We’ve blogged before about Berea College, a school that “accepts only applicants from low-income families” and doesn’t charge a dime of tuition.  Of course, they have a $1.1 billion endowment, “which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest.” 

But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

That’s the kind of school I like, a place where literary theory can’t soar to ridiculous places on waxen wings because those wings are dirty from shoveling manure.  Because it charges no tuition, Berea gets much of its income from - ta-da! - its endowment.  And with endowments between $16 and $35 billion, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford ought to take notice.

With its hilly campus, Georgian president’s mansion and old brick buildings, Berea looks much like any elite New England college. But its operating budget is less than half that of Amherst, which has a $1.7 billion endowment and about 100 more students. Faculty pay is much lower, and the student-faculty ratio higher […] To satisfy the work requirement, some students have jobs in the academic departments, administrative offices and labs, while others are assigned to the college farm, the workshops that make and sell traditional mountain crafts (its handmade brooms, especially, are well-known treasures) or the college-owned hotel, which anchors the town square.

Sounds a little like the College of the Ozarks, another school with a similar work requirement and a much smaller, more realistic budget.

In Ideas Have Consequences, that seminal 20^th century work of conservative philosophy, Richard Weaver explains that property rights are one of modern man’s last ties to God, a physical testimony that something transcends the physical world.  As long as property rights are respected, as they generally have been in Western thought and life, mankind is free to redeem the world through good, hard, creative, productive work.  Michael Heller has a new book that may challenge some of this received wisdom about property rights, though.  It’s called The Gridlock Economy.

The Gridlock Economy takes aim at one of the strongest intuitions in Anglo-American thought: that property is a good thing, and more property is almost always better. In fact, views on property, since about the time of John Locke, have bordered on reverential. Locke, for instance, described property as a natural right given to man by God as the reward for labor.

Heller, “argues that creating too many property rights can actually wreck markets.”  His thesis is this:

A property right creates a gatekeeper-someone whose permission is needed to use that thing we’ve just called “property.” That’s fine, but when you have too many gatekeepers-too many people whose permission is necessary to undertake a given project-that fact alone can create gridlock. It is one thing to get, say, five people to agree to something, but if the number is 500 or even 5 million, the project is sure to go up in smoke.

This essay about the book is worth reading and explains how the concept of “mass permission” impedes the market.  “Mass permission.”  Sounds like a euphemism for “democracy.”

Oil prices fell sharply today—again. The stock market is on a surge. But inflation is on the rise, and food prices are higher than ever. The market is in a 6.0 Richter scale level flux. Opinion abounds on how to fix it, including doing nothing, but it might be that even the power of the United States government is no match for juggernaut market forces.

Light crude oil has dropped nearly $15 a barrel this week from its high of $147 last Friday. Despite the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, financial institutions issued positive reports, spurring a rapid recovery of Wall Street stocks. Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wachovia, and Citigroup all were on the rise Wednesday morning.

Still, inflation reports this morning were bleak, up 5 percent on the year. And food prices continue to increase, up 1 percent in June after growing just 0.3 percent the month before. While a stronger stock market is encouraging news for the economy, most Americans feel the real effects in their wallet at the grocery store. Even if we haven’t hit a technical recession, doesn’t mean Americans  the perception that we have isn’t real.

Politicians specialize in putting band-aids on these perceptions, and the recent round of federal regulations is a perfect example. Not wanting major banks to fail, the Fed has stepped in to prop up what amounts to a business failing because they did not operate well. While this would never be done for a failing hardware store, banks (and airlines, according to the government) are critical components of American infrastructure that must be supported.

Not all in Congress agree with the government’s recent decisions. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) lashed out against the takeovers in a hearing Tuesday: “Giving the Fed more power is like giving the neighborhood kid who broke your window playing baseball in the street a bigger bat and thinking that will fix the problem. When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America. The Treasury Secretary is asking for a blank check to buy as much Fannie and Freddie debt or equity as he wants.”

The politically hot nature of the economy is fast becoming central to the Presidential campaign. With talks of a troop withdraw from Iraq already in the works, the war on terror may take a back seat come August and September. No matter who wins, they will face an array of economic problems, from the continuing fallout of the mortgage crisis to high energy costs to inflationary concerns.

In the second in a series of articles examining the presidential candidates’ positions on key campaign issues, WORLD political reporter Jamie Dean takes a look at John McCain and Barack Obama’s competing economic proposals and how they reveal the candidates’ values and views on government:

With presidential elections less than four months away, the economy dominates polls as voters’ top political concern. High gas prices, rising unemployment, a housing downturn, and predictions of a recession have pushed concerns like immigration and the Iraq War farther down the list.

When it comes to the economy, the candidates offer sharply contrasting visions that underline their fundamental views about the role of government. Meanwhile, economists are uncertain how realistic either candidate’s plan might be.

Read Jamie’s entire analysis here.

Campaign Issues series:
McCain and Obama on abortion

The Dow Jones Industrial Average might be showing a bear market, but Forbes magazine has some good news: it could be worse. 

A bear market is one that is 20% below its latest peak, which the Dow Jones reached on July 2, at 21% below its October 2007 peak.  However, citing rallies in the strength of the dollar and super major oil companies, Forbes reports that “bearish expectations for European rate rises and US employment were dashed by a dose of moderately favorable news.”

Much of the media attention to the economy recently has focused on the many weaknesses in the market.  Business analysts, however, are getting increasingly vocal with economic growth forecasts, noting in particular that economic downturns are part of the natural market cycle—and very good times to invest.  Consumer spending rose 0.4 percent in May, and has increased over 2 percent in the quarter.

“The numbers weren’t as bad as they could have been,” one New Jersey trading managersaid, referring to a report this week that shows62,000 jobs were lost in June.  “Some people had feared 100,000 in job losses or more.”  The unemployment rate held steady at 5.5 percent in June, despite a glut of media attention to the reports of job losses.

Meanwhile, although the soaring price of oil is causing crunches in the airline industry and elsewhere, energy shares are helping steady the US market.  “It was energy shares that supported Wall Street as stocks climbed out of their recent trough,” Reuters.com noted.

The dollar is also rebounding against the euro, despite fears leading into the July 4 weekend that an interest rate hike by the European Central Bank would hurt the dollar, which has been struggling recently.  The ECB’s decision to raise their rate to 4.25 percent was initially feared to be an aggressive policy against the dollar, but the ECB said on Thursday their move was non-aggressive, intending only to fight inflation.  Currently, one dollar trades for 1.57 Euros or 1.98 British pounds.

I dislike the word feminist.  It’s just so loaded.  But that’s what this article is about, until we come up with a better word.  Sandra Tsing Loh at The Atlantic Monthly says feminists have come to some unusual places in fifty years: getting out of the house, getting college degrees and terrific jobs, and then: wanting to go back to the house.  What gives?  Weren’t women supposed to take over the world? 

[A]ren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file […]

Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks to continually oppress their wives.

Of course, it’d still be hard for some women to admit this, to admit that they want to be home.  Just like it’s hard for more conservative stay-at-home-moms to admit that they might rather be out somewhere, working.  I still think the issue of working moms is too contentious to receive the more nuanced treatement it needs, at least from the Church.  Most of us Evangelicals are still too quick to condemn moms who work, moms who send their kids to pre-school, moms who do anything but stay at home and teach their children Latin. 

Until the home becomes as viable a workplace as it was a hundred years ago - when so many businesses and farms and means of employ were in the home or nearby - families are going to have to make tough decisions about what to do with the children, and what to do with the parents who tend to them.  It’s not a black and white matter of either A) loving your children or B) loving some selfish career.  Don’t you think?

Sociologist and professor Dalton Conley says that the Democrats need a new New Deal, and it should look nothing like the old one.  Not because it was bad, but because it won’t work in our current culture.  Back then:

Government and big business had an understanding, famously embodied by the line, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Employers, in turn, agreed to pay their (male) employees a living wage and provide generous benefits. Men, in turn, had an obligation to provide for their dependents. To complete the sequence, the state would step in if any of these links broke down by providing a minimal level of support in the case of unemployment, death, desertion or disability.

These days, though, families are splintered, and that kind of deal won’t hold up.  Conley suggests in this essay new ways the Helping Hand of the Government can come forward and help Americans in health care (the government should form health insurance cooperatives and assign the uninsured to a group), education (the government should form investment accounts for retirement savings), education (the government should make universities make their courses free online), and so on. 

The New Deal ushered in the era of Giant Government, and any kind of new New Deal would only anger the beast and make it bigger.  But Conley addresses real problems.  It’s his solutions that frighten me.

Thomas Sowell says the best colleges and universities aren’t worth the money, because the money buys prestige that isn’t all that prestigious.  The prestige machine is a great big machine with a lot of moving parts, and none of those parts is willing to abdicate its role in the machine.  There’s parents and kids, who are obsessed “about getting into a prestige college or university is part of the social scene of our time.”  There’s the media and the ranking publications, who sell a lot of magazines promising to tell you who’s really the best.  Even though these rankings “typically measure all sorts of inputs - but not outputs.”  Like what kids know, and can do, when they leave.  Then there’s the Accrediting Beast, who “measure how much money is spent on this or that, how many professors have tenure and other kinds of inputs.  What they don’t measure is the output - what kind of education the students end up with.”

A new think tank in Washington is trying to shift the emphasis from inputs to outputs. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity is headed by Professor Richard Vedder, who gives the U.S. News rankings a grade of D. Measuring the inputs, he says, is “roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses” […]  The CCAP study uses several measures of educational output, including the proportion of a college’s graduates who win awards like the Rhodes Scholarships or who end up listed in Who’s Who in America, as well as the ratings that students give the professors who teach them.

What quantifiable measurements - because, let’s face it, that’s what it’s going to take - should measure the quality of education received?  Sowell likes the idea of including how many graduates go on to get Ph.D.s: “Small colleges dominate the top ten in sending their alumni on to get doctorates. Grinnell College, which was not among the top ten on either the U.S. News list or on Professor Vedder’s list, sends a higher percentage of its graduates on to get Ph.D.s than does either Harvard or Yale.”  What kind of other measurements would you include?  I like the idea of including:

• Amount of annual donations from alumni, divided by the average salary of alumni (to prevent big Ivies from winning that one out of the gate)
• Job satisfaction (and life satisfaction) statistics, five and ten years out of college
• Percentage of graduates working in non-profits
• Percentage of graduates working in politics and civil service
• Percentage of graduates working in the military
• Percentage of graduates who publish
• Percentage of graduates who go on to receive professional degrees (J.D., M.D., D.M.D., M.B.A.)

What else?

In the spirit of recent posts on napping, vacations, and work in general, you might enjoy reading a new book on the same general subject: How to Be Useful, “a self-described ‘beginner’s guide to not hating work’” by Megan Hustad. 

Rather than bombard us with, say, seven habits of highly successful people, or try to tell us what color our parachute is, Hustad explores some fundamental ways in which people can be happier at their jobs by making themselves more useful, even if they’re not at their Dream Job, or are stuck working for The Man.

Hustad’s career counseling comes at a fortuitous time for the under-30 set entering the workforce and struggling to find their niche, while their older colleagues wonder, sometimes bitterly, how to best manage coworkers in this generation.

I think this must be a backlash that’s been coming on since the Industrial Revolution.  With the specialization of the free market economies of the west, and now globally, over the past hundred years, people have been convinced they could do any job they wanted to do.  That’s how we end up with What Color is Your Parachute?  You like music, you like beaches, you like business, so why not open up a recording studio in Pensacola?  You like numbers, you like drawing, you like science, so why not find the one niche job drawing illustrations for NASA learning modules?  Problem is, we’ve convinced ourselves that we should only have jobs we love, and when the jobs fall through, or don’t live up to expectations, we pout. 

The modern economy is a gelatinous, fluid beast, and it places families in unconventional situations.  I am not sure how things were in the 5^th century BC, or in 5^th century AD, or even in the 15^th century AD, but in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the agricultural economy meant that a lot of people worked at home, which is to say on the farm.  Men worked all day, women worked all day, and somehow, the kids got mostly fed and mostly educated and became mostly adults.  But now, in the last fifty years or more, the economy demands people work elsewhere.  Men work in an office, and now a lot of women work in an office, and that means somebody’s got to do something about the kids.  It’s not an easy situation.  Sometimes, the kids go to daycare.  Sometimes, the dads and moms decide that the moms will stay home and tend to the kids until school begins.  Sometimes the moms stay home and do school, too.  Sometimes they decide the impossible: that they will both work outside the home and both stay at home.  That’s what Marc and Amy Vachon decided:

After Maia was born, they negotiated part-time schedules, which turned out to be the easy part. Amy worked four days a week, Monday through Thursday; Marc worked three 10-hour days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

The division of work led naturally to the division of child care. On the days he went to the office, Marc would leave early and bike to work (having only one car, despite two commutes, is one way they are able to afford life on two part-time salaries), while Amy did the entire morning child routine. On Monday and Wednesday, when she worked too, she would take Maia to family day care across the street from their house. On Friday, she and Maia would spend the day together. On Tuesday and Thursday, Amy would sleep a little later and leave Maia in Marc’s care. If Maia got sick on a Monday, they agreed in advance that Marc would take off from work, and Amy would do the same if the sick day was a Wednesday. It was a schedule that continued after Theo was born three years later.

Whew.  I’m exhausted.  The economic concept of the “division of labor” doesn’t mean that everybody divides everything equally.  It means they divide things equitably.  Which is to say that economic creators (e.g., individuals, nations, etc.) specialize in something they do well.  Same goes for the home, I always thought.  But, more power to parents who bypass healthy equity for radical equality.  I couldn’t imagine a worse situation in my home.  But still interesting to see others try it.