Madness & Truth

Short thoughts (EDIT: after finishing, I can say my expectation of brevity was clearly unfounded) on interesting things:

— Many people, when I tell them where I went to college while making small talk, immediately ask the same follow-up: “Oh, and you majored in journalism at Grinnell?” Well, no, actually, I didn’t. Grinnell, as it happens, doesn’t offer a journalism program. It doesn’t even offer any classes in journalism. My education in being reporter came from throwing myself headlong into the student newspaper (one year as a writer, three as an editor) and then taking internships in the summer. Did my lack of a journalism degree impede my search for a job out of college? Perhaps a few hiring editors shuffled my resume into the “no” pile using “journalism degree?” as a filter, but enough didn’t that I got a second look. My clips and an interview made it clear that I knew what I was doing, or as much as a typical recent graduate does, and I got a job.

Moreover, when I speculate about the sometimes-dismal state of our industry, I’m never terribly worried. Even were I to end up unable to find a reporting job, I’m sure I could find a job someplace. I majored in political science, but the real skills I came away from Grinnell with were thinking and writing quickly and clearly. Those skills can take you a long way in a wide variety of fields.

I indulge in this tangent by way of introduction to an interesting article from Josh Barro in the National Review. Responding to a writer making a defense of classics majors who writes, “students of Arts and Letters do get hired, and they do go on to better jobs as they gain experience,” Barro agrees — to a point:

This is reasonable advice for students at certain colleges–highly selective ones–but is bad advice for the general public. Only if you’re at a top 10 or 20 school do you have the luxury of picking a major that does (not) give you job-specific skills and still being confident that you will find a good job after graduation.

Barro notes his own experience: he majored in philosophy at Harvard, “got a job as a banker, and ultimately transitioned into public policy.” Many of his classmates, with similarly esoteric majors, are also employed outside of academia. At less elite schools, he argues that’s not the case:

But most students can’t rely on a combination of natural aptitude, writing skills and diploma prestige to land a good job. If you’re at Arizona State, majoring in Greek is probably a big mistake. Most college students should be focusing on developing marketable human capital, which means taking courses that will leave them with specific job skills. Classics doesn’t fit this bill.

This is an elitist argument to make — which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. A certain privileged elite gets to study whatever they fancy without suffering any consequences, while the hoi polloi have to study practical things or spend the rest of their life doing drudgery.

On the other hand, in a historical sense, that’s always been true. It’s only in the past 60 years that higher education was democratized as something for everyone, rather than just the privileged (using that term to imply both economic/social privilege and natural intellect/aptitude/gumption, which is of course unevenly distributed throughout the population). Arguably a larger percentage of the population is in a position to take advantage of a liberal arts education today than at any time in the past. (It’s also worth noting that while many students at elite colleges do come from backgrounds of comparative affluence, stability, and education, there are a sizable number of students who don’t — who have clawed their way into a first-class college by virtue of innate talent and hard work, and this success should not be counted against them.)

Shifting from the theoretical to the practical, I’d recommend a three-part test. 1) Are you looking for a job that requires general talents of thinking and expression rather than specific skills? 2) Are your natural abilities at thinking and expression sufficient to make that a plausible future? 3) Is the college program you want to pursue going to sufficiently hone those thinking and expression skills?

If the answer to all three of those is yes, then by all means study whatever you want. You’ll probably end up fine. (Just don’t neglect non-academic pursuits like internships.) If you’re not looking for one of those general-skilled jobs, or your natural abilities aren’t well suited for one, then you probably shouldn’t spend four years acquiring skills and knowledge that won’t pay off. And if the answer to the first two is yes, be sure to pick a college program that complements this goal.

— The magazine Foreign Policy publishes a list of the most underreported stories in international relations of 2011. I’m particularly intrigued by #1: that India is undergoing a major military buildup.

It’s China’s military expansion — especially at sea — that gets the headlines, but India is actually planning on spending almost twice as much — $45 billion to China’s $25 billion — on new warships in the next two decades. Both China and India are countries that are thought of foremost as land powers, so it’s interesting to see the two countries make a bid for mastery of the oceans, too.

The article reminded me of an interesting (if largely obsolete) debate from American history about the comparative virtues of the army and the navy. This goes back to the founding of the Republic and represented a real philosophical difference. John Adams, the country’s second president, was a huge booster of the Navy, which he saw as “wooden walls” for the county’s defense. When Adams, as president, was facing probable war with France, he gleefully got Congress to approve funding for new ships. But the army was another matter:

A bill for a “provisional army” was passed, but not before it was cut from 25,000 men to 10,000, which was more than Adams had asked for or wanted. For though he was the greatest advocate of the navy of any American statesman of his generation, Adams deplored the idea of a standing army. (David McCullough, John Adams p. 499, emphasis added)

Adams’ sometime friend, sometime rival Thomas Jefferson had a very different point of view. Watching Adams’ naval buildup, Jefferson was appalled. “The new navy, in Jefferson’s view, was a colossal waste of money” (McCullough, p. 501). When Jefferson succeeded Adams as president, one of his first actions was to begin “cutting back on the navy, halting shipbuilding and selling off ships already built…” (McCullough, p. 577.).

Walter Russell Mead notes that this dispute continued for more than a century. Looking at foreign policy schools of thought in American history, he names one — appropriately enough — the Jeffersonians, and notes that they believe “[t]here was nothing so likely to get the United States involved in foreign quarrels as a blue-water navy.”

The larger the navy the more pressure there would be on the United States to defend various commercial and humanitarian “interests” in far-off lands, and the mere presence of American forces in foreign ports made confrontations more likely. … Jeffersonians developed theories of coastal defense and coastal fortification to divert spending from blue-water-navy vessels to coastal barges and forts. More than once in the nineteenth century, the chronically underfunded navy declined to levels well below the minimum needed for combat effectiveness even against second-rate naval powers. (Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, pp. 195-196.)

In contrast, Mead’s Hamiltonian school endorsed, like Adams, the navy as the best tool of national interest. “Beyond the needs of the western frontier, the United States required only a navy,” Hamiltonians thought (Mead, p. 118). In the 20th Century, the decline of British naval power led Hamiltonians to take up the slack:

If Europe’s rivalries were once again to spill out into other continents, the United States would once again have to worry about the rights of neutral shipping, and it would need a navy that could vindicate those rights around the world. (Mead, p. 124)

One point of view holds that a navy — or at least a blue-water navy capable of fighting at sea and not just along the coast — leads only to trouble by making involved in foreign wars more likely. The other held that a navy — or at least a modest navy — can be a prime defensive weapon, one to deter rivals.

Of course, the United States was in a very particular situation: with no real military rivals sharing land borders, the sea was the only real source of danger. And the primacy of the British navy gave American naval proponents the luxury of keeping the fleet modest because Britain did the hard work abroad. Once Britain declined, American naval advocates weren’t so modest. The Jeffersonian argument that a strong blue-water navy encourages foreign involvement seems to have been vindicated in the long term. (In the short term, Jefferson’s cutback of the navy would be nearly disastrous as the U.S. found itself at war with Britain in 1812.)

The question of whether strong standing armies pose a threat to democratic institutions, at least when those institutions are weak, is a question for another day.

— I’m writing this way too late at night because of a recent (soon to pass, hopefully) addiction to a minor little strategy computer game called “Creeper World” (and its sequel). The games are a relatively simple strategy game, where you have to use various stationary weapons to clear maps of an ever-spreading ooze. Cheap ($15 for the two games) and probably worth the price. But I mention this only to note a peculiar, and not wholly desirable feature of the games. Most levels follow a similar pattern: first a frantic rush at the beginning to establish yourself before you get overwhelmed. Then, once you’ve established a decent economy and defensive perimeter, you’re in no danger of losing and “winning” becomes a slow slog of incremental advances that can take ages to complete. The better-designed levels of the game keep throwing new challenges at you, or add a time pressure that forces you to keep moving briskly. But more often than not the exhilaration of the initial phase of the game passes quickly, replaced by a mind-numbing exhaustion as you plod your way through the endgame. That’s not ideal game design, and it’s contributed to me both spending large amounts of time completing the game AND feeling less fulfilled than I otherwise would at victory. Still, not every game can have the polished balance of a “Starcraft,” and I’m glad small, independent studios like the makers of “Creeper World” are putting their work out. Now to just beat the damn game so I can put it behind me.