'Clarity of thought.' The case for investing more public dollars in higher education.
The future funding of public education is commanding a lot of attention across Kentucky. For a perspective on this and other economic issues of the times, Tom Martin talked with Cornell University Professor of Economics Robert Frank during his visit to the campus of Eastern Kentucky University as guest speaker in the university’s Chautauqua Lecture Series.
Q: In recent years here in Kentucky there has been a trend favoring the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) at the expense of the liberal arts and the humanities. What do you make of that?
A: Obviously the technical fields are important. There are good job opportunities in them. But we can get a bit of a lesson if we look to the most prosperous company in the world, which would be Apple. Apple has long celebrated the need to meld the technological fields with the liberal arts. It's only when you have the marriage of those two that you get the maximum value out of any idea. So, I think failure to stress those subjects at the higher learning levels has been a really costly trend.
Q: Can you talk about the long-term impact of declining state support of public universities?
A: Yes. When people are looking for a place to live, they think “Well, what are the opportunities for my kids gonna be in this place where I'm thinking about living?” If schools are low quality, that makes a place unattractive as a destination. So, if you have a company thinking to come here, they're going to be asking themselves ‘how can we recruit the kind of ambitious, high-quality workforce we need if families coming here don't see any avenues to get their children educated properly?’ I think it's a very short-sighted view toward public investment that would be driving a decision like that.
Q: What’s your elevator pitch for higher education?
A: When you meet somebody who's well trained in critical thinking, it's immediately apparent to you. We’re living in a world now where people can doctor photographs. They can shout fake news. They can spin a conspiracy theory. If you're not equipped to think skeptically about the arguments people make to you, then you're ever more at risk in the environment we inhabit now. The liberal arts curriculum teaches you clarity of thought. And that's not something that you get in the STEM curriculum. So, no, I don't think the emphasis to move away from those so-called “softer” subjects is at all well advised.
Q: You have suggested that a main driver in the underfunding of public education is lower tax rates, the “trickle-down” effect. Can you expand on that?
A: We've had a long movement especially here in the United States whereby the people at the top of the earnings ladder have been lobbying very hard for lower tax rates, perhaps in the sincere belief that that would stimulate the economy, that the growth we would get would somehow make up for the lost revenue from the lower rates. In no country has that hope panned out. The people at the top do have higher post-tax incomes by a considerable magnitude as result of their efforts to low-er their tax rates, but the irony in all of that is that the happiness they hope to achieve by having more money to spend has been illusory. I don't think it’s a mean-spirited cognitive error. They aren’t thinking in those terms deliberately and getting the wrong answer. I think it's just totally natural. When you pay higher taxes, your absolute purchasing power goes down, but your relative purchasing power is exactly the same as be-fore.
Q: You drill down into this even further in your recent book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
A: The people who think they've succeeded entirely on the strength of their own talent and effort tend to feel entitled to keep all the money that's come their way. We've done experiments where we remind people that the good things that happen to them weren't entirely of their own doing and that simple prompt causes them to be more generous. The simplest experiment was one where people were asked in one group to name a good thing that had happened to them and then list 3 things that had contributed to that thing happening that they had nothing whatsoever to do with. External causes. Another group was asked to name a good thing that had happened to them and list 3 things they personally had done to help cause this good thing to happen. A third group, a control group, was asked just to tell us about a good thing that happened, never mind why. At the end, people were given a bonus for completing the survey and an opportunity to contribute some part or all of their bonus to one of three charities. The ones who had named external causes for the good thing that had happened to them were 25 percent more generous in their gifts to the charities than the ones who listed things that they had done to cause the good thing to happen. So, just reflecting on the fact that if you're successful; sure, you worked hard; sure, you were talented, but you probably had a break or two along the way, too. If you can just put people in mind of that fact, they become much more generous and willing to support investments for the common good.
Q: So, do we need a mindset reset?
A: It's hard to get people to think in these terms. I've found that if you try to remind people that they've been lucky that there’ve been external things that have helped them along they tend to get angry and defensive. Instead, what seems to be much more effective is simply to ask your successful friends, ‘can you think of any examples of lucky breaks you enjoyed along your path to the top?’ For some reason, people don't get angry when they hear that question. They think about it. You can see their eyes light up when they think of an example. They explain to you about an episode that was fortunate in their early days and then that kindles the memory of a second example. They tell you about that too and their excitement builds and suddenly they're asking you ‘why aren't we investing more heavily in the schools so other people will have a chance to succeed like I did?’
Tom Martin’s Q&A appears every two weeks in the Herald-Leader’s Business Monday section. This is an edited version of the interview. To listen to it, find the podcast on Kentucky.com. The interview will air on this week’s edition of Eastern Standard, Thursday at 11 am on 88.9 WEKU.
This story was originally published April 22, 2018 at 8:00 PM with the headline "'Clarity of thought.' The case for investing more public dollars in higher education.."