October 15, 2018--Male Privilege

"What was that all about?" We had just had a half dozen homemade donuts and coffee at our favorite local general store.

"I also was a little confused," Rona said, "He seemed to be talking about an incident that he probably heard about on Fox News where some guy stoped a bus and threatened the passengers."

"My hearing isn't good today," I said, "But that's what I think I heard. And then did he say they should have taken him out and shot him?"

'That's what I heard."

"Unbelievable."

"How he's a terrorist and that's how terrorists should be treated."

"That they should be taken out and shot?" Rona shrugged her shoulders and nodded.

This from an otherwise peaceful-feeling 70-year-old who sat next to us, eating his bacon and eggs at the counter.

"He said he's lived here for more than 30 years. That he grew up in upstate New York and moved when things there began to change in ways that upset him."

"Yes," Rona said, "He talked about how the thing he likes most about Maine is that very little changes. That he hates change. Including the smallest things. Like when a new owner bought the store, though he was quick to mention he liked that they kept making donuts every morning."

"I like that too," I said, wanting to move on to lighter subjects.

"He seems to live a version of the good life here and I don't understand why he's so angry about what's going on around him. And from the looks of him, including how he was dressed, he seemed to be OK financially. So I don't think it's that."

"We've been talking recently about why so many middle-aged white guys are so angry and how that's affecting our politics."

"Yes," Rona said, "I've been thinking a lot about how it's not primarily about race, but how these men feel threatened by demographics and the resulting browning of America. With their anti-immigrant views underscoring that. That is a big component of their anger, but the more I think about it the more I am concluding most of the problems these men have comes from gender issues. Their relations with women. How they used to feel empowered just because of their maleness, but in recent decades how that sense of privilege has been eroding."

"We have been talking about that and agree that a lot of the things men depended upon to feel powerful no longer operate so automatically."

"There are many things in the larger culture," Rona said, "that have been delivering the same message--that their days of dominance are over. We've been making a list of some of the things that are undermining men's sense of their place in the world. How losing the war in Vietnam, for example, was a huge blow to men who felt that just being an American, American exceptionalism assured their invulnerability. How up to then we had won every war we entered and then we were defeated by little Asians wearing sandals and black pajamas!"

"These are the guys who are prone to chant 'USA, USA' at Trump rallies. As if that restores their sense of self worth."

"The women's movement didn't help. Calls for equity in the workplace--equal pay for equal work--in family life and the bedroom (there was the pill) deeply threatened so many men."

"How many people do we know, how many men do we know, including some in our families who found themselves with women supervisors and how they hated that. How some even quit their jobs to get away from female bosses. And how in a couple of instances doing so ruined their careers."

"Affirmative action also contributed, especially as many men believed it primarily benefitting women. Again in the workplace they saw women they felt to be less credentialed and less experienced getting promoted to positions they felt entitled to."

"And when the Great Recession hit in 2008," I said, "men became aware that women were able to ride it out better than they were. Ironically, partly because women were still not receiving equal pay for equal work they were more likely than their husbands or partners not to be laid off."

Rona said, "This came decades after tens of millions of women who had been housewives entered the work force, often not just in search of career opportunities but because their husbands' incomes were not enough to sustain the household. We know, again from our own families, that a lot of men felt inadequate because on their own they couldn't make enough money for the families' expenses. My father, your father had to send our mothers to work in order to maintain their lifestyles. Or just pay the bills. How did that make them feel?"

"Not good. Diminished," I said, "In quite a few cases the women wound up making more that their husbands and this alone disrupted the emotional balance within many marriages. And now there is the MeToo movement, which has some men thinking that their or their sons' lives can be destroyed by a false accusation of sexual misconduct."

"And so, here we are," Rona said, "Even in this peaceful place there are men so angry that they want to kill people who they consider to be terrorists."

"All that seems so far away from here and yet . . ."

April 12, 2107--Free Tuition

In cost-benefit terms the best social policy investment the United States could make would not be to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure (though we need to do that too) but to deploy that $1.0 trillion to wipe out all outstanding student loans.

There are 44 million who borrowed money to help pay the cost of their college educations and they owe on average about $37,000. Of these borrowers, more than nine million are in default.

Those in default and those struggling to pay back what they owe are trapped in a tsunami of debt and collapsed FICO scores at a time when it is difficult for young people to find employment that pays enough to make repaying manageable. As a result record numbers continue to live with their parents well into their 30s or are reluctant to take chances to switch career paths or start their own businesses. This in turn, in macroeconomic terms, dampens growth and interferes with the traditional churn of the free market.

There are no direct correlates, no lessons from history that we can turn to as models of federal fiscal policy that would be helpful in making the case for this radical suggestion. And, to balance the debate, there are no large-scale examples on the other side of the argument that have credibility.

That is except for those times in America's history when the government stepped in to prop up or even bail out imperiled institutions. We did this in the 1930s during the Great Depression to help rescue the country from a a precarious economy and dramatically, more recently, when we did a version of the same thing to help get us through the Great Recession.

On a less dire note there was the GI Bill that was passed in 1944, toward the end of the Second World War, to provide various sorts of assistance to men and women who volunteered or were drafted to serve in the military.

The GI bill is best known for the support it provided to veterans who enrolled in various forms of education, from vocational training to college and university studies. It paid the full cost of tuition and even offered a monthly subside to help offset living expenses.

It was a massive program: 8.8 million GIs used the educational benefits with a full quarter of them (2.2 million) enrolling in post-secondary education. This not only benefitted those attending but contributed to the dramatic expansion of educational opportunities and facilities that served the nation well in subsequent decades, even after veterans completed their studies. By 1960, only 15 years after the end of the war, a new community college was founded each week, fully 50 a year for over a decade. Now there are 1,200 two-year colleges serving 7.4 million degree-seeking students.

Even those fiscal conservatives who resisted the federal government's involvement in education funding could not help but be impressed. The die was cast--higher education became a virtual right as a result of the GI Bill and its longer-term reverberations. For the first time in world history higher education became fully democratized. Not perfect, but impressive.

And those who study these matters have retrospectively found that the accrued benefits to the nation, in monetary terms, more than offset the direct costs of subsidizing this expansion of educational opportunities. There was unprecedented economic growth between 1947 and 1975 and a significant narrowing of economic inequality. The poorest 20 percent of the population saw their incomes rise at a rate higher than that of any other population cohort.

In other words there was no better engine for economic growth than offsetting the cost of offering these higher-educational opportunities.

To put it simply--better educated people, college graduates especially, earn more over their lifetimes than people with only a high school education and as a result pay more in taxes. Enough in taxes to more than cover the subsidized costs of tuition and even the monthly stipends.

Thus it is exciting to note that the New York State Legislature, pressed by 2020 presidential candidate Governor Andrew Cuomo, just this past week passed a bill to make all public colleges in the state for families earning less than $250,000 a year tuition free.

"Tuition free" is a wonderful oxymoron and one can expect to see over time some of the same economic benefits that were the result of the GI Bill.

Think, then, what a positive jolt to the nation's economy would result from wiping out all accrued student debt. This obviously would be complicated to do (forget for the moment what conservatives would say!) but it is worth thinking about and running the numbers to quantify what a benefit it would be. Increased tax revenues, among other things, would be sufficient to pay for the renewal of much of out failing infrastructure.

Governor Andrew Cuomo