House of Eratosthenes

An intellectual is someone whose end product is ideas. Not everybody who produces an idea is an intellectual because there are many intellectually demanding ideas that end up as products or services such as brain surgery or computer operating systems, etc. But those kinds of things differ in the sense in that there is an external test of the validity of the ideas, other than the approval of one’s peers. For deconstructionists, the only test is whether other deconstructionists like what he is saying. But for a financial wizard, he may be held in awe by his contemporaries and yet if he goes broke his ideas are regarded as failures. Consider that between the two World Wars, intellectuals promoted pacifism to the point they impeded the military build up of any military deterrents against Hitler or Japan, and yet men paid with their lives in the beginning of the war especially because Britain and America had far inferior military equipment. Men died needlessly but no one ever held them accountable for what they said.

Perhaps it is still unclear? If you need to see it in action, look no further than Harvard (via American Thinker):

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”

Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”
:
“It seems that Harvard is trying to save money by shifting costs to sick people,” said Mary C. Waters, a professor of sociology. “I don’t understand why a university with Harvard’s incredible resources would do this. What is the crisis?”

Gee, I dunno. What could it be?

The power of the horse blinders is just dazzling, mind-blowing. Especially with that professor-of-classics guy whining about “corporatization.” Corporations have been around for a long time. What does it take to live through the last six years and watch this “landmark reform” of the health care system, by government, with the government legislation and the government enforcement and the government scandals and government this and government that…soon afterward there follows a change you don’t like, and you leap to the “corporatization” angle to explain it? Corporate action on this has been passive and reactive. That’s how it works with the law. Corporations sit around, and watch, see what they’re required to do & what they’re allowed to do, then they make a plan to navigate through it all. So if there’s a sudden change in ultimate effect, coming after a sudden change in the law, it’s probably not a coincidence and it’s probably not because a corporation rolled out of bed with a hot new idea.

There are those who may complain, with some legitimacy, that a bit too much energy is expended on noticing how self-deluded today’s Obama supporters and ObamaCare supporters and hippies and proggies and lefties and liberals really are. I can certainly see the concern. But it’s episodes like this that provide the rebuttal, that show the necessity of noticing. Just look at the simplicity of the ideas that aren’t taking hold, somehow: “If you pay for more stuff, or force someone to pay for more stuff, it’s going to cost more money.” Intellectual or not, you have to be standing in a very low position for an idea such as that to go sailing over your head. But you can tell from the quotes that these intellectuals managed to get ‘er done. Outrage in year N that such-and-such a thing is “not covered” and the suffering do not have “access” (kaching, kaching) to health are. Then government rolls out the plan, and we have outrage in year N+1 that costs are going up. Uh, yeah costs are going up. Of course they are. They’re supposed to; the system is paying for more stuff. Duh.

The takeaway from this? Ideas shape the mind, just as the mind shapes the ideas. We all know this is true, we just don’t talk about it as often as we should. There is a certain discipline involved in doing the brain surgery, computer operating systems, other “intellectual” pursuits that aren’t intellectual in vocation because they involve some external test validating the merit of the idea. There is an entirely different discipline involved in the formation of ideas that are never to be put into practice, never to leave the realm of ideas, in the manufacture of consensus that is “right” because, and only because, it is consensus. When “the only test is whether other deconstructionists like what he is saying.”

It rots the brain.

The Harvard Profs merely were expecting the ‘corporation’ (Harvard has over 1B in its endowment from what I recall) to merely ‘absorb’ the costs, i.e “they have plenty of money.” Are they really this dense on economics? I’m reminded of Cosmo Kramer telling Seinfeld about ‘writing it off’ and can’t believe they’re that obtuse.

http://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ?t=19s
- Wamphyr | 01/08/2015 @ 06:32
Are they really this dense on economics?

Yes.

I think I can help a bit with this one. (I live and work around academics, and I’ve got more graduate hours than the average bear). Anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but most profs I know have never left school. Think on that for a sec. They went straight from high school, to college, to grad school, to college. For them, money has never come from anywhere except Daddy and the government.

Further, academic types — Sowell’s “intellectuals” — have the world’s most peculiar set of incentives. Their work ends with ideas because that’s how they get paid. To remain employed (become “tenured”), one must publish. The catch is, only original work gets published. Which leaves our Humanities people in quite a pickle. How does one say something new about Shakespeare, or the Civil War, or Plato? The easiest way is to make everything political, and then expand the concept of “politics” until it covers everything — “the personal is the political,” like that guy said. So you end up with profs endlessly noodling about their pet causes and hangups, arguing that these are the only things that matter, because Social Justice. Plato has nothing to teach us — he’s a Dead White Male — but some tranny performance artist spews wisdom from every orifice.

[If anyone is interested, I’m going to put up some inside-baseball stuff about academia on the group blog.)
- Severian | 01/08/2015 @ 07:43
[…] to Morgan’s piece, here, I can tell y’all a few inside-baseball things about the academic-industrial complex. I […]
- Explaining Academia: “Theory” | Rotten Chestnuts | 01/08/2015 @ 09:02
How is (wearing) Horse Blinders any different than Idiot Savant?
Now, let’s move on to what “elite” (perhaps even “award winning”) actually means, and who gets to bestow the title.
- CaptDMO | 01/08/2015 @ 09:05
[…] And they’re lavishly compensated in other ways, too, as our friends at Harvard have so thoughtfully illustrated for us. And that’s why Sowell’s definition of an “intellectual” (which is […]
- Explaining Academia: Egghead Economics | Rotten Chestnuts | 01/16/2015 @ 12:47

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Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals at HarvardThursday, January 8th, 2015

Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals at Harvard
Thursday, January 8th, 2015