Author: Ed

Lots of talk this week about higher education, specifically student loan debt forgiveness. Any plan that forgives student debt would have to be paired with some sort of plan for free public school, or else it would simply degenerate into spiraling tuition costs ("Who cares, just borrow it and never pay it back, kids!") and an indirect subsidy of higher education through the worst possible means.

There is a lot of resistance to free higher education in any of the forms that left-leaning candidates have proposed it, most of which fall into the predictable "Yeah well who's gonna PAY for it huh?" trough that American political discourse uses whenever something that doesn't directly and obviously benefit the wealthy is proposed. But I think there are two other important things going on with the resistance to free or at least heavily subsidized college.

One is that the "Education is the silver bullet" mantra on the center-left would be undermined. Right now we can keep convincing people that their economic struggles are their own fault; if only you had the right skills you'd be doing so much better! We are already seeing a generation that has discovered the flaws with that argument. It turns out, of course, that many of the problems with the job markets and the economy are structural and not at all within the control of the individual. Sure, go get yourself all the fancy skills you can. When the jobs are being shipped overseas or turned into gig economy, no-benefits type work, those skills aren't going to feel very valuable. And the constant emphasis on the "right" skills is a canard; what skills are in high demand changes constantly, and encouraging students to flock toward whatever the hot skill of the moment might be has long term consequences that will appear in 20 years when that skill is decidedly no longer hot.

The second issue is that, to be crass, credentials are only valuable if there is some scarcity. Education is always valuable in the abstract, improving what the individual knows and can do. But when high school graduation rates neared 90%, what happened to a high school diploma? It became nearly worthless except as a basic entree into employment. The same thing has started to happen to the Bachelor's Degree. With more than 1/3 of adults holding one in the U.S., it's often not worth much on the job market (mileage varying based on field and brand name). If the theoretical everyone has one, no one is going to benefit from having one.

So to some extent – and sadly this is quite logical – a lot of the opposition to truly throwing open the doors to higher education comes from people with higher ed credentials who don't want to see the inevitable watering-down of the things they've used to establish professional success. We're looking at a pool of politically important, professionally successful people who are thinking, I paid out the ass for my kid to go to ____ and now people are just gonna get a BA for free? It's not the most attractive logic (and not enough of a reason on its own not to make a public policy that benefits society as a whole) but I certainly understand it. I have an advanced degree, and if everyone in America suddenly had an advanced degree it would be worth significantly less (if that's possible). So, I get it.

That said, only people who completely ignore the numbers and the inequity of what this generation has been subjected to in order to get the college degrees we tell them they absolutely MUST have can argue that we don't need to do something aggressive about student debt. Look at what has happened to college tuition since 2000 and stop pretending like your experiences going to college in the 70s and 80s is in any way meaningful to the current conversation. This really is a debt "crisis" and it's impacting every area of the economy down the line. People aren't buying houses, cars, investments, vacations, and all that other crap we tell people they should do (for their own long-term economic good, but moreso because our economy depends on people doing those things) because they can't afford it.

I understand the resistance, but this isn't a problem that can be ignored. And it's better to start with the most aggressive possible idea – free college period, debt forgiveness period – since you know whatever "solution" eventually gets out of Congress is going to be watered down a million times anyway. Don't do the watering-down up front. I thought we learned that lesson in 2009.

The NYT dropped a serious piece of crap on Sunday based on a flawed premise about responsibility for (and, concurrently, solutions to) climate change. "If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?" they ask, hinting darkly, "In the age of global warming, traveling — by plane, boat or car — is a fraught choice. And yet the world beckons."

A fraught choice? Only if you accept the ridiculous premise that your choice to use a plastic straw or fly commercial to London is really the cause of or solution to climate change.

Climate change is a collective problem, caused primarily by the decisions of nation- or planet-level actors. The petrochemical industry causes climate change. Car dependence causes climate change. Heavy industry causes climate change. Use of unrecyclable throw-away crap causes climate change. More than anything, electricity generation from burning fossil fuel causes climate change.

It is facile, stupid, and wrong to suggest that because you drive or use electricity that you, Joe Blow, are the one who either caused the problem or can solve it. You didn't make the choice to subsidize oil, coal, and gas-burning power plants – you have to live with it. You didn't decide to lay the entire United States out physically and geographically on the presumption that everyone has a car and fuel is cheap. And your decision to stop driving or buying gas will not make one goddamn bit of difference absent meaningful collective action from others.

You are one person who lives within a system that caused, and can help abate, climate change. That system is what needs to change, not you. Guilting you and I about our personal choices on the premise that those choices cause, prolong, or could solve climate change is just gratuitous. Worse, it's an industry-backed tactic for excusing their inaction by shifting the blame from the collective to the individual level.

Your decisions can no more stop climate change than your personal decision not to be racist can solve racism, or than your decision to be honest solves the problem of lying. Your contribution to the problem is a spit in the ocean, yet the parties most responsible have a vested interest in making you feel like it is up to you personally to decide whether or not the problem persists.

It's idiotic logic. Reject it.

I saw something shitty last week.

I'm at an event with thousands (literally) of high school teachers and college faculty. I was sitting in the lobby drinking coffee at a convention center when a man walked in. He was old. And black. He looked really disheveled. But that's hardly out of the ordinary. He had crazy, untamed hair (common among Old Man Professors; 10% of the men here have his haircut). He was dressed very badly, essentially in an untucked rumpled shirt and pajama bottoms (We are all extremely dressed down, because we have very long days and the emphasis is on dressing strictly for comfort; I haven't worn pants without an elastic waistband the whole time).

He had no badge, so the security guard – note that this was a locally staffed person from a temp agency, unaffiliated in any way with the event or its organizers – told him he couldn't come in. He explained that everyone has to come in without a badge the first time because you have to go inside to register and get your badge. You know. Pretty logical.

I had just done this exact thing the previous day. Thousands of other people did it too. The vast majority were disheveled. Many were also old. Many were also dressed like hobos. But few were also black.

The security guard kept telling him he could not enter, and finally he just came in. He had explained himself at least three times. She kept physically getting in front of him and trying to block him. He said multiple times, don't touch me. She did not. But she went into full, SIR, I'M ASKING YOU TO LEAVE mode. Within 10 seconds she was on a walkie-talkie calling for a police officer. A cop showed up.

So here, for the millionth time, an armed police officer was brought to confront a black man doing exactly nothing wrong, and exactly what everyone around him was also doing. The cop did not do anything. But he was there, and armed. Even if there was a 0.0001% chance the situation could have gone badly, that's 0.0001% higher than when I walked into a bland convention center to register for an event I was invited to be at. And odds of 0.0001% eventually get someone if this scenario is repeated often enough.

The whole time I'm watching this and thinking, this is how people end up getting shot. The wrong cop shows up on the wrong day in the wrong mood and confronts something less than total obedience from a black man and the tasers and guns come out, or someone ends up face-down on the ground with a knee in their back, or someone ends up in handcuffs.

There was no reason at all for that cop to be there. And it's not his fault he was there; it was his job to show up when called. The problem was that another middle aged white woman looked at someone and concluded that because he is a black man the police needed to be summoned.

Stop calling the police on black men who aren't doing anything other than existing. Thanks.

Universal health care – in whatever flavor one envisions – is a popular idea and Democrats had success in 2018 with many congressional candidates who emphasized it. So it's extra puzzling why the national leadership is so timid about embracing it. Everybody understands that it's not something that could be accomplished with a magic wand or without concessions in the legislative process; but the inability / unwillingness to at least declare confidently "This is a goal we have, we want to achieve this" is really telling. Alex Pareene (ex-Wonkette, for those of you into that) has a great take in The New Republic regarding the incomprehensible "let's try to please everyone" position congressional Democrats are trying to stake out on prescription drug prices.

I mean, even Trump gets this. He runs around saying "We need lower drug prices!" He's not doing anything to actually bring that about, and in fact he's done as much to protect the pharmaceutical industry as any president including George W. Bush. But he gets that people want to hear it. He gets that it's an almost embarrassingly easy political point to score. "Let's lower those drug prices!" Nearly everyone who isn't a pharma executive or salesperson can relate! Easily!

Instead – segue! – they're stuck in their inevitable, terminal cycles of technocratic fixes that A) nobody understands and B) are obviously designed to protect drug industry profits because the biggest priority seems to be not upsetting drug companies. And that mindset, the mindset of tweaks and tax credits and complicated, unworkable, Wall Street friendly administrative nightmares, is one the party absolutely needs to get beyond. Samuel Moyn's review of the new book by Cass Sunstein makes this point well. As Mike Konczal notes, "It is dangerous to approach the economy – now, with so much on the line, with the threat of the far right near – as a set of glib information problems, instead of one shot through with instability, massive imbalances of resources, deprivation and pervasive private power."

How they are not campaigning by shouting "The drug industry sucks! Nationalize that fucker!" is beyond me. They're letting Trump – DONALD TRUMP – beat the from the LEFT on this issue. The nature of our policy making process, of course, makes it impossible to guarantee delivery on such a bold promise. But for fuck's sake, will someone at least aim a little higher? Give people something aspirational to think about? A higher ideal that speaks to people in language other than bureaucratic "Well first we'll set up some exchanges" kind?

Of course not. Let's just nominate Joe Biden instead and try to guilt the Democratic base into being excited about it. Worked great in 2016.

A random Twitter user named Gwen Snyder offered the world a simple observation that more or less blew half of the internet's mind last week.

As someone who gets contacted / threatened by a lot of random weirdos, Gwen apparently got fairly adept at checking people out on Facebook to see what kind of nut she's dealing with. I get a lot of weird contacts too, although nothing that ever made me legitimately worried that I might be in danger – more the 'obsessive internet guy who wants attention' variety. But I do usually look at profiles when someone is really pestering me; not the one comment telling me I'm an asshole type, but the kind that sends private messages by the dozens. Usually it's obvious with one glance that the guy (it's usually a guy, but surprisingly not always) is standard issue alt-right garbage. Lots of Facebook timeline posts about white genocide, lots of "snowflake" memes, etc.

Gwen points out something I never knew, which is that if you look at which pages a Facebook user has "Liked" it lists them in chronological order. This is different than the "likes" a person makes on regular posts – it doesn't track those in any way other users can see. But if you like pages (Chicago Bears, Gin and Tacos, CBS News, whatever) it lists them in the order you liked them. So she found that it was easy in many cases not only to see that the person bothering her is now into the white nationalist discourse, but how they got there.

She takes us through the example of a guy in Philadelphia whose "likes" began with normal "middle aged urban white guy" preferences – the local news networks and newspapers, local elected officials (both parties), Philadelphia sports teams, and some generic "we support our police" type stuff. Then he discovered Fox News and everything changed. Soon it was a parade of Fox News personalities, then the more prominent right-wing internet presences that Fox promotes (Turning Point USA, Ben Shapiro, Brietbart, etc.) Then came the hardcore Trump sites – not just Trump himself, but the "we love our hero president" meme factory groups on Facebook. Then, especially once he crossed the threshold into Breitbart territory, came the explicitly far-right / white power stuff.

It literally tracks step-by-step the process of this guy becoming a white nationalist threatening to kill people on Twitter, whereas he was once a normal Average Joe who liked going to pancake breakfast fund raisers for the local Fire Department and thought his Democratic mayor wasn't half-bad. We've all seen people we know go through this process but couldn't really quantify it. It turns out that Facebook tracks the evolution pretty systematically.

Fox News absolutely is a gateway drug. It's not just what Fox itself covers – it's the way it introduces addicts to the broader universe of the right wing internet. And it doesn't take long before the user is introduced to the Harder Stuff. The journey from Fox & Friends to explicit white supremacy is surprisingly short.

As Gwen demonstrates toward the end of her thread, this kind of progression doesn't go unnoticed. Her "friend" was identified quickly by local white power groups in Philadelphia and followed on Facebook. They know a good potential recruit when they see one – and they know where to look.

If you follow on Facebook – and have been following for a long time – you probably recognize the name Chuck McKiernan, which is the online alias of a long-time reader and friend. He was suspended from Facebook for 72 hours recently for posting the following comment:

Of course when Facebook says "Someone from our review team confirmed…" what they mean is, we have some kind of algorithm that caught this. Because if a human, at least any human conversant in the English language, looked at that comment they would understand it immediately. Read it. Is anything even remotely unclear about the meaning or context? A child would read that and understand that it is sarcasm. This is the kind of thing that appears (or at least appeared!) in middle school English textbooks to demonstrate the concept of satire. Take a ridiculous claim and pretend to take it seriously to emphasize how silly it is.

On the other hand, Facebook recently announced in the wake of the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack that it will begin cracking down on white supremacist content on its platform. Predictably they announced that for public relations purposes and then it turned out that the policy is toothless window-dressing. For instance, Facebook confirmed that Canadian white supremacist Faith Goldy's videos about "white replacement" and "Eurabia" and various other prominent white nationalist tropes is…A-OK. So Facebook will crack down on white supremacy as long as the content explicitly shouts THIS IS WHITE SUPREMACY or WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO COMMIT ACTS OF VIOLENCE FOR WHICH WE WILL BE YOUR INSPIRATION FOR LEGAL PURPOSES. It's the cheapest kind of head-in-sand denial, like insisting that something isn't racist because it doesn't include explicit racial slurs.

I've gone to Facebook Jail a couple times, always for something utterly ridiculous and innocuous. Social media cannot self-regulate. Its mechanisms and policies for doing so are broken, the worst possible combination of denial of their real problems and comical over-reaction to minor issues. Did your post mention "Self Harm" in even an obviously unserious way? Ban! Did anything you said make someone else feel bad? Bullying! Ban! But if you want to take videos of Notre Dame cathedral on fire and doctor it to include audio of people shouting "Allah Akbar!" and distribute it…well, that's fine. No issues there.

When a major industry demonstrates conclusively that it cannot regulate itself there are only two choices. One is to throw up our hands and let them effectively set public policy by allowing them to regulate themselves. The other is to regulate them.

Every writer has an "idiolect," or a personal vocabulary of distinguishing words that they use a lot, or common words they use hardly at all. For example, Shakespeare rarely used the word "also" for some reason. In all of his writing the word appears a total of less than 40 times. His contemporaries used it as much as we use it today, which is to say: constantly. Shakespeare, for reasons known only to him, just did not use the word much. Maybe he didn't like it, or maybe it reflects some extreme hyper-local dialect of English he learned.

One of the things that stands out about my own writing is how often I use the word "accordingly." Another thing I say a lot – intentionally – is "modal."

I apologize in advance if this is information you already know, but I've had the experience several times in the last year of very intelligent people – editors, journalists, people in the publishing industry – send me edits on things I've written indicating that they are not clear what modal means. It is possible that in an academic field in which everyone is used to dealing with data sets I encounter that term regularly enough to assume it is common. But when people who know the language highlight it and say "This isn't clear, please explain" it obviously is less common elsewhere.

I say "modal" a lot because when people say "average," they almost always mean "modal." It's a pet peeve. Allow me very briefly to explain the most familiar measures of central tendency in data and explain why you see a certain kind of news story in political journalism that incorrectly substitutes average for modal.

Average (or mean) is widely understood. Add up the salaries of a group of 10, divide the sum by 10, and that is the average salary. Unfortunately average is also used in non-data contexts as an adjective meaning "ordinary" or "common." That is bad.

Why? Well here's a true story – of the 11 players on my high school football team's defense, our average net worth today is well over $5 million. Seriously. Ten of us make totally unremarkable incomes doing normal jobs, and the eleventh guy made over $50 million playing in the NFL. On average, we're all worth seven figures!

So, averages can be very misleading. Especially in smaller sets of data.

Median is the middle value that divides a set of observations in half. If the median household income in the US is $56,516. That means 50% of households earn less and 50% earn more. Imagine every observation in the data lined up in a row; the median is the one right in the middle.

While the median household income is $56,000, the average is $79,000. See? High values – people making billions of dollars – skew the average toward the right (on a simple graph).

That brings us, finally, to mode. The mode is the most commonly observed value in a data set. This generally is only useful – but then tends to be the most useful – when the data are categorized subjectively. For example, say we decided to categorize households as Rich, Middle Class, and Poor based on some subjective cutoff points. Count up the total number in each category; the one with the most is your mode.

Another great example of when mode is useful is academic: grades. Say the Dean wants to know how my students did in a course. There are 20 students. I calculate everyone's grade as a percentage of all possible points. I say, "The average grade was 80%." But what does that mean? There are almost infinite combinations of 20 percentages that will average to 80%. Maybe 16 students got 100% (A+) and 4 got 0% (F). Maybe all 20 got exactly 80% (B-). A better way to reflect the performance of the class would probably be to say, 16 students got an A+. But 4 students enrolled and never showed up, so they got an F.

That brings me to the reason I think about this daily: news stories about the "average" voter in the United States.

There is no "average" voter because several of the important variables for "measuring" voters are categories like race, gender, educational attainment, and so on are not continuous values. You cannot "average" race or the attainment of degrees in the American electorate. What you could do, just as one example, is to say that 44% of the electorate falls into the category of "White, no college degree." Therefore, the "Cletus Safari / Diner Enthusiast" guy constantly being interviewed in the media is not average; he cannot be. He is the modal American voter, as long as the criteria of interest are race and education.

It's a petty hill to die on, and most people understand fine what is meant in common usage when a journalist refers to the "average voter." But it is incorrect as well as silly – because we have a perfectly good term for what he or she actually means.