Blog

A Question of Fairness

Welcome to the new Barlett and Steele Web site. In addition to a greatly expanded archive of our work, including video and audio material, it will also be the home of our Blog. From time to time, we will offer our observations on a range of subjects, especially those we have written about over the years: Health care; local, state and federal taxes; globalization; corporate welfare; illegal immigration; Social Security; government policies that serve moneyed interests rather than working people; the inequities growing out of those policies; government contractors, and, of course, the world of Washington politics. We also hope to explore new topics with the hope that you will help educate us. We look forward to your ideas.

*

Some years ago, the historian, David McCullough, delivered a commencement address at the University of Connecticut whose message was the importance of reading books throughout life. In an aside tailored for his young audience, he offered a critical observation on the Internet age and the speed with which information is transmitted today:

“Everything moves faster and our notions of time and space adjust of necessity, whether we realize it or not. Information is available as never before and at the touch of a finger. Information has become an industry, a commodity to be packaged, promoted, and marketed incessantly. The tools for ‘accessing’ data grow ever more wondrous and ubiquitous and essential if we’re to keep in step, we’ve come to believe. All hail the Web, the Internet, the Information Highway.

“We’re being sold the idea that information is learning and we’re being sold a bill of goods. Information isn’t learning. Information isn’t wisdom. It isn’t common sense necessarily. It isn’t kindness. Or trustworthiness. Or good judgment. Or imagination. Or a sense of humor. Or courage. It doesn’t tell us right from wrong.”

Indeed not. Today, more than ever, we need to learn to think critically. With so much information flying by, we all must stop and ask questions, probe slick phrases, study analogies closely, weigh alternative explanations for often bad ideas packaged in rhetoric that seems quite logical at first. This will be one of the missions on this Blog: To encourage critical thinking. This is especially important in a presidential election year marked by endless campaign speeches devoid of specific solutions, passionate one-liners, attack ads, spin sessions, glib comments by television news personalities — all at a time when, depending upon your economist of choice, the nation is moving toward, or already mired in, a recession.

In recent months, for example, special interests and their spokespersons have criticized the idea that the federal government should retrain workers who have lost their jobs as a result of unfettered trade policies. Such was the tack taken by a University of Rochester economics professor, Steven E. Landsburg, in an opinion page article in The New York Times. The potential readership of Landsburg’s column grew exponentially as it passed from blog to blog on the Internet.

Landsburg posed the question of whether there is “a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs” proposed by Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney?” He offered this unequivocal answer:

“Um, no. Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?”

“. . .One way to think about that is to ask what your moral instincts tell you in analogous situations. Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door?”

The analogy is seriously flawed. The loss of a single shampoo order is hardly equal to the loss of a job. But there’s something else to think about. Anyone who has entered the workforce in the last decade knows, or certainly should know, that his or her employment is transient. Those who went to work two decades or more ago did so with the expectation that loyalty to a single company would be repaid with a lifetime job.

Then Congress changed the rules of the game. As a result, corporations were encouraged to move their plants to other countries where workers could be paid far less. American workers, in turn, were dumped on the street.

The real question becomes: Is it right, or fair, to change the rules of the game in the middle? Think about that when you watch the next Super Bowl. As one team holds an eight point lead and the opposing team scores a touchdown with seconds to play, even with the extra point that team will come up short. But what if the referees decided to make the extra point worth three points? Not fair, you say? Couldn’t happen? Certainly not in sports. But it happens every day in the work world when Congress changes the rules to benefit powerful special interests. Lest you think Washington doesn’t really work that way, then ask why Congress has imposed a stiff tax on much cheaper imported ethanol from Brazil so that it cannot compete with higher-priced U.S. ethanol?

Lastly, think about this: While Landsburg, the economics professor, feels it’s unfair to ask society to pay the retraining costs for displaced workers, a few years back he was arguing that university professors should have tenure to improve the quality of education. In other words, college professors should be guaranteed employment for life, but other workers are disposable.

He put it this way in an Internet article talking about the need for colleges to combat grade inflation, a truly serious problem:

“. . .Easy graders are more popular on campus. The costs of leniency — measured in lost reputation — are spread over the entire school, while the benefits are concentrated in the professor’s own classroom. Therefore the professor is biased toward leniency. The problem, then, is in the gap between the professor’s interests and the college’s. Any solution must involve narrowing that gap. That’s where tenure comes in. An untenured professor is like a corporate bondholder — as long as the institution stays above water in the short run he’s happy. A tenured professor is like a corporate stockholder — he has a permanent stake in the fortunes of the institution. Professors should have job security for the same reason Alan Greenspan should have job security: It instills a healthy respect for the long run.”

By Don and Jim on 2.5.08 | Comments [7]