Late Night Laugh: Photographs
July 23, 2008
Obama In A Nutshell: Not So Pretty
July 23, 2008
From Obama WTF (What’s The facts?:
Obama in a Nutshell now includes 22 memorable quotes which capture the essence of BHO with great verbal efficiency and occasionally a wisp of wit.
1 “Mr Obama is spectacularly under-qualified to be President; he’s been in the Senate for 25 months… there are probably craftsman repairing things in that building who have been there longer.”
Tim Hames, in Times of London, 2/12/07… writing about why America can’t make Obama President
2 “As Obama’s campaign is based on words… not on a proven track-record… if his words are not supported by facts, there’s nothing left but an empty blue suit.”
Oxy Moran in Obama WTF, 2/12/ 2008…writing about the need to scrutinize Obama’s empty rhetoric
3 “Obama’s words are silken and honeyed; for McCain, words are unnecessary, his actions speak volumes.”
Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun: 6/15/08…writing why he cant understand how Jews can vote for Obama
4 “For all his talk about change, Obama remains a product of a Chicago political culture renowned for corruption and filled with characters who range from felonious to just outrageous.”
Chicago Tribune, 6/22/08 …writing about how Obama’s Chicago friends are killing his campaign to present himself as Mr Clean
5 “I want to cut Obama’s nuts off”
Jesse Jackson Sr, father of Obama’s National Campaign Chairman on 7/6/08 whispering on a hot mic about his retribution for Obama’s talking down to African Americans
6 “Barack Obama has the worst luck with preachers of everybody I know”
Jay Leno, 7/9/08 talking on his show after the announcement of Jesse Jackson’s vulgar remark.
7 “Hearing Barack Obama’s speech… my, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”
Chris Matthews 2/12/08 on MSNBC demonstrating the mainstream media’s physical inability to report objectively.
8 “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.”
Senator Hillary Clinton, 2/22/08 talking about Obama plagarizing Governor Deval Patrick during a Primary Debate
9 “Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.”
David Brooks, 6/20/08, New York Times, writing after Obama broke his promise to use public financing which he had made the initial foundation of his campaign
10 “We can take Obama out of Chicago, but we cant take Chicago out of Obama”
Oxy Moran,6/28/08 in Obama WTF, after Obama said he would remove the ongoing Federal oversight of the Teamster’s Union which had been imposed after corruption convictions
11 “It is hard to imagine, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright…. the Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign.”
Jodi Kantor. 4/30/07 New York Times after writing story about Pastor Wrights radical views
12 ““Why say you’re for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates?”
Jackson/Long writing in Chicago Tribune 4/3/07 about an interview with Gha-is Askia a Democrat for State Senator in 1996 who was disqualified after Obama challenged the validity of her signatures. This was the same election when he got Alice Palmer disqualified on the same grounds.
13.”There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience”
Alex Conan 7/5/08 quoted by AP on Politico
14 `Obama’s a politician, I’m a pastor. We speak to two difference audiences, `I do what I do. He does what politicians do.”
Jeremiah Wright jr 4/25/08 talking to Bill Moyers about Barack Obama’s tendency to say what people want to hear.
15 “Obama’s always wanted to be president,”
Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama’s, shortly after his 2004 Democrat Convention speech
“Obama” David Caldwell
16 “I think Obama can be ready, but right now I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.‘
Sen. Biden on ABC’s “This Week,” 8/19/07
17 When there is a crisis and when the phone rings …whether it’s 3:00 a.m or 3 pm in the White House, there is no time for speeches and on the job training…Senator McCain will bring a time of experience to the campaign…Senator Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002.
Senator Clinton CNN’s “Newsroom,” 3/8/08
18 Over the past few days, Senator Obama’s assertions about foreign and military affairs have been, frankly, confusing and confused… he’s made threats he should not make and made unwise categorical statements about military options.“
Senator Dodd Washington Post 8/2/07
19 Obama’s other side: his imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometimes prickly nature, each quality exacerbated by the enormous career pressures that he has inflicted upon himself.
D Mendell “Obama” Biography 2007
20 Barack Obama’s levity-free reaction to the now-famous New Yorker cartoon leaves one reluctantly wondering: Is he humor-challenged?
Kathleen Parker Indy Star 7/21/08
21 I have had some personal contact with Obama on a serious human rights issue and seen that his fancy rhetoric is so much wind
Dr Richard Harkin of Chicago writing in the Weekly Blitz 7/22/08
22 Senator Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election
John Mccain referring to Obama’s refusal to support the surge in Iraq 7/22/08
RoboMonkWhy did the farmer put a Walkman on his cow?
Because an MIT professor told him to.
In a research project aimed at helping cattle farmers corral their herds more efficiently, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the US Department of Agriculture has devised a way to remotely issue commands to cows.
The researchers are still experimenting with exactly what sound will best lead a cow home, but they’ve tested annoying horns, helicopters, and crooning cowboys.
The “Ear-A-Round” device, which looks like a solar-powered Walkman, allows scientists to track an animal’s location and movements. It also keeps information about the cow’s body orientation – how its head moves, for example – to understand how it travels individually and with the herd.
Yup- Here’s the video.
Syrian trucker ends up in the UK instead of Spain. He blames the GPS unit.
Syrian driver Necdet Bakimci stopped with only the North Sea at Lincolnshire in front of him.
He explained in broken English how he was looking for Coral Road on Gibraltar in southern Spain.
Clearly 1600 miles of road signs in languages other than Spanish made no impression.
Why urinating outdoors is a bad idea:
A tourist who relieved himself over a live railway line at a south London station was electrocuted.
The Polish man died when an electric current connected with urine which had splashed on to the 750-volt line.
It is thought the married 41-year-old teacher was on a trip to London to improve his English.
Sadly, the Polish tourist was unable to read the warning sign with the lightning bolts.
Team Obama in Europe: Unhappy Little Campers
July 23, 2008
Cheering is guaranteed at Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin on Thursday, but his campaign is still frustrated and nervous. His appearance in the German capital will be a major test for Obama — and 40 American journalists will be there to report any faux pas he makes back to the US.
Barack Obama’s campaign is frustrated over all the vehement discussions about his speech in Berlin on Thursday. SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that the recent criticism took the campaign by surprise and frustrated Obama’s advisors. At first many Europeans complained about Obama not coming to Europe, but then the criticism shifted to his keynote address on the trans-Atlantic relationship — and fears it might lack substance. The reaction has left members of his team frustrated.
Although the discussions over where Obama will appear in Berlin are finally over — he will speak at the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, at around 7 p.m. on Thursday — another debate is already heating up. Is Obama using Berlin merely as another prop for his election campaign? In an editorial, theInternational Herald Tribune is demanding greater “sobriety” from Obama. The Economist is complaining of “disquieting signs of a tendency on Mr. Obama’s part to tailor his message to whichever audience he is talking to.” The magazine asks if one will be able to find any real clues from his talk about the future course of US policies in the speech. Others bemoan the fact that the senator isn’t even bothering to make a symbolic visit to Brussels, the capital of the European Union. How can he truly be interested in positively transforming the trans-Atlantic relationship if he doesn’t make a stopover in the city, they are asking? Paris and London are already frustrated: The two countries feel neglected because Obama is paying them only brief visits.
Germany, however, certainly can’t complain about a lack of attention. Yet that still hasn’t stopped politicians here in the past few days — including the head of the center-left Social Democratic Party, Kurt Beck — from expressing their surprise about statements made by Obama’s chief foreign policy adviser. Susan Rice called for more involvement from the US’s NATO partners in Afghanistan in a SPIEGEL interview published on Monday. Beck responded by saying, “As far as expanding the mission is concerned, no more can be done.” This also sparked concerns the senator could demand something similar from Germany regarding its role in Iraq or that he might emphasize his hard-line position on Iran’s nuclear program.
SPIEGEL has learned that the Obama team is frustrated by the controversy surrounding the candidate’s Germany visit, with some asking why the trip is so difficult for the Germans to comprehend. The candidate merely wanted to drop by for a visit with America’s allies to share his vision of US-European relations. It is said that the address he plans to give in Berlin will not be a stump speech, but rather a substantive speech on trans-Atlantic relations. Of course, as a presidential candidate, Obama is limited to talking about this vision, since he doesn’t have the ability to sign documents or treaties or even make policy. And as a man running for the presidency, he obviously has to keep American audiences in mind when he makes appearance abroad.
Obama is said to want to signal to voters back home that he has the necessary gravitas for a president and that he is a man who can reconcile America with the international community following the Bush years. His team believes images of Obama against a backdrop of enthusiastic Europeans will strengthen his campaign. At the same time, he must make sure that he doesn’t appear to be more popular abroad than at home.
The reality is that Thursday’s appearance in Berlin will be a tight-rope walk for Obama. So far his international trip has gone off without any hitches. His itinerary took him to destinations that are far more controversial than Berlin — Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East — but he was also very cautious in his public statements. His TV appearances were tightly orchestrated and he barely spoke to journalists during press conferences.
But with his speech in Berlin, Obama will be thrown directly into the spotlight. Here’s what he wants to achieve:
- Obama wants to signal that he will pursue a different foreign policy course than George W. Bush. The word “listen” will pop up frequently in his speech. And he is not expected to openly criticize Bush or Republican candidate John McCain while on foreign soil. He can’t show too much sympathy for Europe’s frustration with the Bush administration, either. His team is also preparing for the possibility that people who come to see his speech in Berlin may shout epithets against Bush or McCain. To that end, they have also banned posters and placards from the event.
- In order not to appear overly friendly to the Europeans, Obama will also issue concrete demands during his speech. He said last week he wanted to strengthen NATO by demanding more from America’s partners. He said he will “seek greater contributions — with fewer restrictions — from NATO allies.” In other words, he’ll be showing some ” tough love.” He is expected, for example, to clearly state that Europe must take on greater responsibility in the international community. Still, Obama’s advisors apparently aren’t overly worried that he will lose his magic in Europe. His advisors are also well aware that the Germans won’t like everything he says over the next eight years if he is elected. But he has to be careful not to take things too far. In Berlin, for example, many politicians may have prepared themselves for the demand that they increase Germany’s presence in Afghanistan. But that doesn’t apply to Iraq, even if the request were as modest as more humanitarian or civilian aid. The annual German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends poll has shown again and again that a radical shift in the US’s Iraq policy is the most important precondition for trans-Atlantic rapprochement. If Obama allows Europeans to become doubtful about his Iraq policy intentions, the euphoria could quickly fade.
- Obama wants to include Germany in this discussion. In addition to his speech in Berlin, he is also meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (During his stops in France and Britain, he will not be meeting with Steinmeier’s counterparts.) In the run-up to Thursday’s speech, his team has described German-American relations as “well-established” and stated that Obama believes Merkel is more influential than French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In order to assuage frustration in London, Paris and Brussels, Obama will have to provide a focus in his speech on broader trans-Atlantic opportunities. Unlike famous predecessors who held addresses in Berlin like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, he won’t be able to tap into specifically “German issues” like the Cold War.
It will only take a few hours after his speech on Thursday for Obama’s team to see whether they succeeded in their tight-rope act. And they won’t need to pay any attention to the Berlin media, either. A pack of 40 US reporters, many of whom have followed Obama throughout the campaign — are coming to Berlin. So are the American news channels. CNN will be broadcasting live from Berlin and the hosts of the three major US TV networks — ABC, CBS and NBC all plan to broadcast their prime-time newscasts from the German capital.
They will go on air at 12:30 a.m. German time.
From The American Spectator archives:
Will Victoria Jo Stinnett ever celebrate a happy birthday? I very much doubt it. As soon as she is old enough to understand, she’ll be haunted by the trauma of her birth — ripped from her dead mother’s womb by alleged killer Lisa Montgomery. Yet monster though she undoubtedly is, Montgomery is already reaping the benefits of the insidious root-causes racket.
Root causes are the rationalizations liberals give — usually after the fact — for their immoral actions or for the immoral actions of others. The paradox at the heart of the root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.Thus liberals find no need to explain why Bill Gates behaves benevolently, but somehow, they require a theory to explain why Montgomery, after a good deal of premeditated scheming, gained access to the Missouri home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, strangled her, sliced open her abdomen, and then made away with her child, later passing the girl off as her own.
In the months to come, you’ll see the dog-and-pony psychiatric show and its media claque pose such questions as: “What drove Lisa Montgomery to mug, murder, and mutilate Bobbie Jo Stinnett.” That’s because, after people perpetrate evil, liberals toss free will to the wind. Since Montgomery did a monstrous thing, liberals attribute her actions to causes. You see, to perpetrate evil, one must be “mentally ill.” Since Bill Gates does good things, those of a liberal mindset attribute his actions to choice. They acknowledge free will and human agency if — and only if — adaptive actions are involved.
“Progressives” make some exceptions to the rule. Never once did the punditariat ponder what drove Scott Peterson to murder his wife and unborn child. Peterson’s sex made it easy for liberals to accept that he chose to act on his inherent evil impulses. Liberal misandry guarantees that female offenders are more likely to benefit from root-causes “reasoning.”
FEMALE OFFENDERS AND JIHADISTS, to be more precise. Western Liberal “intellectuals,” not Jihadists, are behind the root-causes theory of terrorism. Ask any Islamic terrorist why he desires to kill Americans and Israelis, including innocent civilians, and he’ll reply with candor and conviction. The Islamic criminal, unlike the common criminal that inhabits Western jails, lacks psychological savvy, a fact that increases his believability. He hasn’t yet imbibed the teachings of Western progressive psychotherapists, eager to help him excavate the “root causes” of his depraved deeds.
Not given to the-camel-ate-my homework excuses, the Islamist will disclose that he desires to kill us because he hates us. And why does he hate us? 1. Because America’s government prefers democratic Israel to the despotic Palestinian Authority. And 2. Because America’s military, as he sees it, meddles in Muslim affairs.
Now, Islamic propagandists assure us that the Muslim disdain for the “infidel” Jew is a recent phenomenon based entirely on the continued existence of the tiny “Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel. But over a cup of thick Arabic coffee, the Islamist will concede that, while his contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was derogatorily termed, has gathered Nazi detritus along the way, its origins are purely Islamic. What does this have to do with America? As our candid Islamist will argue — and most of the “Muslim Street” will agree — America is a puppet whose strings are pulled by a Jewish/Israeli cabal.
Liberals, of course, know any man’s mind better than he does himself. According to their lackluster logic, which has come to dominate debate, the “Three P’s” — patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness — are responsible for terrorism. Never mind that Osama bin Laden is a millionaire. Or that the September 11 killers were scions of privilege. Or that Al Qaeda is hardly manned by illiterate peasants. No matter that from Russia’s Bolsheviks to South America’s Tupamaros and Montoneros, from Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang to Italy’s Red Brigades — terrorists have always been middle-class.
The typical terrorist is prosperous and self-righteous, writes Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The elite flocks to Islamist ideology,” seconds Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes. “Militant Islam is not a response to poverty or impoverishment but results more from success than from failure. Not only are Bangladesh and Iraq [before the war] not hotbeds of militant Islam, but militant Islam has often surged in countries experiencing rapid economic growth.”
Forget all that. Rather than face facts, liberals opt to libel the poorest of the poor, and that includes most sub-Saharan Africans as well as the slum-dwellers of Brazil and India. Last time I looked, however, these paupers were not mounting a global terrorist offensive.
Liberals are especially vigorous in applying root-causes “reasoning” to female suicide bombers. To liberals, Chechen suicide bomber Zarema Muzhikhoeva is not a criminal who conned herself into a corner as tight as the corset of explosives she tried to detonate. Instead, they regard Muzhikhoeva and her Palestinian cohorts as mere pawns in a patriarchal game.
To discuss these doyennes of death, Scarborough Country rounded up Dr. Drew Pinsky and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Both told host Pat Buchanan that while women were capable of violence, they enjoyed “a natural nobility of character.” Boteach insisted, “To get women to be that aggressive, they have to be brutalized by men or their society.”
The Rabbi’s chivalry runs counter to the facts, not least anthropologist Ilsa Glaser’s research into female aggression in the Palestinian Authority. Glaser discovered that women’s gossip and nagging play a crucial role in the instigation of one of the most wicked of crimes: the “honor killing.” In defaming the targeted women and goading the men to act, Arab women are the prime movers behind these murders.
Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud is a typical Palestinian woman, but boy, does she defy the liberal stereotype of Arab woman as victim of male hegemony. Qaoud’s daughter Rofayda was raped and impregnated by her own brothers. When the girl refused to commit suicide, Mommy Dearest hacked away at her own child’s wrists — ignoring pleas of “No, mother, no!” — until the poor girl expired. Qaoud’s kinfolk (and she concurs) see in her not a murderess but rather a woman driven by devotion to community, family and Allah.
THE SIRENS OF SUICIDE are viewed in much the same light. “She is a hero. She is a martyr,” brayed the mother of Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa Idris. These people are proud of the ghastly deeds they say their faith commands. They demonstrate no consciousness of guilt nor do they exhibit the urge to adorn their barbarism with a respectable pedigree. That’s the job of patronizing Western liberals. “In dealing with crime,” wrote political philosopher Murray Rothbard, “liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten immoral character.”
Nothing causes ordinary Palestinians to strap on belts of razor blades and dynamite and then blow up innocent Israelis. And nothing causes ordinary Israelis to not respond in kind. These are respective choices. Since so many Palestinians choose to commit evil, liberals invariably attribute their actions (after obligatory and perfunctory denunciations) to Israeli-engendered oppression. Since just about no Israeli civilians respond in kind, liberals fail to credit their moral choices. Similarly, Lisa Montgomery has reasons — not causes — for killing Bobby Jo Stinnett and stealing her child.
The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said this of his experience in Auschwitz: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.
As a genocidal murderer, Karadzic is an extreme but not uncommon example of clinicide, the phenomenon of doctors who kill. Clinicide includes serial killing, treatment killing and political killing. Doctors murder more than any other professional group…
Since 1945, the role of doctors in terrorism, torture, genocide and abuse of prisoners is a growth industry…
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
The arrest of the psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic raises a profound question: was Karadzic merely a doctor who ran a genocide, or did his profession as a doctor play a significant part in his genocidal role?
The evidence points incontrovertibly to the latter: Karadzic practised as a psychiatrist at Kosovo Hospital until he became the president of the Republika Srpska in 1992, taking some of his nurses and doctors with him; he used his training to plan terror tactics for ethnic cleansing; he never renounced his profession.
What do we know about this man who so brutally perverted his medical oath to save lives? Karadzic, comimg from peasant origins in Montenegro, lived in multi-ethnic Sarajevo from the age of 15, mixing with Muslims, Croats and Bosniaks. He received his medical degree in 1971 and qualified for psychiatry.
Karadzic saw himself as something of an artist, a view shared by few others, performing as a troubadour, writing children’s stories and folk songs. He published poetry rife with prophetic, if not apocalyptic, visions; among the charmless titles were The Morning Hand Grenade and Let’s Go Down To The Town And Kill Some Scum. He was jailed for fraud but used his contacts to get his job back.
As the shadows of war loomed over the fragmenting Yugoslav Republic, Karadzic surprised everyone when he emerged as Slobodan Milosovic’s proxy, using extreme nationalist rhetoric of a kind not heard in Europe since the Nazis. A new term entered the lexicon: “ethnic cleansing”. Karadzic, a central figure in the destruction, conducted the siege of Sarajevo, shelling the hospital where he had worked, killing colleagues and patients.
In 1995, Karadzic was indicted by an international war crimes tribunal, making him the first doctor so indicted since the Nuremberg doctors trial in 1946. In 1993, the American Psychiatric Association passed a motion condemning Karadzic for “brutal and inhumane actions … because, by membership and training, Dr Karadzic claims membership in our profession”.
What was Karadzic the psychiatrist like? His colleagues said he provoked psychotic patients and his work was ordinary. When a psychopathic patient with a knife rampaged through the ward, Karadzic retreated to his room, leaving a nurse to disarm the patient. He constantly regaled colleagues with grandiose plans; for example, he would write the definitive textbook on depression.
Karadzic’s capacity for gross denial was pervasive. Following the killing of 68 civilians by a mortar shell at Markale marketplace on February 5, 1994, Karadzic said the corpses had been blown up by Muslim forces to gain sympathy.
From his career as a psychiatrist to his apocalyptic reign as genocidal leader, he displayed an extraordinary degree of reckless opportunism in which the instincts of an extreme gambler were unchallenged by restraint or fear of the consequences. Warren Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, described Karadzic as obsessed with violence, regarding him as mad.
As a genocidal murderer, Karadzic is an extreme but not uncommon example of clinicide, the phenomenon of doctors who kill. Clinicide includes serial killing, treatment killing and political killing. Doctors murder more than any other professional group; they kill their partners, relatives, patients or victims in service of the state or an ideology. It is likely that the power over life or death attracts them to the profession in the first place. Dr Jean-Paul Marat, the bloodthirsty political serial killer behind the French Revolution, was a dermatological and ophthalmic specialist. He was followed by Turkish doctors who organised the Armenian genocide, Nazi doctors who ran death camps and Japanese doctors who carried out biological warfare.
Since 1945, the role of doctors in terrorism, torture, genocide and abuse of prisoners is a growth industry. From communist Eastern Europe to rightist regimes in South America, the list is extensive; each new phase of insurrection, state repression or clash with opposing forces invariably produces doctors engaged in serious human rights abuses. Examples include Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, Dr Hastings Banda of Malawi, Dr Wouter Basson of South Africa and, cult-status notwithstanding, Dr Che Guevara.
Karadzic’s trajectory shows uncanny resonances with that of Hitler. Both came from a rural background to spend their early youth in multi-ethnic cosmopolitan surroundings, Hitler in Vienna, Karadzic in Sarajevo. Like Hitler, Karadzic suffered from psychosomatic illness. During his early years in Vienna, Hitler mixed with people of all backgrounds, including Jews, his murderous racism coming to the fore only in 1919. Hitler regarded himself as an artist. While able to qualify as a psychiatrist, Karadzic had a similar grandiose and romantic vision of himself, despite evidence that he was never more than an indifferent poet.
If nothing else, Karadzic shows that clinicide, from the killing fields of Srebrenica to the growing epidemic of geriatric murder in nursing homes, can no longer be ignored.
And Now, Universal College Education?
July 23, 2008
The idea of universal high school education was supposed to elevate the educational levels in this country. Instead, the value of a high school diploma has been devalued as schools have ‘dumbed down,’ graduating students who can barely read or write coherently. Schools regularly advance students who have not mastered their grade level material, all in the name of social ‘equality’ and ’self esteem.’
Now, some well meaning ‘experts’ want to make college education mandatory, all in the name economic equality. They point to the disparities in income between high school graduates and college graduates. No one has connected the dots- perhaps competence, rather than a meaningless high school diploma is responsible for the lack of employer confidence and low wages.
No one, it seems, wants to address the reality that before we break our colleges, perhaps we had best fix our high schools before we further devalue a college education.
In a 1996 television interview that was partly shot in an elementary-school computer lab, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who was then chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, tried to explain rising inequality in America.
“In the early 1970s,” Tyson said, “a college graduate earned something like 45 percent more than a high-school graduate. Today a college graduate earns 84 percent more than a high-school graduate. What’s happened is the technology has increased the demands for higher skills.”
Computers did it. Among both Democrats and Republicans, that is one of the most frequently cited explanations for the post-1975 spike in American wage inequality. As the story goes, information technology has transformed almost every job, increasing employers’ thirst for workers with advanced skills and college credentials. In the lingo of economists, this is “skills-biased technological change.”
But that story is at best a half-truth, according to a new book by two professors of economics at Harvard University. The authors, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, don’t deny that American employers’ demand for skills has been rising. But they say that that demand has been rising at a roughly constant rate for the last century. Contrary to popular belief, they argue, the personal computer and the Internet have not caused a sharp leap in employers’ demand for skill.
So if demand doesn’t explain the recent rise in inequality, what does? Look to the supply side of the equation, Goldin and Katz say: America simply isn’t educating its citizens the way it used to.
In The Race Between Education and Technology (Belknap/Harvard University Press), Goldin and Katz emphasize that plenty of skills-biased technological change occurred long before anyone had heard of Bill Gates. The mass introduction of electric power in the 1910s, for example, increased the complexity of many jobs and increased employers’ demand for skill.
But that rising demand, in Goldin and Katz’s account, was outpaced during most of the 20th century by a soaring supply of educated workers. Between 1915 and 1950, the national high-school-graduation rate rose from roughly 15 percent to roughly 60 percent, and college attend-ance also spiked. As their numbers ballooned, educated workers could no longer command so much more in wages. Between 1915 and 1950, the college wage premium (the amount by which college graduates outearn people who hold only a high-school diploma) and the high-school wage premium (the amount by which high-school graduates outearn high-school dropouts) both fell sharply. The postwar period famously saw a broad prosperity, with wages growing for people of all educational levels.
Then, around 1970, something changed. High-school graduation rates flattened near 70 percent, where they remain. College attendance continued to grow, but the college-completion rate — that is, the percentage of a population cohort that earns a bachelor’s degree — stagnated for more than a decade. (In the 1990s, women’s college-completion rate began to grow strongly again, but the rate for men is still roughly what it was 40 years ago.)
“There was enormous growth in educational attainment between 1900 and 1970,” Goldin says in an interview. “But after 1970, the growth in attainment became much more sluggish. Putting those two parts together, you can explain a large amount of the story of wage inequality in the 20th century.”
“In the past few decades, technology has continued to move forward, but not that differently than in the past,” Katz adds.
Demonstrating that the demand for skill has been roughly constant for a century is a tall order, and it’s the element of Goldin and Katz’s book that is most likely to draw skepticism from their colleagues. Their argument draws partly on data from the Iowa state census, which was one of the few during the first half of the century to collect detailed statistics about educational attainment. (The national census did not do so until 1940.)
Goldin and Katz concede that institutional features — trade policies, labor laws, and so on — have also helped to shape American inequality over the last century. But as a rough cut, they say, the simple supply and demand of skilled labor — the race between education and technology — tells most of the story.
“Education has not kept pace,” says Katz. “In the early 20th century, we created almost universal access to high school. We have not done the same with college, which essentially we would need to have done to have kept this sort of widespread prosperity present.”
One of the book’s central questions is this: Given that the wage premiums for education have grown so strongly during the last 35 years, why haven’t more young people responded by earning degrees?
One answer, Goldin and Katz say, is that the short-term barriers to college are steeper than they once were. “Among the college-ready,” Katz says, “we need to make sure that they have the financial support to get into college. We do an OK job with that, but we could do better. More than half of undergraduates work more than 20 hours a week. The loan burdens are tremendous. Tuition has been rising. It’s clear that those things are taking a toll.”
A more difficult answer, Katz says, has to do with the weaknesses of American public-school education. “There are a myriad of possible reasons for that,” he says. “Some people say it’s all about resources. Some people say we need to improve incentives for parents and teachers. Clearly, over the long run, early-childhood intervention programs may be very important. We need a continuum of investments. But per dollar, we’re not doing so well in the K-12 system in the U.S. these days.”
In a working paper released earlier this year, three Yale University economists — Joseph G. Altonji, Prashant Bharadwaj, and Fabian Lange — suggested that the slowdown in American educational attainment and skill development might be even worse than it appears.
Analyzing data from federal studies of two cohorts of high-school students, one from the early 1980s and one from the late 1990s, the Yale scholars found that the later students’ average skill level (as measured by school completion and cognitive test scores) was modestly higher than their predecessors’. But almost all of that improvement could be explained by the fact that their parents were better educated than the earlier cohort’s parents had been. Holding parents’ education constant, skill levels increased by only 1 percent between the two cohorts. That is a much smaller increase than one would expect, given that the wage premium for skilled workers increased by roughly 20 percent during the same period.
“The increase in the skill premia was not accompanied by a commensurate supply response,” the Yale scholars wrote in a discussion of their paper at Vox, an economics Web site. “That implies that, all else equal, the large degree of earnings inequality observed today is likely to persist far into the 21st century.”
Goldin and Katz, meanwhile, are continuing to develop their model and are scrutinizing the recent growth of wage inequality within the group of people who hold college degrees. “There has been much more growth of inequality among college graduates than among noncollege workers,” Katz says. Only some people, he says, are coming out of college with the high-level abstract-reasoning skills that fully complement the new information technologies and command high salaries. Workers with “midlevel” skills, by contrast, are more likely to see their tasks simply replaced by computers.
Does that mean, then, that too many people are going to college, and that the rewards of a B.A. are overrated, as some commentators have recently suggested?
“That’s absolutely wrong,” Katz says. “The reason we know that is the following: It’s true that there’s growing inequality among college graduates. But there’s shrinking inequality among noncollege workers. The market is very bad for people with only a high-school diploma — they’re not doing much better than people who dropped out in the eighth grade. So the return [on investment] to college is still very high. Even if you wind up in the bottom half of the college group, you’re still much better off than in the top half of the high-school group.”
Goldin wishes that more Americans remembered and appreciated the achievement represented by the universal high-school movement of the early 20th century. “It was a very good way of making sure that the resources of the country would be used effectively,” she says. “Europeans would look at our education system and be appalled by two things. One was that we were educating so many, which they considered to be highly wasteful. The other was that we were educating girls as much as boys, and together. But the system enabled just about any child — and I don’t want to say that there weren’t injustices and indignities in the system — but it allowed just about any child to have a chance.”
