I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!

Readers of this blog will, I am sure, all agree, that I am a nice guy -- easy-going, friendly, slow to anger, an all around swell fellow.  But I have my limits, and I have finally had it with Paul Krugman's sucking up to Hillary Clinton and his ceaseless attacks on Bernie.  I mean, I understand why.  Clinton is no threat at all to the established arrangements that Krugman makes a great show of questioning but which he really cannot stand to see threatened.  Bernie, despite all his flaws and inadequacies, really is stirring up anti-capitalist emotions that no Nobel Laureate in Economics can countenance.  But I have had enough.  I am going to remove the link to Krugman's blog from my command line in Google Chrome.  That will leave him with only a zillion followers and "friends," so he probably won't notice, but I have my pride.

There, I have done it.  Now I can look at myself in the mirror each morning.  I feel so much better.

WHILE I WAS OUT

While I was out shopping for dinner, the comments section exploded with a series of very interesting and knowledgeable responses to my defense of Bernie’s call for free public higher education.  My thanks to all of you.  Rather self-interestedly, I take it as a tribute to this blog that its readership is so classy.  J  Let me try briefly to add a few responses.

First of all, I cannot figure out where I got my original income figures, but they are totally wrong.  S. Wallerstein’s are correct.  My point remains, concerning the relative wealth of America and France.  Sorry about that.

Second, it is quite true that the federal structure of the United States and the state rather than federal responsibility for education makes the situation here much more complicated.  But the general principle that elementary and secondary education should be universal and free has gained acceptance in our system, and so could the principle that tertiary education should be free.  Bernie is not, so far as I can see, supposing that such a principle can be implemented by the waving of a wand, and certainly not by an Executive order.  He is trying, for the first time, to make this principle part of the core commitment of one of the two major political parties.  Clinton is not prepared to sign on to that principle.  If she were, a useful conversation could be initiated in the Democratic Party about how to implement it.

Third, David Palmeter is quite correct about the extraordinary inflation in tuition costs.  When I entered Harvard in 1950, tuition was $600 a year [I recall it as $400, but the distinguished logician and philosopher Charles Parsons, my classmate, graduate apartment mate, Columbia colleague, and long-time friend, recalls it as $600, and I learned long ago that in all such matters Charles is always correct.]  That is $5900 in 2016 dollars.  Tuition this year at Harvard is $57,200, almost ten times the inflation rate!!!  Why do they charge so much?  Because they can.  Then they use their enormous endowment to underwrite grants to many of their students.  It would take me a long time to begin to explain the explosion in costs, but one thing is for sure:  it is not an explosion of faculty salaries.

Fourth, there are all sorts of ways in which the French higher educational system is inferior to the American, setting to one side the so-called grandes écoles, and I am actually a big fan of the American system, though not of its cost.  To cite just one among many of its virtues, in America it is quite possible for a high school graduate to take some of the academic courses at a local Community College, then transfer those credits to a branch of the state four year college system, eventually graduate and gain admission to a post-graduate program at a campus of the state university system, and thus climb the ladder educationally.  There are many educational systems around the world in which that sort of portability of credits and steady rise is just impossible.

Once again, thank you all for a valuable discussion.

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM

Hillary Clinton and her fans [notably Chris Matthews] have had a fine time ridiculing Bernie's proposal that public college education be free.  Matthews especially cannot control his smirk as he says, in a stagey incredulous voice, "He wants to make Berkeley and Madison, Wisconsin free!," somehow imagining that the cost of higher education bears any direct relation to its quality, as though it were a house.

Well, at two a.m. this morning I decided to check a few facts.  Here is a sample of what I found:

Gross income per capita in the United States:  $15480
Gross income per capita in France:                  $12,445

So America is somewhat richer than France.

Percentage of adults 25-34 with a B.A. in the U.S.:    43%  [higher than I thought]
Percentage of adults 25-43 with a B.A., in France:     43%

So America and France educate the same proportion of adults at the tertiary level.

Average in-state tuition at public universities and colleges in the U.S.:   $13,856
Average tuition at French universities [almost all public]:                        $    585

How can this be?  Simple.  France has made a collective public decision to make college essentially free, just like elementary and secondary education.  America has not made that decision yet.  Bernie says we should.  

Can we afford it?  Yes, somewhat more easily than France can, because we are somewhat richer.

It is that simple.

WISHING WILL MAKE IT SO

In my never-ending struggle to see a glass less than half-full as almost overflowing, I undertook a little experiment.  General elections are won by electoral votes, not by total popular votes or anything else.  So when Hillary Clinton has big wins during the Primaries in states that no Democrat is going to carry in the Fall, then we ought to discount those wins as having no relevance for the General Election, right?  [You can see where this is going].  I started with the list of states Obama won in 2012, and then put in Bernie’s column the states where he has already won a primary or caucus and put in Hillary’s column the states where she has done the same.  Then I looked up the electoral votes each state will have in 2016, and added them up.  Here are the results:

Not Yet Decided:  New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, DC, New Mexico, Oregon,

Bernie has won:  Wisconsin [10], Vermont [3], Colorado [9], Iowa [3], Hawaii [4], Michigan [16], Washington [12], Maine [4], Minnesota [10], New Hampshire [4] = 75 electoral votes

Hillary has won: Florida [29], Iowa [3], Nevada [6], Massachusetts [11], Ohio [18], Illinois [20], Virginia [13] = 100 electoral votes

The next Obama state to hold its primary is New York, which has 29 electoral votes. 

Which means that if Bernie can pull out a win in New York, he will be leading in the RELEVANT electoral vote count.

So there.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL

While I was in computer purgatory, Donald Trump, whose eventual nomination I have been confidently predicting, took some major steps toward inflicting on himself wounds from which he may not recover.  I confess I simply did not anticipate the depths of his stupidity.  Serious policy wonks will focus on his bold refusal to take “off the table” the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Europe, but my attention, like that of most of America, was captured by the moment in the Chris Matthews “town hall” interview when Mr. Trump, his face screwed up in a caricature of serious thinking, offered the opinion that women who have abortions “must be punished.”  It was, both for Trump and for Matthews, a tour de force.  Trump managed in one magical moment to unite the pro-life and pro-choice forces, which have been locked in a death struggle for half a century.  Matthews managed finally to puncture Trump’s façade of imperturbability and force him to reveal himself for the blustering fool he is.

It was transparently clear that Trump had never given a moment’s thought to the question of abortion, beyond embracing what he repeatedly refers to ritually as the Ronald Reagan position – “pro-life with exceptions” [i.e., “rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”]  The anti-abortion forces for decades have been piously referring to the pregnant woman, with staggering illogic, as “the victim” in an abortion, despite insisting that the abortion she seeks and pays for is murder.  Poor Donald, who had neglected to take note of this talking point, can be seen in the video painfully thinking his way through the question whether, should abortion be illegal, the woman should be punished, and drawing the logical, but absolutely forbidden, conclusion that she should be.  At that precise moment, Donald Trump ceased to be the inevitable Republican nominee.  Mind, he may still he be unstoppable.  The next month or so will tell.  But as someone commented, he has become one of the undead – no longer viable, but possibly unstoppable nonetheless.

I have been rather critical of Matthews in this space, so I think it is only fair for me to give credit where it is due.  Matthews was brilliant, relentless, undistracted by Trump’s attempt to re-direct the conversation to Matthews’ Catholicism.  It is worth watching the entire exchange and not just the eight or nine second sound bite in which Trump utters the fateful line that there “must be punishment” for the woman.  What fascinated me was that Matthews got Trump to say those words by bullying him.  He simply refused to let Trump off the hook, as every other interviewer has thus far.  Trump could have refused to answer – by far the wiser course.  But Matthews just plain bullied him into giving a reply.  Trump was revealed, in that moment, as all bullies eventually are, as a craven coward, not at all an alpha male, who cannot stand up to someone who is simply stronger than he is.

NORTH TO FREEDOM

On April 21^st and 22^nd I shall be heading north from Chapel Hill to give two lectures.  At Brown, I shall be offering the last in a series of Political Theory workshops that have been taking place every second week throughout the year.  Then on the 22^nd, I shall speak to a faculty study group at MIT organized by a young Political Scientist there.  On both occasions, my topic will be the work I have done over forty years on the thought of Karl Marx.  My theme, I am a trifle embarrassed to say, is rather self-congratulatory.  I shall be arguing that my work on Marx is quite literally unique.  I am unaware of anyone else who has ever attempted to do what I have done.  Indeed, I am unaware of anyone who has even conceived the idea of doing what I have done, namely, merging a philosophical and literary critical analysis and interpretation of Capital with a mathematical reconstruction of the economic theory set forth in that text, thereby producing not simply several disparate interpretations side by side but a unified, integrated literary/mathematical understanding of Marx’s reading of bourgeois capitalism.

There is a deeper and broader thesis underlying this work, viz. that because society is inevitably and unavoidably ideologically encoded and mystified, all fully satisfactory social theory must be written in an ironic voice that acknowledges and communicates that mystification, all the while seeking to penetrate and supersede it.  One of the secondary implications of this thesis, incidentally, is that successful works of social theory, like great works of fiction, cannot be redacted in textbooks but must be read in the original authorial voice.   That is why we read Capital itself even though we can quite well acquaint ourselves with Chemistry without reading Lavoisier.

The MIT folks have promised to read the brief 25,000 word summary of my work that I posted on this blog under the title “A Unified Reading of Marx.”  [I sent it to them as an email attachment seven months ago.]  The Brown group, alas, have not made that commitment, so I shall have to try to communicate in thirty minutes some elements of what it would take me two hours or more to summarize.

I shall report on my success or failure. 

I'M BAAAACK

I have been in computer hell for three days, but I now have a new computer, courtesy of Best Buy, whose Geek Squad transferred over my files and bookmarks and such.  The only thing that did not survive was the record of my wins and losses in tens of thousands of games of Spider Solitaire and such.  Indeed, the game programs did not survive.  So I start once again from scratch.  

A good deal happened while I was in limbo.  Comments to follow.