[FRIAM] of straw and steel
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 3 14:10:56 EDT 2021
Oh, Nick.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Sat, Jul 3, 2021, 10:40 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Russ,
>
>
>
> I think I am driving toward the view that while Merit is not a fiction,
> the I that holds it IS a fiction.
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nick Thompson
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Russ Abbott
> *Sent:* Friday, July 2, 2021 9:56 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] of straw and steel
>
>
>
> You might want to take credit for doing the work needed to make your
> potential a reality. The Rawlsian answer to that is that your genetic
> disposition to do that was also inborn. I'm not completely convinced.
>
>
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 6:33 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> EricS,
>
>
>
> Have you looked at Sandel’s *Tyranny of Merit* or Wilkerson’s *Caste*?
>
>
>
> If on thinks hard enough about “merit” it becomes deeply confusing. The
> idea of Merit is something that I got on my own, right? So working back
> from now to birth whence exactly did I get that merit. Even what I got
> from my genes was random right. At what point do get to embrace my merit
> as of my own making? So far as me, myself, is concerned, it’s all luck all
> the way down. That is what the declaration of independence means when it
> says that all [humans] are created equal.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nick Thompson
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
> *Sent:* Friday, July 2, 2021 7:47 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] of straw and steel
>
>
>
> I think there is some version of this for college tuitions, too, though I
> am partly muddy-headed and what I say next will probably fail the logical
> map at some points.
>
>
>
> The general idea is some combination of what is in Ginsberg’s book
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Faculty-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/0199975434
>
> but even more so in some article I read in J. Higher Ed or something
> (which I have not succeeded in finding and I need now for other projects),
> to the effect that:
>
>
>
> 1. There is been a massive cumulative re-allocation of money out of
> need-based grants and to merit-based scholarships over the past 40 years or
> so.
>
> 2. Sounds good, of course: who could be against rewarding merit.
>
> 3. Except that, de facto, what one largely rewards is preparation, which
> is a proxy for parental wealth and membership in one of the culture’s
> preferred classes, races, regions, or what-have-you. The part of this that
> I am pretty sure is in Ginsberg is also fishing for parental wealth by
> building snazzy student centers, on-campus water parks, etc. All that at
> enormous cost. The punchline of all this is that WHEN THE BUSINESSMEN TAKE
> OVER THE CONCEPT OF THE UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY BECOMES A BUSINESS. So,
> monies spent, such as tuition deferment whether called grant or
> scholarships, is in their worldview VENTURE CAPITAL. (That was what was in
> the JHE article.) And the return that venture capital is seeking is
> parental tuition money.
>
>
>
> So how does this map to Glen’s EricC’s comments: The nominal tuition is
> very high (4x what it was in the 1970s, per faculty actually teaching or
> doing research). That high tuition isn’t actually cost-received from most
> parents, because a significant fraction of it was spent either giving their
> kids scholarships, building water parks and student centers, or whatever.
> However: if they had given it in need-based grants, they wouldn’t be
> getting _anything_ from the parents. So in the businessman’s world, the
> investment gathered a maximized monetary profit, which was the criterion
> for how to make it.
>
>
>
> As in EricC’s point below, there will be some very rich parents with kids
> so lazy or dull that they aren’t well-prepared even with opportunities, so
> one can’t give them scholarships, and those will pay the sticker price.
> Those are the ones who buy the article at $19, or medical products or
> services at list price. High profit but small margin on them.
>
>
>
>
>
> In all the recent and ongoing conversations about tuition jubilee or free
> college in the US, I worry that everything real and solvable gets ruled out
> before we ever start, because the above characterization of the real
> business model isn’t front and center. Not very different for medical
> products and services (I am trying not to use the completely bleached
> expression “health care”), though that has been around long enough that a
> fuller story is not so uncommon to find.
>
>
>
> It is right that we have mortgaged a whole generation of kids with
> unplayable tuition loans, and probably somebody should eat that cost. Kind
> of like when German banks bought junk mortgage bonds in the US, they should
> actually have been allowed to fail for having not done due diligence,
> rather than being bailed out by a government that then had to get the money
> to float them by leaning on somebody else (the Irish, the Italians). That
> of course doesn’t really work for the reasons correctly given in Minsky’s
> Ratchet
>
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Stabilizing-Unstable-Economy-Hyman-Minsky/dp/0071592997
>
> But the threat of it somehow should be used, while the problem is
> building, to keep the banks doing due diligence, and to stop the schools
> from hiking tuition and spending to profit on the margin, or medical
> products and services skyrocketing as a negotiating point against insurance
> companies, etc. The system either gets fixed as a system, or not at all.
>
>
>
> There must be a really great book somewhere, which gets the data and the
> economics better than I can, and also explains this clearly enough that it
> can be an everyman’s book. It’s messy and a bait indirect, but it’s not so
> hard as to be incomprehensible. Does anybody know such a book?
>
>
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 3, 2021, at 5:51 AM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> Something Glen's analysis, there are MANY things in the modern economy
> that fit things model, including healthcare.
>
>
>
> The insurance companies demand a steep discount in procedures.
>
> The hospital's have costs to cover.
>
> The only possible consequence is to dramatically increase the sticker
> price. There hospital doesn't expect someone to pay that much for a major
> procedure, they expect bulk buyers (i.e., insurance companies) to drive
> buisness at ther bulk price. (If some random person does pay sticker price
> every so often, all the better, but that's not ther primary goal.)
>
>
>
> Mattress companies, clothing stores, etc. that have massive sales 3/4th
> of the year are doing the same sort of thing.
>
>
>
> See also my continuous complaints about the "Big Mac Index". Only a small
> % of Big Macs in the U.S. are purchased at sicker price. The sticker price
> is primarily intended as something to discount off of.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 10:56 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Maybe. But remember, despite the prescriptive linguists out there: a)
> "troll" is not an insult and b) it can be accidental.
>
> All 3 of Russ' "people with grants", Barry's "rent seeking", and Pieter's
> "publishing profits are bad for science" responses are a trawler's delight!
> Rather than talk about the Strawman fallacy and it's variations, we're
> talking ... [sigh] again ... about capitalism and money.
>
> Call it naivete if you want. But it was a very effective troll.
>
> On 6/30/21 7:47 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> > Oh, I see. The point is to make getting the individual item so
> expensive that it just balances driving to the library (or doing ILL) with
> subscribing to the Journal. It's pure manipulation; costs have nothing to
> do with it.
> >
> > Glen, I think you persistently confuse naivete with trolling.
>
> --
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
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