Oh yeah, that tuition debate

I've been fairly lucky. College has not really cost me a whole ton of money. In fact, by the time I'm done with college, I probably won't even rack up $15,000 worth of student loans. But that's the beauty of attending the University of Houston, which despite the lack of cultural and educational recognition in comparison to the two institutions located in Austin and College Station, the school provides the best bang for your buck in post-secondary education at least here in Texas.

I've heard three arguments about the cost of collegiate education and what to do about it -- one from Presidential candidate Ron Paul, one from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and another from Mark Cuban.

Ron Paul, in yet another item he attributes the federal government for fucking up, claims that federal government involvement has driven up the price of tuition at colleges. His general argument is that because of governmental involvement in the subsidizing of education, it has allowed colleges to raise tuition to outrageous levels. Paul is advocating for the divorce of government and education because of his strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Thiel, in an interview with the conservative publication The National Review, opined that education is merely another economic bubble that is waiting to burst. He took it from a business standpoint for he believed that collegiate education had little return on investment. I would assume this comes from the fact that a lot of students emerge from college broke, up their neck in debt, and many times do not find jobs right away in the degree that they spent four, five, and six years working on.

Cuban wrote in his blog that student loans should be capped at $2,000. He feels that it would lead to a decrease in tuition costs because he thinks that the amount that can be secured by students through loans allows for colleges to charge more and more for tuition.

The cost of tuition has skyrocketed so much to the point where student debt has overtaken credit card debt to become the biggest debt crisis in the United States. In fact, the total amount of student debt in the United States has cracked $1 trillion. Ouch.

There's three reasons why most of us go or went to college -- one, we believe(d) that it is the only sensible path to a much more comfortable living; two, because our parents, teachers, and other peers instill(ed) in us the value of college, or three, both of the aforementioned reasons. It's especially true now as more and more people go to college than ever before.

There has been a major culture shift in the United States and the rising cost of tuition reflects that. However, I would stop short of saying that a supply-demand curve could be applied to it because any sort of equilibrium price that would exist is absolutely imaginary. As the United States transformed from mainly a blue-collar economy to a more service and information economy, businesses that specialized in providing services and information put more and more stock in having a collegiate-educated workforce, which spurred a greater demand for post-secondary education, which in turn led a rise in tuition as colleges had to find a way to pay to provide for more students. Not to mention, colleges and universities have seen a decrease in funding from state government since the 1970s (thus putting the burden of educational funding on the federal government), which led to even greater rises in tuition as enrollment continued to increase. While many students (including myself) still turn to the federal government loans for financial aid (which accounted for over 60% of financial aid that 2007-2008 graduates received), most higher education institutions are relying on additional private sources (donations) for funding in addition to tuition.

In short, I do believe that out of control tuition increases would have occurred even if the Higher Education Act of 1965 was never signed into law by President Johnson. I think more than anything the perceived value of higher education, through changes economic climate, drove up tuition costs. As higher education institutions started to cater to more students these institutions became more driven to provide more for their students, if it was by way of better residential facilities, better on-campus technology, better educational talent, better degree programs, or even additional degrees being offered and awarded.

So in response to each of the arguments:

I vehemently disagree with Ron Paul about blaming government intervention with rising tuition costs. Tuition was already rising in the 1960s as it is and as the economy transitioned away from blue collar jobs to service and information jobs, thus adding more value to post-secondary education, the explosion in the cost of tuition was going to happen regardless of whether or not the federal government stepped in and started subsidizing college students' education. Ironically the free market champion can actually blame the market: as the United States increasingly de-industrialized the economy as the information revolution started to take hold in the 1980s and 1990s, it sparked a movement amongst students to enroll in community colleges and four year universities to even remotely have a chance a comfortable living. And even then for many that has not proven to be a reality.

I also disagree with fellow libertarian Thiel, who fails to get that there's no real such thing as a legitimate, quantitative return on investment on education because any perceived return on investment is subjective. Literally, someone who went to college, from undergraduate to medical school and residency, totaling 12 years in college could say that they had a poor return on investment on their education if they questioned the value of making $160,000 a year yet be saddled with nearly $130,000 in student debt while someone else could be in the exact same situation and argue the opposite. Furthermore, education isn't a bubble -- if the only real way to make a decent living in today's service and information economy is to acquire the necessary knowledge to participate in today's service and information economy then students are going to turn to robust higher education.

I also disagree with Cuban for virtually the same reasons as I disagree with Paul: collegiate tuition rose because more students started to find more value in education as government funding for it (especially from the states) decreased for it. Like I said, even if the Higher Education Act of 1965 was never enacted, tuition would have still skyrocketed at a faster rate than inflation because of the transition away from a blue collar driven industrial economy.

Furthermore, I think what has to be analyzed, in my opinion, is what should and what shouldn't higher institutions of learning should force students to pay for and what should or shouldn't higher institutions of learning be providing for. How much should faculty really be paid? How much money do schools really need to function? Those are the questions that we really have to be asking before we can really start a discussion on how to lower the cost of tuition here in the United States

Me, Myself, and the Austrians, and the Keynesians.

If you ever read anything by Austrivangelist Ron Paul and Keynepologist Paul Krugman (I refer to both of them in humor because of Ron Paul's preaching of the Austrian school and Krugman's tireless defense of Keynes theories), it's obvious that one economic school resents the other. However, I give credit to both -- Paul is well versed and educated in Austrian theory and Krugman has won a Nobel Prize on Economics.

Most of you probably don't really know about the Austrian theory or the Keynesian theory, at least by name. However, nearly all of you know some form of it colloquially.

Austrian theory champions free markets, tying the money supply to the gold standard, believe credit cycles fuel business cycles, believe that inflation only comes in the form of monetary supply growth, and a rejection of math as a form of economic analysis. In Layman's terms, respectively: its that lassiez-faire concept you learned in U.S. history, its exchanging money for gold, it's securing loans and credit cards to buy more shit, it's things costing too much because there's too much money, and it's math being unable to predict what humans can do. Give credit where credit is due to the Austrians -- Hayek was screaming bloody murder about the prospects of a financial collapse early in 1929. You probably have read about what happened in October of that year. Paul raised red flags about the housing bubble as early as 2002.

On the other hand, Keynesian theory (even if it somewhat deviated from Keynes original theories as time went on), is the advocacy of government involvement in the economy, in the form of fiscal policy from the central bank, a large public sector to complement the private sector, and through government investment (spending) in the economy. A better way to put it is government stimuli, government banks, government stimulus programs, and government bailouts. The reasoning behind government intervention, according to Keynesians, that pretty much the free market can't do everything by itself. A cornerstone to Keynesian thought is the belief that aggregate demand is the preeminent driver of the economy. In the course of U.S. history, Keynesian economics seen its effect in the New Deal programs of the Great Depression, the post-World War II era, and the omnibus stimulus programs of the Bush and Obama administrations.

I believe that aggregate demand drives the economy, that the public sector is actually a valuable asset to the economy, that government can be good to promote economic stability, and the free market has the propensity to fuck up. I guess I can put on my Keynesian hat.

I believe that yes, access to credit can fuel demand, that loose credit is disastrous, that the free market side of the economy is what really puts our food on the table,  and unbridled confidence in the government to act as an insurance agency for an economy can prove extremely damaging to government fiscal policy. Well, I guess I can put on my Austrian hat as well.

At the same time, before the era of the Federal Reserve and the American mixed economy, there were still bubbles, recessions, and depressions. Railroad bubbles, fueled by unstable financing, set off economic depressions in 1873 (which, lasting until 1879, remains the longest period of economic contraction in U.S. history and was the first economic event to be called "The Great Depression") and again in 1893 (which was actually seen as worse than the event of 1873-79). The United States actually had three severe recessions in the 20th century before the Great Depression (in 1907, in 1918-1919 after World War I, and then the second part of that post-World War I recession in 1920-1921). In a demonstration of how bad things were -- it was J.P. Morgan himself that bailed out the U.S. Treasury in 1893 and Morgan inspired New York bankers to rally to reestablish confidence in the economy in 1907.

By the way, it was Panic of 1907, along with the numerous bank runs that had been taking places intermittently in the years previous, that gave birth to the Federal Reserve in 1913.

So taking history into consideration, it should be recognized economic booms and busts are standard, no matter what economic theory we subscribe to. There will still be economic bubbles that will plateau and then burst. There will still be credit bubbles because throughout the course of the past few centuries of human history, we've proven that no matter how hard we try, not everything can be paid up front and the acceptance of deferred payments will always be a cornerstone to an economy. There are winners and losers and capitalism; it can be argued its a mathematical outcome; but those that are "losers" in the capitalist economy can bring socioeconomic chaos.

There has to be a stabilizing check and balance on the free market -- of which government serves that role. I am not one to have total blind faith in the free market. Governments do make mistakes; we've seen plenty of them and thus I won't have total blind faith in the government, either. However, I'd rather have government involved in the economy than not be involved in it.

The Keynesian hat stays. I'll always err on the side of the mixed economy.

My apologies, Dr. Paul.

The Same Old NBA

The NBA is back. Like most others, I'm struggling to give a damn.

Nonetheless here we are less than two weeks before the season tips off on Christmas Day, and there are two glaring storylines persisting that illustrates the disarray of the National Basketball Association.

Kaiser David Stern, in a move out of egotistically driven, short-sighted stupidity, voided a trade between the Los Angeles Lakers, the Houston Rockets, and the New Orleans Hornets in the incident known as "The Trade for Chris Paul That Technically Happened, but Kaiser Stern Said It Never Happened." Sure the Rockets were getting fucked over in the trade anyway, but now the Rockets are stuck with two players (Luis Scola and Kevin Martin) who are hurt with no moves on the horizon to even rectify this by distraction, considering the Memphis Grizzlies beat their offer for Marc Gasol. The Lakers lost a major part of what was one of the greatest back courts ever assembled in the history of the National Basketball Association in Lamar Odom as part of the trade-fail fallout. The New Orleans Hornets ended up having to settle for a weaker package from the L.A. Clippers for Chris Paul.

The soon-to-be Brooklyn New Jersey Nets and the Orlando Magic are biting their own collective nails because of how much Dwight Howard means or could mean to the futures of each organization. It does not really help that the unhappy center probably has no real clue as to what the hell he really wants to do with himself.

In other words, it's the same old theme of small-market teams can't hold on to players and here comes the usual suspects stockpiling on talent.

Yet, in the end, it's the same old NBA.

I guess the real difference in today's NBA is that four teams (Lakers, Celtics, Heat, and Spurs), instead of two teams like it was in the 1980s (the Lakers and the Celtics) or one team in the 1990s (the Bulls), dominate the entire league. In addition, today's dominant quartet also differ in that, while the Lakers and Heat can count three of the best players in the NBA on their squads (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade), the three individually are not leagues beyond the rest of the premier players in the NBA. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird effectively ran the NBA in the 1980s, even with rising stars such as Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Charles Barkley. Jordan ran the NBA in the 1990s. And what I mean by "ran" is that the road to success that any other team was going to embark on during those eras ran through Johnson, Bird, and Jordan. Bryant, James, and Wade have not reached that point, even if Bryant's Lakers have made 3 straight NBA finals appearances and James and Wade form arguably the best 1-2 punch in the league since Bryant and Shaq.

Yet, it is the same old NBA as to where it is a lot more difficult to compete in this league than it should be. There's a reason with Howard wants to leave the Orlando Magic -- even he sees that unless the Magic waits years to build up cash or completely tanks their season, the Magic will never acquire a top-tier point guard or power forward. It's the reason why Chris Paul wants to leave New Orleans -- he knows he'll never see any robust talent around him to where he'll get a ring unless, like I said for Orlando, they lounge around and build up cash, or play for a lottery pick. And just wait about 3 years -- it will probably be the same situation in Chicago with Derrick Rose, even though Rose has a decent supporting cast around him.

Note two things:

• Since 1999, only three teams have won the Western Conference Championship in the NBA -- that's the Lakers, the Spurs, and the Mavericks.
• In each of the 3 years that an Eastern Conference team won the NBA title - (2004 with the Pistons, 2006 with the Heat, and 2008 with the Celtics), the Eastern Conference playoff seeding featured at least one team with a losing record -- in fact, the 2004 Eastern Conference Playoffs featured a 36-46 Boston Celtics team. The 2007-2008 Boston Celtics and the 2010-2011 Miami Heat are the only two teams since the 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls to even have home court advantage in the NBA Finals.

While the Lakers, Spurs, and Mavericks are all solid, competitive franchises in their own right, it is also a testament to the reality that there's no parity in the NBA -- as in, its not a wide open league in terms of who will win a league championship, unlike in the NFL, the NHL, and MLB. What that snowballs into is fan bases writing their own teams off, meaning no money for the franchises, meaning even further that teams, as I said before, will either wait and build up cash or hope that they end up with 50 or 60 losses. While I'll admit that I am a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, I am a bigger fan of basketball, and NBA basketball would vastly be more enjoyable if it wasn't just yet another season of the usual suspects.

If I Were A Poor Black Kid...

The other day, I probably read the most idealistic op-ed ever. And I mean ever.

Let me begin by saying that I did not grow up with a family that was well off. My mom and my grandparents financed their cost of living primarily by credit, and indeed we're paying for it now. However, I lived a pretty comfortable life growing up. I was never abused. I went to school. I got good grades. I only ended up with a GED instead of a high school diploma because of issues surrounding a half credit. I'm presently in the middle of my seventh school year taking of either being in college or taking collegiate courses.

At the same time, I grew up with a luxury that is a cornerstone of suburban life -- stability. Stability is what people drove people in the suburbs in the first place. White Americans fled the urban core for the suburbs in the white flight eras of the 1960s and 1970s, for a culture of stability, for they resented the change brought on by black Americans moving into their neighborhoods. Black Americans fled to suburbia increasingly in the 1990s and 2000s for a more stable, healthy climate as opposed to the turbulence of the inner city. Families are more apt to settle in the suburban world because of the stable, family-friendly environment. But of course, I am well aware that stability is indeed a perception.

Gene Marks, the author of the piece that is the namesake of this post, wrote a list of things that he would do if he was "a poor black kid" in the inner city. He reasoned that his children were no smarter than the kids coming out of the 'hood, and thus a lot of his reasoning is based upon a vicariously distorted, romanticized view of himself as a progressive, education-hungry "poor black kid" in America. He meant well, he really did, and he said a lot of stuff that, if pursued, could lead a poor black kid to some measure of success. However, he still falls into the same trap that most suburbanites fall into when it comes to commentating about issues of the inner city -- "if I can do it, you can do it, too, and if it's available to you, you can do this, and you'll be successful" -- completely ignoring what is really at the genesis as to why many inner-city black children fall into a pattern of mediocrity.

It's rooted in the climate and more importantly -- the culture that they were raised in. While it would sound synonymous, I differentiate climate being more local (as in local in the home) in comparison to culture, which refers to the community. The one thing that I've never seen written very often about in the editorial press, such as the one that inspired this post, is the entire culture that is brought about by low incomes and poverty. Sociologists have written about it but few social commentary pieces when it comes to the plight of inner city black children ignore it aside from how low incomes and poverty create a much more fertile ground for criminal activity. Some of it is a passive aggressiveness of an entire community, some of it is a lack of hope of an entire community, but a lot of it is rooted in socially desecrating patterns that, unfortunately, do not get broken.

The cornerstone of inner city life is survival. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Ignore the more sexual hedonistic, materialistic, and misogynistic shit that you hear about in popular hip-hop music. It's really about survival. And because of the stakes getting raised higher because of the impoverished culture, survival takes precedent. And because its more about survival and less about stability, there exists a value structure that is completely different than what is in the suburbs or in more affluent neighborhoods. Think about, especially for those that are reading this and live in Houston -- how can Gulfton in Southwest Houston be one of the most dangerous areas in the entire city, yet Bellaire, a city that is an enclave within the city of Houston and sits one mile east of Gulfton, can be one of the safest areas in Greater Houston? Same thing can be said for the Spring Branch area of Houston versus the Memorial area of Houston that sits to the south of Spring Branch across the Katy Freeway. A different culture spurs a different climate which is going to spur different results.

A survival culture and stability culture are different and sequential. You have to survive before you can achieve stability. If you're in the suburbs and you're not fighting for your own survival, then all you're left to fight for is either achieving stability or maintaining it. What this translates to for children growing up are less stressors, which will provide children the ability to do better academically, to do better socially, and to be better off in general than their inner city counterparts. I'm not saying that there isn't a survival culture in the suburbs, however, because it exists, but not to the rampant, widespread degree of the inner city where its an affliction on a wider swath of a demographic. I also want to make it known that I'm not saying "better off" in terms of superiority, either. Middle class and wealthy suburban kids, or hell, middle class and wealthy urban kids statistically fare better academically (better grades, high school graduation, and collegiate attendance), socially (less likely to be involved in crime), and better off (quality of life), than poor kids from the inner city or even poor kids in the suburbs because of the different climate of which the culture they are apart of spurs.

In short, and really the whole point of this post is this: the survival culture creates a different value system. Good grades and education is important, yes, but if whole point of making it in inner city dystopia is doing what you can to survive and that mantra fuels a troubled climate in the household which creates issues at schools and on the streets, then good grades and education is not going to carry weight. It's especially true when it comes to young black men my age -- the reason why the likelihood of inner city black men getting killed or going to prison is so high because of climate they were raised in, fueled by the culture that is crafted by low incomes and poverty.

So going back to what Marks wrote about: it's idealistic, not because there aren't any poor inner-city black children that aren't studious, because believe me, there are many, but because the climate that the grow up in as a consequence of a survival culture generally doesn't provide for it. I guess the best way to put in terms of attempting to summarize the survival culture is the point of instant gratification as compared to eventual, worthwhile payoff. If Marks was really a "poor black kid" in the inner city, then he'd see for himself why many of the things that he would supposedly do would almost never occur. It's easy to say vicariously what you would do in someone's situation until you actually get why they're in that situation in the first place.