Men without work, basic living wage, free college tuition. Concept vs. reality and habituation

The other day I saw a Facebook post in which a friend of mine was pondering what he'd do if he suddenly came into a large sum of cash so that he didn't need to work.

He determined he'd devote himself to worthwhile causes.

Well, maybe he would, but most people wouldn't, including most who seriously believe that they would.  Indeed, most people would, after a few months, adjust to doing absolutely nothing.

That's right. Nothing.

Which is very well established, and why we should ponder the impact of outside funding in a year in which its getting a lot of traction in one form another another.  This extraordinary political year, which has seen a rich capitalist secure a the largest number of delegates in the Republican race, and an avowed socialist seriously threaten to take the nomination in the Democratic race, has seen a lot of discussion on these sorts of topics, including the suggestion that the US ought (which already is up in the top three or of the world's nations in terms of percentage of population with a college degree) to provide a "free" college education to all of its citizens and the suggestion that the government ought to provide a Guaranteed Minimum Wage to everyone of its citizens.  And of course we recently had a type of national health care pass which some feel should be changed into a more classic European style single payer type system.

Now, each one of these things is a separate idea and has to be considered that way.  But one thing we want might to really ask is what is the impact, if known, of funding folks where they normally fund themselves.

And that's really well established.

Given funding, and no work, what universally occurs is that the suddenly funded person spends a period of weeks working on getting their work back, if they are working.  

But after several weeks pass, they acclimate themselves to the lack of work. After a few more, they habituate themselves to it.  After that, they'll do what they can to remain in that status, no matter what.

Now, a person can't say a thing like that and not spark all sorts of negative reactions. But the data is well established.  It's well established from various welfare systems for one thing, when they have generous benefits, which they often do not.  People have looked at welfare payments that relate to unemployment, when the benefits are generous, and the above is the universal pattern.  The recently out of work desperately seek to re-obtain it, then acclimate themselves to not working, and then habituate themselves to living at whatever level a subsistence payment provides.

There are, additionally, examples of massive social failure caused by prolonged welfare systems.

The other day I read an article from the Canadian Broadcasting System about a First Nation (Indian) area in Canada that's in a massive crisis.  Canada extended subsistence payments to really remote First Nation bands some decades ago.  When exactly this occurred I'm not sure, but First Nation groups that lived in remote areas lived on their own, by their own and through their own efforts at least through World War Two.  After that, the idea of providing them with subsistence to improve their lives came about.

It hasn't.  It's wrecked them.

Now, basically, the situation is that men in particular in these groups simply do nothing.  There's no incentive to do anything.  All of the old skills they once had to live in remote areas has vanished.  They couldn't effectively go back to hunting for subsistence now if they wanted to, the skills are lost. Suicide is rampant.  The bands are in crisis.  Only women, who by nature remained tasked with roles their gender imposes upon them or blesses them with, depending upon how you look at it, keep things together as they retain the basic jobs that women have had since day one.  So, the result?  Women have kept the roles that feminist are always thinking they'll liberate women form, and that's keeping everything together to the extent anything is kept together, while these groups are quite literally being killed with kindness.

Let's take higher education.

Eh?  How does that relate. . .?

Well, maybe it does.

Recently I published this item on a Paul Campos article:

Looking at the hidden reasons for the cost of higher education.

My guess is that Paul Campos doesn't get invitations to the faculty Christmas Party.

Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.  That wouldn't keep him from getting an invite. But his book Don't Go To Law School (Unless): A Law Professor's Inside Guide to Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing Risk was not without controversy.  In it, Campos seriously took on law schools and sparked a huge amount of debate, including debate from law school professors (which both Federal Judge Posner and I have likened to refugees from the practice of law, but I stated that first).  

Now, or actually several months ago, Campos wrote a New York Times Op Ed entitled The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much  and the reason, according to Campos, isn't the one that schools like to give out.

According to Campos, public funding of education is causing it.

That's right, public funding.

Now, that's counter intuitive.  In this era of Bernie Sanders inspired "let's make education free" the logic would be that funding education drives the cost down, and makes it more affordable for all. But that logic is pretty thin, and Campos raises some really good points.

Campos first notes what most suspect, but that few are willing to acknowledge.  Following the baby boomer flood into college, public investment in college massively increased.:

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

In that article Campos noted:

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

And he went on:

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

And he went from there:

Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

Basically, Campos is stated that public funding of education amounted to bureaucratic and institutional social welfare.  Now, I"m not claiming that those who are employed in upper education aren't working, but I will say that it's a pretty common slam by people in any one industry to compare their jobs against academics in the same field.  Lawyers, for example, generally don't think "wow. . . those law school professors are really working hard."

Having said that, I will say that I've often found certain fields to be the exception.  In hard sciences, mathematics and agriculture I think the academics are admired.  In fields like history and languages the fields are considered naturally academic ones. But in other instances, such as where we get weird and fanciful theses being written in rarefied fields that only serve to secure an academic post. . . well things are questioned.

And apparently this happens to the expense of the students.

Thomas Jefferson claimed that:  "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."  Jefferson didn't know anything about biological evolution or DNA, but if he had, he might have added that humans being are seemingly programed by our nature both to work (albeit only of some types) and inactivity.  That is, our natures assume we're going to be busy in the wilds and that he we have enough coming in, and don't need to be, we ought to conserve our energy by doing nothing.

But doing nothing was never contemplated by our evolution as a permanent state of affairs.  By winter the wolf would be back at the door and starvation looming. Get back out there man.

And indeed the thing that runs contrary to what I've noted above is the degree to which lifelong, but I do mean lifelong, habituation eventually causes some to so identify with their work that they can't or won't escape it even if they could.  So, in those instances, you see people keep on working when they no longer have to, but then they're so fully habituated to it that they literally cannot stop. That's admirable in some, but not so much in others. And it can be sad.

Acquisition as an instinct also cuts against this, but that's not necessarily a good thing either.  We see that with the very wealthy who keep on acquiring, even though they no longer have to keep the wolf from the door by any means.  Indeed, at some point too much wealth in one person's hands can become destructive simply by accident.  The knowledge of that, in part, fuels the current resentment against the "1%".

So, I suppose, what does all that mean? Well, for one thing, it means we ought to be really careful about the provision of free anything as a society.  There are certainly times when people need help.  And that help ought to be provided.  But it actually isn't very helpful to start providing too many things as a public benefit, as people will nearly always acclimate to it and quit being industrious themselves.  Likewise, it probably isn't a good idea to allow for unrestrained acquisition either.

And it shows, I suppose, how instincts that developed when we were on the veldt are still with us.