Holla Back New York City – If You Can’t Slap ‘Em, Snap ‘Em!

The Common Ills

macroinformation

Liberal education, by reputation, is learning for its own
sake. For this discussion I shall take “illiberal” to be
the opposite of liberal. Illiberal education is a means to
an end. Perhaps the distinction can be better expressed by
contrasting “education” with “training” than “liberal” with
“illiberal.” I have chosen the latter approach based on
several considerations. My concern about the ascendancy of
illiberal training coincides with my fear and loathing of
the loss of liberal values. Also, some of the pedagogical
ideas I have come to see as illiberal clearly have self-
identified constituencies. These have injected themselves
into public policy debate on education, as such, and
consistently refer to their projects as educational; less
often as training.

So, in the wonderful world of education, what’s hot, and
what’s not? Are the liberal arts dead? I believe liberal
arts education will endure, but will retreat to its earlier
role in society as an intellectual plaything of the leisure
class. One force driving this retreat is the trend in
college financial aid policy toward fewer grants and more
loans. To borrow, for any purpose, is to place a bet on
one’s future earning power. Education paid for with
borrowed money is necessarily a means to economic ends.
Another economic trend eroding the standing of liberal arts
is the de-professionalization of scholars. This de-
professionalization is being accomplished on numerous
fronts simultaneously. A shrinking percentage of faculty
are tenured, and a shrinking percentage of graduate
students are supported, which is to say, have fellowships.
Wayne State University recently ran a radio ad campaign for
a liberal arts master’s degree program with professional
adults as its stated intended applicant pool. The new
intellectual ethic is; get established first, use resulting
discretionary income, if you wish, to lead the proverbial
examined life. An analogous trend is perhaps visible in
the promotion of retirement strategies by the major
brokerage firms. Today’s generation of retirees, they
suggest, is obliterating retirement as we know it by
managing the wealth generated during professional-level
careers for investment in careers with perhaps altruistic
implications, involving such activities as teaching and
mentoring. The new social ethic is that every human
activity requires economic success as a justification.

What does the new illiberal education look like? Liberal
education has always stood alongside vocational education,
but I fear vocational education, like liberal education,
belongs to a more innocent age. The traditional home of
post-secondary vocational education is the trade school.
The trade school is alive and well, and seems to be
enlarging its market share in the education industry. The
trade school segment is certainly marketing its wares
aggressively. Consider the now-famous Universal Technical
Institute, a center of automotive learning. I just sat
through their infomercial, which places heavy emphasis on
their industry relationships. It seems some of the
institute’s students will qualify to enter training
programs specific to the dealer networks of Toyota, Ford
and BMW. There is also a program geared specifically to
careers in the NASCAR(tm) racing circuit. I found this all
very intriguing. I wonder: If I were to be accepted into
their prestigious NASCAR(tm) program, would I be violating
some non-disclosure or non-competition agreement by
pursuing a technician career in Indy Racing League?
Hopefully I will find answers to at least some of my
questions about this institute at their website, uti.tv.

Another trade school that has been saturating the local
airwaves is called ComputerTraining.com. Their decibel-
enhanced radio spot encourages us to take their online
entrance exam, which is an opportunity to demonstrate that
you have “solid computer skills,” this being a pre-
requisite for their Windows XP training program. Next time
I get online I will also visit their website. Hopefully I
won’t have to agree to too many things in order to check
out their test and find out what they mean by solid
computer skills.

Trade education has never been learning for its own sake,
but is it still vocational in nature? A vocation is a
calling. Does a calling have a brand name? Trades have
always had trade secrets, but they used to have trade
unions, too. Paid apprenticeships are giving way to paid-
for (usually with borrowed money) training programs.

Michael’s Nonsense: The Michigan “election”

A Pox On All Their Houses: Bastiat, the Left-Libertarian?

The other risk shift

Much has been said of the many profound effects of the shift on the employment and finance markets,
and most of that has been soundly ignored by the coalition of parties with effective control
over access to mass audiences in general. What has not been said enough is that there seem to
be signs that the shift has spread to the consumption goods sector.

‘Risk shift,’ is an apparent phenomenon allegedly documented in a book titled Risk Shift: ?
by ?. Author and subtitle information lost to the old seive, unfortunately. If I were asked
to come up with a catchy subtitle with a stated goal of driving $ales of the book by cranking
up the irresistability quotient (IQ) of the book from the POV of a selected target market.

The selected target market, of course, is resentful post-boomers.
One full title I like is Risk Shift: Premium Inflation as Moral Weapon.
This title would be symbolic of the following sentiments:

* A tribute to Mosca’s theory that Democracy implies not just
universal sufferage, but also a universal right to keep and bear
moral arms.

* A tribute to Burnham’s theory that Mosca’s doctrine that (democracy implies universal
moral sufferage) implies that democracy is of a formal rather than Machiavellian nature.

* A suggestion that price inflation can be used as a de-facto moral weapon, in apparent
violation of the theory of superstrong efficiency, which states that the Invisible Hand
possesses ‘strength beyond challenge.’

* A book title shouldn’t be obscene, unless parties promoting the book feel morally
entitled to indulging themselves with a deployment of public obscenity as a moral weapon,
which is why I would decide to resist the temptation to dub the book
Risk Shift: No Shit, Sherlock which is a flagrant claim that the objective reality
of the so-called Risk-Shift is, in moral terms, an elephant in the room.

Other attention-grabber titles might be worth running by the marketing dept.’s
in-house brain trust:

* Risk Shift: Involuntary Austerity or Market Correction?
Questions whether the humility/humiliation being dished out due to
the risk shift is deserved or not.

* Risk Shift: Bilateral Asymmetry or Persecution Complex?
Questions whether symmetrist normsets are reasonable, and explores
the theoretical possibility of de facto persecution, while questioning
whether there can be an upper bound on asymmetry.

Risk Shift: Science or Technology?
Science implies no blame, and no possible solution.
Technology implies possibility of blame without
also implying impossibility of solution.
Probing for possible existence and/or uniqueness of solutions
to the alleged risk shift problem.

What might bilateral asymmetry be like?

Bilateral asymmetry as objective fact means two supporting
facts can be objectively verified:

1. transfer of risk (beta?) from institutional consumers to individual producers

2. transfer of risk from institutional producers to individual consumers

I have not read Risk Shift:?.
I have, however, checked out certain details about the book online,
such as reviews, previews, sneak peeks, etc. online. This seems
to confirm what I suspected–that the author’s thesis amounts to
saying “No Shit Sherlock” in the middle of a public policy debate.
A slightly less abrasive thesis:
Yes Virginia, the Golden Age of Bennies was a Mirage

The question of bilaterality is a proposed test of the
hypothesis that the customer is always right against the
hypothesis that the individual is always wrong.

The suggestion that there might be a lesson to be learned
from the study of risk shifts, in general.

If bilaterality can be confirmed, one may speculate as to
whether pretending to be a customer
(perhaps by loitering at places of retail business while sufficiently attired to imply non-vagrancy?)
has any strategic value
to an individual, and how that value might compare with that
of pretending to be an institution. (incorporating oneself? refusing to pay retail?)

Is market risk (defined as non-diversifiable risk) cyclical or structural
in its lower bound variations?

The purpose of the present blog entry is to
beg the question of whether the concept of
risk management has any ethical business
existing. In a subsequent entry I hope
either to have concluded that it does, or
alternatively, to play Devil’s Advocate,
using the putative legitimacy of
risk management
as a justification for setting up certain
other metaphorical (or perhaps institutional) straw men
and proceeding to knock them down instead.

First, let’s seek a working definition
of ‘risk management.’ First, I hope readers
(if any) will understand that at this
particular moment I’m at home, not at the library,
so I’m working more from memory than from
reference books, let alone jacking in.

‘Risk’ (in the ‘management’ sense) appears
to my untrained readings in finance to be
simply a fancy way of saying ‘uncertainty.’
‘Risk management’ seems to be a catch-all term
for a number of mysterious arts. The purpose
of this attempt at an essay is to explore
the question of whether the divers arts of
risk management include any ‘dark’ arts.

Here are some apparent schools of risk
management I have heard rumors about:

orthodox upsidism
is built around the assumption that
someone who has ‘insured’ against
all ‘downside risks’ has achieved,
if not a ‘risk free’ life,
a ‘risk free’ portfolio.

orthodox efficientism
rejects upsidism, holding that
some risks are ‘non-diversifiable,’
somehow implying that ‘risk’ has a greatest
lower bound. Efficientism seeks
to use certain tools of applied
mathematics (called ‘hulls’)
to systematically hunt
down this lower bound
(or ‘frontier’ as they call it)
as if it were
an asymptote. This activity is
referred to as the pursuit of
efficiency.

intolerance of moral hazard,
as might be guessed, is where the
student of risk management finds
that Hobbesianism rears its ugly head.
Essentially, the inherently corrupt
nature of human nature is the only
real barrier to the effortless superefficiency
(as defined above) inherent in simply
‘letting do,’ specifically letting the so-called
‘invisible hand’ do whatever it wants,
and (importantly) always on its terms.

Does a fox possess urban houdou?

The question is not intended as a Zen koan.
It refers to an ethical dilemma in which I presently find myself.
Josie and I are trying to decide whether to work with or against
the will of a fox who wishes to squat in our backyard.
We’re suburbanites, so perhaps the question is whether a fox
possesses suburban houdou, which is the right to enter a suburban
community legally. It seems the fox is not requesting protection,
since this morning we witnessed not only the presence of a fox
in our backyard, but the fact that the fox was in the middle of
a systematic marking of our property as its territory. This seems
to imply a claim of settlement, which is to say we may be liable
for sheltering a dangerous predatory wild animal. An attorney advised
me that I shouldn’t worry about civil or criminal liability, and
that my legal options include calling (City of Warren) Animal Control,
calling (State of Michigan) Department of Natural Resources,
the Michigan Humane Society or nobody. Apparently inaction implies no
blame on my part, which seems odd in a climate in which 1-800-DOG-BITE
has become an ad blitz for lawyers on the civil complaint side of
the ideological fence. Combine this with Bush’s assertions about the moral
implications of providing safe havens for terrorists, and one
can only wonder whether the lawyer’s intent was to provide me
with assurance or a workable CYA strategy. In moral terms, I
don’t think of the fox as a terrorist. I consider him or her to
be a de facto apex predator. I say de facto because I can’t imagine
any wild animal that ranks above foxes on the food chain entering
our neighborhood. I assert that a predator is not a terrorist.
I am aware that cats are capable of terroristic predation,
which is to say toying with mice. I don’t know whether foxes toy
with their prey, but I don’t see how any wild animal can be morally
equated with a human terrorist, so I feel obliged to at least attempt
to accommodate the fox. Since MHS is on the legally sanctioned(?)
list of options, I figure MACS (Michigan Anti-Cruelty Society)
may also be able to offer expert assistance, perhaps of a
zoological rather than legal nature.

I wish to establish within the animal kingdom a schedule
of houdou suitable for deciding what wild animals are to be
allowed settlement rights in urban environments. I wish to
propose granting suburban houdou, on a probationary basis,
for foxes, or at least for the reddish-looking specimen
and its kin (species). Apparently foxes have always possessed urban and suburban houdou
in parts of England for centuries. This establishes precedent
(on British soil, which should in theory imply common law precedent at least within the Commonwealth)
of a long-standing social contract between foxes and humans.
Apparently the terms of the contract are that foxes enjoy more or less automatic urban houdou
in England. The catch (there’s always a catch) is that foxes may, under certain
very special circumstances, be fair game for sportshumen, during certain specially
designated rural hunting expeditions. The catch in the social contract has
been challenged using every moral weapon the animal rights activists
in England (if not worldwide) have been able to muster in service
to the removal of the fair game clause. I am undecided on whether
an attempt to implement urban houdou in America should include
a fair game clause. Urban houdou for deer has been a hot issue
here in metro Detroit, along with controversies over fairly supervised
hunts of limited duration and gross harvest in specially designated areas
such as Metroparks™ and the like.

Another resource I am considering checking out is the Commonwealth Club.
This club has a branch office right in the neighborhood, so I consider
it a neighborhood resource. Perhaps in an city with an apparently sustainable population
of urban foxes, the presence of an Anglo-Saxon Community Center can help
deal with some of the public relations problems inherent in proposing
urban houdou for foxes.