Literacy and its absence

The problem with literacy is that the poorly educated do not automatically revert to a pre-literate state.  On the contrary.  A pre-literate person was obliged habitually to exercise his memory and imagination.  An illiterate person has neither skill.  I’ve just spent several hours correcting the assignments of semi-literate high school graduates who are now college freshmen.  It is late.  I am discouraged.  My own institutions—a small state university and  a considerably larger community college—have demonstrated once again that their primary entrance requirements are a pulse and a credit card.  I am beyond discouraged.

Failure of conventional wisdom

This dialog from Serenity illustrates the failure of conventional wisdom:

OPERATIVE:  It’s worse than you think.

MAL:  It usually is.

Today’s lesson: It is worse than you think.

It is worse than most observers think.

In fact, conventional wisdom has underestimated this economic problem from its beginning.  To wit: in 2007, Ben Bernanke asserted that the subprime mortgage crisis was contained.  Events demonstrated his error.   In 2009, Moody’s Investor Services claimed that investors’ fears that Greece was in a liquidity crisis were misplaced.  Events demonstrated their error.

During most of 2011, European leaders, most notably Sarkozy of France and Merkel of Germany, put forward plan after plan whose purpose was to solve the European debt problem.  Events proved each inadequate.  Each reassured the major markets, but only for a few weeks or days; each in turn failed to resolve underlying market issues.  Whereupon the European leaders would meet once again, devise a new plan, with similar results.  This has happened about a dozen times this year[1], and the only result is that stability has been sustained, but just barely.  We may rejoice that there has only been rioting in Athens and London, and that it has not gotten worse so far.

Two lessons emerge: conventional wisdom is not wise, one, and two, plan after plan after plan is not a plan. Or to put it in other words, keeping the rioting down to a dull roar is not success.  Or, to put it in still other words, if the success of today’s plan is measured by how it limits social unrest, then we must not have unreasonable expectations that tomorrow’s plan will actually address underlying systemic problems.

So, what next? For me, I must shake my well-entrenched conviction that “it will all work out in the end, as it has all my life.”  After all, I used to worry that nuclear war was possible.  It was and still is, but so far it has worked out.  I worry now that economic catastrophe is imminent.  My inclination is to say, “it will work out. I personally won’t be inconvenienced very much, let alone endangered.”

This is wishful thinking, a category of thought which has gotten many people killed. History demonstrates that repeatedly.

Congress has failed as well. The failure of the “Super Committee” triggers automatic budget cuts to the tune of $1 trillion.  That seems large, but it is stretched over nine years, which means in actuality cuts of a little over $100 billion a year. And they won’t begin until 2013 (after the election).  Meanwhile federal debt increases that much every month.  And one last remark about this—curiously, and in the face of evidence to the contrary—the plan also expects $169 billion in savings from lower costs of borrowing, which under the circumstances of near-zero interest rates is a laughable assumption.

Therefore, we must accept that Congress is not capable of being effective about this.[2]

One historical example of a democratic representative body being incapable of effective action on intractable problems may be found in inter-war Italy, with the consequences you should have learned in your world civ class.  I can elaborate if you wish. The short version is that it created a vacuum of power into which stepped the man on horseback, the strong man, Il Duce, Mussolini.

This is not necessarily always the consequence, however.  A wonderful line from Robert Merle’s novel, Malevil, illustrates this: 

“I do not believe for a moment that a group, on whatever scale, always produces the great man it needs.  Quite the contrary.  There are moments in history when one senses a terrible void.  The necessary leader has not appeared, and everything goes lamentably wrong.”

Thus: It is worse than you think. 

Or as expressed in Serenity: 

RIVER TAM:  Things are going to get much, much worse.

For further reading, see http://lewrockwell.com/goyette/goyette21.1.html

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[1] As of March 2013, that number amounts to precisely 20, and the result is the same.

[2] As of July 2013, the dreaded automatic budget cuts have occurred, even though they were not supposed to happen because they were so terrible to contemplate that the Congress which sat after the Super Committee’s work was done was supposed to fix the systemic problems which the Super Committee only kicked down the road.  Well, the subsequent Congress did not fix the problems, the budget cuts occurred to great wailing and gnashing of teeth, the administration fiddled with them enough to make them seem oh-so-terribly painful to the public, and now some months later nobody is talking about them.  It was all Kabuki Theater -- Congressional failure and Executive spitefulness.