Category: General Thoughts

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New media: scouts v quants

A few years ago there was a big conflict in baseball between the scouts and the quants, or maybe you could call it the jocks v he nerds.  The dispute was whether the scouts, with their years of judgment and powers of observation could pick better players than the quants, who had developed complex programs based on statistics.  Baseball is probably the most statistical rich sport. Presumably, if you could harness all the power of the numbers, machines could better predict the trajectory of any player than could a human.  Somebody even wrote a book about that called “Moneyball” which extolled the virtues of the numbers. I didn’t read that book and I am not much of a sports fan, so I know only what I read in other places and I am interested in this only as an illustration of the larger issue of forecasting. Evidently the war between the scouts and the quants is over and both sides won.  

So what does this show?  The source I read about this concluded that both were useful and that numbers are made meaningful by human judgment while human judgment is improved by numbers.  While I think that is definitely true, I also think there is the element of time. The older generation of scouts had to adapt. Actually, many probably just died out. The conflict became meaningless as everybody started to use the quants as the tool it was.  Ironically, after digesting the quants, human judgment became even more important, informed as it was by the quants which took some of the randomness out and maybe a little of the insider game.  Information became available to all, or at least to most, and those who could best use it did better. This is the bigger story.  

I think we have gone through a similar evolution concerning new media at State.  I will be immodest to claim that I got there before many others. I paid for that, as I was seen as an apostate to the new media, or more likely just thought too old and staid to really understand. But when I was last in Washington to take part in a new media strategy session, I found the environment much more accommodating to my ancient ways.  

Our war between the scouts and the quants is also over and both sides have won. There still will be skirmishes, as the latest new technology will promise to change everything, but I think we have reached equilibrium.  The new media/social media is an essential tool of all public affairs, but it is just ONE tool and it is not the objective in itself.  The object is as it was and always will be: to reach human beings and help them change their minds. Some strategies will lean heavily on social media; others not so much.  

We just had an interesting situation with social media. Because of an extended strike at the Federal Universities in Brazil, summer vacation dwindled to a few weeks. Because of this, students who had planned to go to the U.S. to work at places like Disney were unable to go. The unhappy kids set up a Facebook page where they framed the issue as a visa denial problem.  Indeed, we could not issue summer work visas, since there was no summer vacation to work.  But the impediment was not our visas; it was the vacations, or lack thereof. The issue leaked into the newspapers and television.  It was very unpleasant.  

In the old days, we would have crafted a press strategy to get our narrative into the press. The problem was that our best narrative still looked bad.  The bottom line is that kids cannot go.  Their dreams are put on hold.   There is no scenario where we are better off.  If you cannot win, don’t play.  New media made this possible.  The number of aggrieved kids was small and most of them were on social media. We engaged them directly.  We could not offer them any solutions, but we could listen to their complaints and explain the situation, our narrative, yes, but precisely targeted. Our goal was to make the story as banal as possible, so that no media outlet would care to cover it.  Our strategy worked. The kids involved lost interest in making trouble, since they understood that the situation was what it was.  We told them that they could apply next year, which is true although not immediately useful.    

Social media allowed us to precisely address the people who really cared without irritating a much larger community. I would liken it to those new surgical techniques that can get at the problem with minimal invasiveness.

Of course, we could only do this because we had already developed and deployed our social media acumen, but I think we can call this a success story for social media and the principle of limited appropriate response.  

It is generally true in public affairs that any story that comes looking for you will be bad.  Good stories are the ones we have to go out and push.   If a story comes to you, it usually implies defense.  We used to have to take these lemons and try to make poor quality lemonade out of them. We sometimes could stop them by our own engagement with journalists, but usually not if they were interesting. Social media allows us to get at the source of the problem.  Our challenge remains identifying the true source but this is a step forward.  

Maybe I am not as much as an apostate as I let on.  

My picture is the Charles River from the Courtyard Inn in Cambridge. I am here to attend a Harvard seminar on getting more Brazilian students to the U.S. for advanced degree, one of the best public affairs programs possible. 

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Collective Effort versus Collectivism

I have been reading the new George Kennan bio, which is reminding me of the horrors of the communist/Nazi varieties of collectivism. On the other side, I am just reading about “crowd funding” where small investors support artistic endeavors. I understood that we often operate under a false paradigm of individual v collective effort. We are implicitly accepting the flawed concepts of 19th century economists who really didn’t know what they were talking about and/or analysis should have been left in its historical context.  

I don’t need to describe the horrors that communism, Nazism and other collectivist theories brought to the 20th Century. The people who used these benighted concepts to oppress vast populations hid behind the idea of collectivism. They claimed they would use this to create a better society, something approaching heaven on earth with prosperity and justice for all “the people,” properly defined and purged of their undesirable elements. Of course, to get to this heaven, leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao need to pull the people through hell.

We Americans fought hot and cold wars against these guy and defeated both of them. We were also infected by less virulent forms of both diseases, which created conflicts within the U.S. One of the collateral victims of this was the concept of collective effort. It came to be identified with the left side of the argument and came to be defined in an erroneous way. Collective behavior came to be seen – on both left and right – as the kind of thing practiced by the collectivists in communist/nazi places, i.e. organized from top-down and usually in some sort of “struggle,” most commonly a kind of class struggle in the Marxist sense. This obscured the truth.

The truth is that the free market, people working in voluntary association, is the most effective way devised by mankind to engage in collective effort. A firm channels the collective efforts of many people with diverse skills and interest into a common end. The market mechanism organizes the efforts of people who may have never met or even know of each other’s existence into cooperative supply chains so subtle and sublime that no planner of group of planners could ever imagine, much less organize.

Collectivism as practiced by the planners was a sickly and anemic shadow of the effective organization done by the free market. An ordinary swing manager at McDonald’s was more skilled and had access to better sources of information than the head of the Soviet planning groups. He could use the collective knowledge, skills and functioning supply chains to produce hamburgers hot, fresh, inexpensive and on schedule, and he could do it day after day -something no Soviet planner ever succeeded in achieving. The magnitude of this discrepancy was so great and so shocking that we just missed it. I suppose it is like the person on the airplane traveling hundreds of miles an hour who just doesn’t feel the movement.

It has been nearly sixty year since the fall of the Nazi’s and more than twenty years since the collapse of communism. In consequence, we have the advantages and disadvantages of looking from a distance. Some have forgotten or rationalized the horrors of communism. What we should remember is that their style of collectivism was not only immoral, but also hopelessly inefficient.

This makes sense if you stop to think about it. Collective effort is effective to the extent that it employs the imaginations and aspirations of the individual participants. If you just make people do things with the threat of force, they do as much as they need to in order to placate their masters, but no more. It is not a collective activity. It is a collectivist activity. The people have been collected and used until they are used up.

Being connected with Internet makes voluntary collective activity much easier. It also makes the functioning of dispersed effort and intelligence more transparent. In the recent past, we knew that markets worked, but the mechanisms were a mystery. Today we can chart networks of connections that can show the movements of information.

For a long time most of us have assumed that the scope of government would increase as countries developed. As our societies became more crowded and complex, the idea went, we would need more government to sort out the relationships and resources. This seemed to go with an increasing centralization of firms. They were getting bigger. We had big government, big business, big labor and big coordination problems. This began to change in the 1970s and accelerated ever since.

As communications improved, the advantages of centralization decreased. Henry Ford owned or controlled many factors of production. He controlled forests and mines to produce the raw material. His plants fashioned these things into cars. It was integrated. Today a business doesn’t need or want to control all aspects of the production chain. It is much more efficient to coordinate with others through networks. The command and control has been replaced by voluntary associations that can change rapidly. It is much MORE a collective effort than before, but it is not controlled by a single plan, sometimes really by no plan at all. The factors of production do not receive instructions. Instead they get market signals, incentives that move them to supply goods or services for people they have not met or may not know even exist.

Our ideas of government have not caught up with this innovative and networked world. Government is not especially relaxed about innovation but is exceedingly comfortable with hierarchy. Government, after all, is hierarchical by nature because its main function is to determine who is in charge with the power to set priories and limit options. If you don’t believe me, think of why we have laws, rules and regulations and what institution is the final legitimate authority in creating and enforcing them.

In the past, we needed big government to balance big business and big labor. We also needed it to manage many of the interactions among people and organizations. As modern communications allow us more and more to become self-organizing, we might have to think of new and different roles for government. IMO, this will lead to LESS government, although I hope it is better targeted and more effective.

We conservatives should stop defining ourselves as against government and start thinking of ourselves as FOR more effective and better targeted government. If government says “no” to peripheral tasks, it can be more effective on those it says “yes.” We need to reform government to adapt to the networked world.

In some ways this is back to the future. The pre-industrial age was a more networked and less standardized place. It was backward and inefficient because of the primitive level of technology. (By technology, BTW, I mean more than physical tech. There are technologies of the mind (such as calculus, statistics or economic analysis) that were unavailable to people 300 years ago as well as technologies of organization. These are less obviously apparent, but perhaps more important.) But it was human scale and human run. The industrial age brought standardizing and “mass” everything. Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were both producers and products of this. Individuals mattered not at all to them. But now we have the chance to reclaim some of the humanity we may have lost and at the same time keep and expand the prosperity we got from industrialization. An interesting world indeed.

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PS – Few people believe in Marx anymore, but Marxist analysis still pervades our thinking. Marx was an idiot/savant. If we understand that, we can more easily deal with his legacy. He was a savant with his flashed of genius, especially in the poetic sense of creating images. He was an idiot when it came to assembling these into a coherent social-economic theory. We should appreciate him as a literary figure and reject him as an economist or social theorist. Unfortunately, his followers usually did the opposite.

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Old Dogs

Younger people think us baby-boomers had it made but this was not really true. Older baby-boomers, who became adults in the 1960s, enjoyed a great economy. Younger ones, who became adults in the 1970s, faced high unemployment and stagflation, economic times more challenging than we face today, at least for youth. One reason we are well educated is that we stayed in school because we couldn’t find good steady work. 

I noticed an interesting story in the WSJ talking about how older workers are being affected more acutely then even younger workers by current doldrums. Take a look at this chart and count backwards. Younger baby-boomers were young during the rotten times of the 1970s and are now the old of the rotten times today.  

But let’s share a deeper fear. As a 57-year old, I am afraid that my skills are becoming – have become – obsolete. Experience means much less in a world that is rapidly changing and in some cases old skills may actually become a liability. Thirty years of experience in one line of work may be of no value looking for a job in another.  There is also the assumption that young people know the tricks of technology that old dogs cannot learn.  

I think this is why older workers fear losing their jobs so much. Once we fall out, our chances of getting back in are limited. Those with the means may simply choose early retirement; others will just be poor and this period of unemployment may well affect their life prospects for the next thirty years or until they shuffle off this mortal coil, poorer, sadder but perhaps not wiser. 

Random chance plays a big role in our lives. Those who are successful are less often the smartest or the quickest than those who keep trying.  As you get older, you have fewer roles of the dice left and often fewer places to throw them. I don’t have a solution to this problem, which more or less reflects the human condition. But I do point it out to those who might think that unemployment among older people is a situation that doesn’t matter so much since they can retire.

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MD Anderson Cancer Center

Some building complexes in Houston are like little cities, self-contained and extensive.  One such is the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where we held our meetings of Latin American educators.  This is one of the best cancer research hospitals in the world.  They try to create a pleasant environment for people in such unpleasant circumstances and they largely succeed.  The complex includes a hotel run by Marriott for families and outpatients.  It looks like a luxury hotel but it has capacity to help people who need it. The restaurants and cafeterias can provide specialized diets with food that looks and tastes good.  It is helpful for people in stressful situations not to have stress added by things like food and surroundings.

The multi-building complex is connected by a network of skyways.  They told me how many miles they covered, but I forgot.  It is a lot of space.  Patients can get their exercise just by walking around the buildings, w/o having to go outside.  Houston can be very hot and humid and outside exercise might be difficult for some patients.

The slogan of MD Anderson is “Making Cancer History”, using both connotations of the word.  There has been a lot of progress in the fight against cancer.  Survival rates are rising and cancer rates have been falling since the the 1990s.  Most people are unaware of this good news. There is some concern that rising rates of obesity will stop or even reverse this positive trends and they told us that 60% of us will get some form of cancer in our lifetimes.  It is one of the ironies of curing other diseases that as we live longer and do not die of other things, cancer becomes more likely. 

Cancer is a difficult adversary because it is not a single disease and in some ways is not a disease at all.  It can be a kind of misfire of cell growth that could be good in other conditions.  I cannot say I know very much about it however.  As I listened to the talk and occasionally saw patients and their families wandering the building, I just felt sad and sort of stopped listening. 

The very word cancer is anxiety provoking. It dragged up old memories of my mother’s cancer.  It is funny how some things stick in your memory. I recall my mother talking to my great aunt Margret. Margaret said something like “Cancer. How can you face the word?”  My mother replied, as close as I can recall, “It is what I have and it’s not the word that scares me.”  That happened more than forty years ago, but I can picture the event.  Of course, I wonder how good my memory is. I regret that I don’t remember more about my mother.  She died young from that cancer. I wonder if more modern therapies could have saved her long enough for me to get to know her as an adult.  

My top picture shows the MD Anderson Center. Notice all the skyways. The next pictures are Houston in general.  Next shows live oaks. One of the things that is nice about Houston is that they plant trees. There are lots of live oaks and bald cypress along streets.  Bottom pictures are Trekies.  There was some kind of comic book convention at the George R Brown Center. You see a picture of George Brown just above.  George R Brown ran Brown and Root, one of America’s great construction companies. He also was a philanthropist, which is I suppose why they named the center after him.

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Community Colleges in Texas

Community colleges are one of the great innovations in education. I wrote about them in an earlier post.  While in Texas I took the opportunity to visit community colleges in Houston and San Antonio. Both are working on programs in Brazil.

Houston Community College, Jackson Community College (MI), and Red Rocks Community College (CO) are cooperating in the US-Brazil Connect consortium.  They will send a group of students to Salvador, Bahia next month to tutor in English.  Brazilians are expected to come to these schools in the U.S. this fall.  Read more about it here.  I know our Brazilian friends are enthusiastic about preparing their workforce to the needs of today and this will be well received.  Meanwhile, our American community colleges can deepen their international profiles, a win/win.   I told the Director of International Initiatives at HCC, that we would visit the students in Salvador, either I will do it myself or ask our colleagues in Rio to do it.   It will be good to see what is happening and maybe we can be helpful.  I also met the woman who will actually lead the group in Brazil.

The next day, I drove to San Antonio to visit Alamo College.  I became familiar with Alamo last year when we helped a group of student from Rio Grande do Sul get visas for an exchange with Alamo. 

I am always astonished by the breadth and depth of connections that Americans and Brazilians make on their own.   We at the embassy and consulates try hard to make connections, but most of it happens w/o our help and much of it happens even w/o our awareness. The American nation truly is greater than the American government.  But we do try to facilitate these things when we discover them and I believe we do add value.   Alamo chancellor will make a trip to Brazil next month.  I told him that we could help and asked that we go along on some of the visits.  This is a win/win too.  We help each other make connections.  I also met the woman who is honchoing the connections and who has worked with Marcia in the past.   You can read more about Alamo here.

The Alamo people are interested in taking part in the MEC program for English teaching. They told me that they already run an intensive course on ESL for Mexican teachers and can do a similar one for Brazilians.

My pictures are from Houston.  I will add some from San Antonio tomorrow, but I want to get some sleep and don’t feel like editing today, yet I want to post this now. You can see from the pictures that Houston is a modern city, lots of glass and steel.  There is still some green and many nice live oaks. The top picture is the HQ of Houston Community Colleges.

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Pigs, Chickens and Human Beings

Only about 2.5% of the population can multitask but many more think they can and even more try. This is a source of grief and even physical danger, when people talk on cellular phones while driving, for example. Lack of focused attention is diminishing the quality of our decision making as a society.

I have to do a lot of my work at home because I cannot get time to concentrate at work. Some of the “interruptions” are important. Interacting with coworkers is the essence of work in the age of the knowledge worker. I have observed and research indicates that people who insist on “working” to the exclusion of interaction with co-workers are less productive. That time at the water cooler can be an essential time to exchange information and assess capabilities.

Much, however, is dumb. People react too quickly. Instead of thinking for themselves, they send emails, call or send instant messages. Pretty soon dozens are in on a decision that should have been made by one person. The benefit of collective knowledge rarely outweighs the inefficiency of collective thinking if nobody has come up with decent questions. Beyond that, if you count up the salary time you are paying for the dozens of kibitzers, you usually find that the total cost of making a poor decision would be less than the time spent trying to make a perfect one. That assumes that the collective decision is better, which it often is not.

I am making it my business to limit these kinds of things to the small extent that I can. Edmund Burke said “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” I am adapting that saying to meetings and activities in general. “If it is not necessary to meet/consult/act, it is necessary not to meet/consult/act. We have way too many good things to do and cannot waste time on crap that seems urgent because lots of people clamoring, but is may not be important. The most important thing I can do is decide which things we are not going to do.

Sometimes this can be an easy decision. Some things are just clearly not worth doing. The only trouble here is just saying no. The harder choices involve things that are very important or very worthy but not our business, not within our skill set or beyond our control. Focus is important. Since we cannot do everything, we need to focus on those things that only we can do, that we can do better than others or things we need to do to survive. We need to reject other things. It is malpractice to get involved in too many things we cannot properly do. The most important thing around might be curing a deadly disease, but we are not qualified to act in this sphere, so it is stupid to get involved. We would add no value and probably get in the way. More is not always better.


One of the wisest human characteristics is restraint. We should not take as much as we can. Leave something on the table. We should be careful not to overextend too often. We should judge ourselves and others by what we really do, not by intentions, bold plans or promises.


There are times when our reach should exceed our grasp. People who never fail are people who haven’t tried hard enough. But we need to focus our effort on what we do well and let others carry forward the other things. I have never met a successful person or heard about a successful organization that just played it safe and staying within the comfort zone. But I have also never heard of a successful person or organization that could not decide and stick to reasonable priorities.

The media and especially the Internet allow us to gain a superficial knowledge of lots of things. We think we understand more than we do. It has also created an immediacy that makes us think we should be interested in many things. We hear exhortations that we should be committed to lots of causes. This is not true. It is beyond our capacity. In the wise words of Clint Eastwood, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

We can be interested in lots of things, involved in some but we can commit only to a few. Remember the difference between being committed, involved and interested when you have your bacon and egg breakfast. You are interested; the chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

Most of the time we should play the role of the human, i.e. be interested. Sometimes we should play the chicken, i.e. be involved. We should avoid having our ass on the line, like the pig, unless we are really prepared.

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Rock-Paper-Scissors Solution

I was talking to a group of visiting college professors today about why the academy has seemed to become more distant from society. The irony is that years ago, when universities really were places of the elite, they were better respected and integrated than they are today. What the heck happened and how can we get back to the way it was? I think some of the problem is admissions.  

When I grew up in Wisconsin, we considered the university “ours”, even though nobody in our working class neighborhood had actually been to college. Our outlook was forward looking. Parents expected that their kids could go there. In those days, if you were alive and lived in Wisconsin, you had an excellent chance of getting into the flagship university in Madison and a nearly 100% chance of getting into a university somewhere in the system. 

This was a good thing for me because I was pretty stupid.  I was “disadvantaged,” in that I didn’t study. No decent university would let me in today, but back then they did. After a while, I learned the system, studied and did well in school and subsequently in life. I messed up many times, but America is the land of many chances. Or at least it was. 

Today admissions process is crazy. It cuts people off from the university. It creates a wall that most people know they cannot jump. Even ordinary state schools require nearly perfect academic records plus all sorts of outside activities. What 18-year-old can live up to this? The ones with parents who create and mold the resume from the time they are born or maybe even before. This creates tension in the whole system, makes parents worry that their three-year-old isn’t getting the proper stimulus, encourages legions of doctors to prescribe drugs that quiet rambunctious kids & drives teachers nuts teaching to tests. And it doesn’t improve quality. How can we stop the madness? 

I have a couple suggestions. We have to remove the incentives.  How? The first is open admissions. This works with community colleges. Many states are expanding sensible programs where students of community colleges can get automatic admissions to four year colleges after successfully completing their associate’s degree with a 3.00 average. This lets kids earn their way into college instead of having to make the once in a lifetime jump that can determine their futures. 

My other suggestion is to allow a little more random chance. Top colleges often have several times as many qualified applicants as they do places. They spend a lot of time trying to judge the “whole person” which is something they really cannot do. Edison, Einstein, Churchill and many other great individuals were indifferent students. I have a simple solution. 

Universities should establish threshold requirements, i.e. qualifications. It might be things like adequate English and math ability, experience in science etc. Better universities can establish higher thresholds and specific programs would have their own. Universities could publish these requirements in advance and interested students could work to meet them. At this point, the student would not be compared to each other. They would make the cut or not on standards determined before any applications had been received. This would probably produce many more applicant than the university could accept. After that, rely on random chance; hold a lottery; do a random number; I like rock-paper-scissors. Whatever works. Make the process completely transparent. Students could be told the odds, which would give them a better chance of predicting outcomes than they have today. 

Consider the advantages of my “rock-paper-scissors” solution. 

1. It is very cheap. It doesn’t require big boards of experts.

2. It is simple. Kids would not need to spend hours fighting with complicated applications and assembling all sorts of portfolios.

3. Randomness eliminates bias.  A roll of the dice is fair. Dice have no memory nor can they be affected by prejudices unconscious or overt. Random chance recognizes neither race, gender nor creed.

4. It will increase real diversity. The outcomes will reflect the populations from which they are chosen.

5. It will introduce new sorts of people and ideas. One of the values of diversity is that it helps groups make better ideas. Studies have shown that groups of experts do a better job if the group contains some variety, even if the variety means someone less prepared. 

It is time we gave up this crazy idea of classification and abandoned the idea that we can accurately predict outcomes. A little randomness is good. We cannot avoid it anyway and should take advantage of it. It will make us all better off. 

Using the tools of randomness works in lots of life’s decisions, BTW. We should always do our homework, but at some point we have all the information that we can reasonably gather. Additional gathering will not help and may actually hurt. After you have gone as far as logic and research can take you, a coin flip is as good anything else and better than wasting time on the arrogant idea that you can figure out all the angles. 

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Better to Light Many Candles

I was impressed generally with the American system of higher education. This really was a journey of discovery for me. I have more information than I can currently digest and will have to spend a lot of time just thinking about everything I learned and how to use it.  

I know we like to wring our hands and talk about how we are falling behind. From what I have seen and recently learned about our colleges and universities, I can say with conviction that this is not true. What is true is that others are catching up and we are actually helping. That is a good thing for us. For too long a time the task of creating knowledge and innovation has been over-concentrated in our country.  

We can use the help of others and all will benefit if we work in partnership. Science is a social process. It builds on the work of others and thrives best when the best minds are linked with others. Science w/o Borders will help Brazil forge links with the world of innovation and Brazil will benefit. I have grown to love and respect my Brazilian friends and I certainly wish them well, but I am American. I have to ask what is in it for America. I think there is a clear benefit for America when we have the opportunity to work with more minds and take advantage of more innovative imaginations.  These connections are two-way – multiple-way – exchanges. Helping innovators in Brazil will help innovators in America and innovation is what secures our hopes in the future.

What our great thinker-scientist-president Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1813, nearly 200 years ago remains true. In the 200 years since then it has been proven again and again. Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” It gets better. In the world of ideas, when you share your light, your own gets brighter, better and longer lasting. To extend the fire-light analogy, when you are building a campfire, the flames that are separated die out, but those that are able to feed each other grow warmer and stronger. This exchange is a marvelous idea.

My picture shows Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. Our Constitution was the first to address science. “Congress shall have the Power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The system gave inventors the right to benefit from their discoveries for a limited time on condition that they share the knowledge that went into it.  This kind of idea is one of the reasons why we went progressed so fast since. Our political heritage is also a scientific one.

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Different Times

Monuments from earlier ages often contain symbolism that makes less sense in latter day times. This I noticed with a couple of statues: one a person famous worldwide, the other a local celebrity.

Up top is Winston Churchill, known to all. There are a few little known things about the man and the statue.  Churchill’s mother was American, something Winston himself liked to bring it up with American friends and allies. Most of the statue stands on the grounds of the British Embassy, which according to international law & custom means he has his feet planted on British territory. Well, not both feet. He has one foot thrust forward. This foot is on American soil, symbolizing the unity of our two peoples both in the person of Churchill himself and the broad sense.

You also may notice that Churchill is flashing the V for victory sign. Some people who came of age in the 1960s might think of that as the peace sign. That would not have been in Churchill’s nature.

The statue along side is James Buchanan Duke, who endowed Trinity College, later named Duke University where the statue now stands. The basis of Duke’s wealth and the basis of much of the local wealth was tobacco, now a noxious weed despised in polite company.  

If you look at the statue closely, you notice that Mr. Duke is smoking a cigar. I suspect that was his characteristic pose. In the past even cartoon characters were shown smoking. It was ubiquitous.  

My father smoked two packs a day, Pall Mall unfiltered. It was a nasty habit and I am glad that is has so generally disappeared, but it is a mistake to project our current values onto people of the past. A postage stamp depicting the artist Jackson Pollock airbrushed out his cigarette, even though it was clearly present in the photograph on which the stamp was based. Trying to understand the past doesn’t mean imposing today’s morality ex-post-facto.

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A Mature Ecosystem

The biology analogy applies to the complex interactions and niches in the American education establishment.  This is a good thing. A mature ecosystem can use inputs efficiently and accommodate many different needs.   It is robust and adaptive. 

I am impressed with the system. I find that it is much better than I understood it was before the visit. My earlier understanding was simplistic and outdated. I still thought in terms of a university or a school as the unit of analysis. I knew that schools created and maintained connections with other schools and the outside community, but what I didn’t really understand was the extent that all these entities have effectively merged.  This is why the ecosystem analogy is apt. The parts of schools are not only interacting with other parts and outside actors; they are dependent and cooperative with entities well removed from their own cooperation.   It is like the bird that eats berries on top of a tree in interacting with soil bacteria that allow the roots to take advantage of minerals many steps removed.

The coordinating mechanism is a kind of distributed decision making process. All the various actors are responding to the changing circumstances, incentives and opportunities. The mature educational ecosystem provides lots of shared services or at least opportunities that all can use. This makes the power of big institutions less overwhelming and empowers smaller institutions. It levels the playing field when everybody has access to resources that once were concentrated only in well-established institutions.

All this means that we are on the threshold of a new age of higher education. This is the same revolution experienced by big industry in the 1970s and 1980s. That was when the advantage of the big and established organizations eroded. You didn’t need to have in-house services when such things were available by outside vendors cheaper and more efficiently. The education establishment hung on a bit longer providing full services.  In fact, the positions of the majors strengthened as customers moved to prestige providers. There were few alternative products and it was hard to unbundle them. The value of the name was strong.  

I think this is changing rapidly. Educational wealth has been distributed wider. You can get a great education all over America and sometimes you don’t even have to enter a prestigious university program or a university program at all. The connections are all over the place now. 

In my old world, you went through different stages. I remember one book I read called them “boxes of life.” You didn’t skip them and you rarely went back. You graduated HS; some went to college; you got out four years later and went to work for the next thirty or forty years and then retired. You were done with formal education for the most part the day you graduated. Today things are different. You have to keep learning.  Students of various ages and occupations are mixing. Now you might go back to school or at least formal training many times during a working life. This education can be delivered in a variety of ways, at a variety of times by a variety of providers. The traditional four-year institution enjoys no advantages and the paradigm that brings people in at the bottom, processes them through a set program and graduates them at the end may in fact be a liability.  

The new paradigm is much more customized.  No two people take exactly the same coursework. Their needs are not the same. No one institution can satisfy all the needs. The expertise will not be available at any one institution.  The expertise may not be available at all. It needs to be created in the process of the interaction of learning and teaching. It is an interesting new world.

My pictures show the New York Public library up top and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia below. From the trip, but not much related to what I have written.