, with our topical cures, we should not be surprised to see new symptoms of the old maladies appearing: insurance again being packaged into derivatives, bonuses again soaring on Wall Street.

“We treat symptoms, and we do not look at the causes of the symptoms,” Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine and wellness guru, said when asked to extend the wellness metaphor to the economy. “We are totally at this moment looking at it in a reductionist manner. The reductionist manner is a bailout. And somehow that’s supposed to solve the problem, whereas the problem occurred because we were thinking reductively.”

Look within. Wellness sees the causes of and remedies for ailments as lying within us. Avoid infection by building immunity. Defeat disease by eating foods that help the body heal itself.

With the economy, we look everywhere but within. It’s the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers. It’s Washington’s fault. Bush’s fault. Obama’s fault. Greenspan’s fault. Somebody fix it!

But what about us? Why can’t we acknowledge that it was us who bought all those unaffordable houses, us who listened to that zero-gravity financial “advice,” us who bought and bought and never kept a rainy-day fund? And why, in solving the problem, do we expect the state to create substitute dynamism instead of renewing the culture of decentralized dynamism that made the U.S. economy so vital to begin with?

“Conventional medicine is very unbalanced in placing all its emphasis on external interventions rather than looking to advance that internal capacity to maintain healing,” said Andrew Weil, founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the author of several books on wellness. Likewise with the economy, he said: “Instead of simply identifying external threats and developing weapons and strategies against them, we should instead identify and strengthen immunity and resistance.”

A politics of wellness would transcend party. It would emphasize the up-front investments that Democrats like in order to achieve the long-run fiscal solvency on which Republicans insist. It would fulfill the liberal belief in a positive role for government in maintaining well-being but would honor the conservative conviction that government’s chief role is to help the social organism heal itself. It would acknowledge, with the left, the complex lattice of cultural and institutional influences that govern a society’s well-being, while emphasizing, with the right, the limits of what any external healer can do.

Think wellness in these hard times. The most urgent problems, after all, may be the ones we haven’t had yet.