Choosing which degrees to support faces all of the problems of central planning. One problem is that if colleges are told to create more STEM degrees than the number of students who are already capable of studying for those degrees, it will encourage the creation of empty "STEM" degrees like "bachelor of arts in information studies" that are even more useless than an English major because everybody will know why those degree were created.
It also creates boom-and-bust cycles. I graduated with a degree in physics, just as the Cold War collapsed and mandatory retirement for professors was outlawed. There was an absolute glut of physicists all looking for jobs at once.
Or at least should engage in central planning. If you're spending billions of dollars, maybe a little planning is a good thing, even if it's centralized.
We should subsidize it at community colleges with large cohort sizes and commensurate lower marginal costs.
We should not subsidize it at schools trying to play the rankings game with artificially small cohort sizes and commensurate high costs to the taxpayer for no additional payoff.
Why should we subsidize it at all? Because it's a public good.
It's a public good because of non-excludable positive externalities on our polity, and that's not reflected in the market price due to market failure. The positive externalities are having voters that understand history, sociology, political science and economics. This is good because it prevents populism and because it creates voters who are able to critically evaluate public policy.
> This is good because it prevents populism and because it creates voters who are able to critically evaluate public policy.
I certainly do not believe in the slightest that humanities graduates can “critically evaluate public policy” any better than, say, STEM graduates. In fact, they’re probably worse. They were the ones pushing Marxism on Americans back in the day and similar insanities today, like eg. demonizing and defunding the police. I believe that it makes them negative externality.
Now, you may of course disagree. But the point is that there is no agreement that they are a public good.
> I certainly do not believe in the slightest that humanities graduates can “critically evaluate public policy” any better than, say, STEM graduates.
They are better at evaluating certain types of policies than STEM graduates.
I've met a lot of engineers who are incapable of understanding what a social construct is, or the societal consequences of hate speech, or who don't know what market failure is, or who are totally ignorant of the history of slavery and the indigenous genocide, who don't know anything about international relations, or various other things which are just child's play for humanities graduates which all have deep relevance to certain policies. This shows me that a polity with just STEM graduates and tradespeople is a polity that can't function properly. Without humanities education (whether self-education or otherwise), the only response to Biden talking about "white supremacy" in his speech is pitchforks and fascism, because voters miss the reasons why Biden would make such an utterance. The only response to a carbon tax is pitchforks, because they don't even understand what a market failure is. The only response to transgender protection is pitchforks, because they don't even know what a social construct is. STEM graduates don't know what they don't know, and they label their blind spots as negative externalities out of a combination of supreme arrogance (primarily), ignorance and confusion.
Policy evaluation isn't really the main point. The antidote to populism is the point.
> demonizing and defunding the police.
The topic of police demonstrates my point. It's only people from a humanities background that showed an interest in critiquing the police, and they were the ones running the studies on policing going back decades. The STEM folks had zero interest. They'd rather ignore the situation rather than study and address it. That's why society can't function with just STEM graduates. They don't know what they don't know.
> But the point is that there is no agreement that they are a public good.
I understand that fascists and nationalists and right-wingers are against humanities education because it provides an antidote to their toxic ideology. And that's about 30% of the population against it by default. Argumentum ad populum. That doesn't detract from the correctness of what I'm saying.
> This shows me that a polity with just STEM graduates and tradespeople is a polity that can't function properly.
The word “properly” does a lot of work here. In context of the previous sentences, it most straightforwardly means “it cannot function according to the left-wing likings”. And I very much agree with this: if humanities department (as they currently exists) were actually calling the shots, the society would indeed “function properly”, i.e. it would be left wing in all its policies. However, nobody then should be surprised that the right wingers most certainly do not consider funding humanities departments to be public goods: they believe that what these departments promote is in fact the opposite of good.
The rest of your comment is some sort of weird attempt to convince me that the society ran only by STEM grads would actually not be good, which is not the view I ever espoused: note how I added “say, STEM graduates”, which clearly implies that they are just an example. I hope that you do not actually have a humanities degree, otherwise you should ask them for you money back!
> I understand that fascists and nationalists and right-wingers are against humanities education because it provides an antidote to their toxic ideology.
I guess it’s easy to assume that your opponents are just wrong and “toxic” in everything they say, but if you make them understand that a reasoned discussion with you is impossible, given how you dismiss it all a priori, they might come to a conclusion that the only way to achieve their goals is, as Clausewitz said, politics by other means. This is an extremely dangerous way to proceed, and I think you should not be so convinced about your side’s invincibility. The society is negotiated peace, and you’d better work to make future negotiations possible.
You seem to strangely think that the liberal arts uniquely boosts left-wing policy as if that's not true for knowledge and education generally. The glimmer of fact you've observed is that useful domains inform change, and change happens to be advocated for by the left most of the time. Medical sciences, part of traditional STEM, informed the covid response, and surprise, the reactionaries were against that. Climatology, same story. Transgender treatment, which is psychiatry and peadiatrics, same story. So it's not liberal arts per se. It's just facts of the world that justify change, and reactionaries who are opposed to any change (unless it points in the direction of allowing negative externalities such as pollution to persist or right-wing authoritarianism) regardless of the discipline it's informed by, STEM or liberal arts.
Further, neoclassical economics is typically considered a centre-right or at least neoliberal paradigm and is taught to all econ students. The way of addressing market failure that I mentioned (e.g carbon tax) is actually a right wing preferred response to climate change. It's only the hard right which doesn't understand this and opposes a carbon tax. Perfect example of the need for liberal arts. The educated old-school fiscal conservatives know better. Because they are educated in these topics.
International relations which can inform non-pacifist intervention is taught by the liberal arts. At least this domain is not tied to the left-right spectrum in any way. It's simply informing foreign policy. It's pretty valuable to have voters who know foreign policy, left or right!
The solution, going by your opinion that no left-wing boosting thing should be funded, is clearly not to defund climatology, medicine, sociology, history, economics and international relations. You don't stop agitation for change. You just get uninformed agitation like the Bolsheviks. A smart left that is capable of picking and choosing what to change is a necessity, because their moral impulse to drive needed change in the face of perceived unfairness isn't going away by removing their education.
"I guess it’s easy to assume that your opponents are just wrong and “toxic” in everything they say"
I assume the nationalists and polluters to be wrong and toxic, yeah. There's such a thing as the false balance fallacy. Not everyone is extended a hand of understanding if they are actively dumping waste into my backyard and lobbying for policies to enable that.
I consider myself to be center-right economically, in favor of lower taxes and lean regulation and smaller entitlements, so my comment is about the anti-intellectual reactionary right. I can see eye to eye with non-science denying anti-authoritarians individualists (which is to mean non-nationalists, for example, because nationalism is a collectivist morality) on both the left and the right.
> You seem to strangely think that the liberal arts uniquely boosts left-wing policy as if that's not true for knowledge and education generally.
Why then education and knowledge boosted right wing policy as recently as 15 years ago? As recently as 20 years ago, college graduates were something like 50% more likely to identify as republican than democrat. How could that be?
> change happens to be advocated for by the left most of the time
Yes, and that change is often very much a bad thing, and the “experts” advocating for it are very much wrong. Consider, for example, the transgender issue you brought up. In UK and Sweden, for example, “experts” on transgender care for past few years have advocated similar policies to the ones advocated for by “experts” in US today. In past few months, however, “experts” in both countries had a big turnaround there, and now very much advocate against policies promoted in US (eg. against puberty blockers, surgeries for minors etc). Regardless of which “experts” are right, the others are wrong. If ours are wrong, they are doing indeed criminal damage to children. Who will oppose them? Same point can be made about COVID “experts”, or, to a lesser degree, climate change policy.
That’s the problem with experts: if people notice they are full of shit (and you often don’t even need a lot of expertise for that, when policy proposals are completely incoherent, like “keep churches closed but strip clubs open”), the whole notion that education is a public good really stops being so convincing, and for good reason too.
> You don't stop agitation for change. You just get uninformed agitation like the Bolsheviks.
So I should keep funding humanities, otherwise they’ll start murderous revolution? I, uh, remain unconvinced.
In all, the fact of the matter is that trust in institutions and in media is steadily falling down, and this makes me happy, because I don’t believe they deserved much of this for last 30 years or so, and what trust their predecessors have earned, they are working very hard at squandering. On their carcasses, new life will grow once again.
I've already outlined the dichotomy between educated old-school free trade fiscal conservatives (basically, me), a dying breed, which is a position informed by an understanding of economics (comparative advantage and so on) and the modern reactionary conservatives who reject economics (along with all other liberal arts and sciences) in favor of their populist agenda. The emergence of the latter is all the more reason in support of a liberal arts education. The last 15 years has seen the polity fracture along educational lines, and the consequences that are on display. It used to be along wealth lines.
The trans treatment issue and covid response issue is just like any other intersection of academic study and public policy. You balance the pros and cons based on the empirical evidence. Sometimes policy makers may get that balance wrong one way or the other. Treatment may lead to life-destroying outcomes X percent of the time, but lack of treatment can lead to life destroying outcomes (e.g empirically increased chance of suicide) Y percent of the time. Lockdowns are a trade off between your freedom of movement and the freedom of old people to not die. It's not an easy issue, because you've got the incomplete and evolving science on the one hand, and public morality on the other, combined with a dash of administrative incompetence. So you shouldn't presume that getting the balance wrong in one direction is criminality but getting it wrong in the other (thereby increasing suicides) isn't, or that there's any better alternative that involves uneducated people making such decisions.
"So I should keep funding humanities, otherwise they’ll start murderous revolution?"
We literally almost got that if Trump and his uneducated supporters succeeded in undermining democracy, and we may yet get that. Education is an antidote to populism, whether that's the Bolshevik left flavor or the fascist right flavor.
> It's a public good because of non-excludable positive externalities on our polity, and that's not reflected in the market price due to market failure. The positive externalities are having voters that understand history, sociology, political science and economics.
That's nice positive externalities to have, but not once have I seen any evidence that the average humanities graduate possesses those qualities you claim they have.
IOW, it's a nice thing to have, but what makes you think that it comes from a humanities degree?
