Oh yes. The magic of the self-regulating, all-knowing, invisible-handed marketplace, at work again.

It's 1966 again, Maoists! You'll have to change a few words in the slogans, but all those nostalgic for the days when the vanguard burned, broke and beat those wicked revisionist intellectuals can bring themselves up to date by reviewing a few quotations:

Opinionator Stanley Fish makes some compelling points about the recent CUNY/Kushner clash. Perhaps I'm just too big a fan of distinctions, but I agree that we don't want the concept of academic freedom to become “so diffuse it loses its usefulness because it becomes hard to say with any precision where and when it has been abridged.” The trustees comments may have been bullying, wrong-headed as well as wrong, but not an abridgement of academic freedom. Or am I (also) wrong and wrong-headed?

Nicely formulated, Joe Stiglitz. The capture of public interest in a nutshell. The full interview here.

“For a decade and more, women's dress and hairstyles have abandoned visual for iconic-- or sculptural and tactual-- stress. Like toreador pants and gaiter stockings, the beehive hairdo is also iconic and sensuously inclusive, rather than abstractly visual. In a word, the American woman for the first time presents herself as a person to be touched and handled, not just to be looked at.” - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

It seems that whatever you do for a living, and possibly whatever you do for fun, a data-collector is punching tickets at your back. Some of us have the feeling that we spend about as much time accounting for what we are doing as we do actually doing what we account for. Results: decrease in pragmatic throughput, increase in anxiety, helplessness, alienation, etc.
But let's stop complaining. The culture of accountability can't be turned off, but it can be redirected-- and that's why I am here to propose:
Making Blues Musicians Accountable.
The blues musician lifestyle is notoriously under-rationalized. Has anyone ever stopped to think how poorly they stack up next to a network administrator or a supermarket checkout clerk? Is anybody bothered by the waste of time, the lack of persistent goal-directedness, the lost opportunities, the time spent listening to lonesome whistles? Can we have a read on the number of notes played per bottle of breakfast whiskey consumed?
Let's get our priorities straight. Deal with the blues musicians first, then come after the teachers and the M.D.s.

While all this outrage is being directed at the supposedly overpaid teachers and the supposedly ineffective schools, look at what wonders for-profit education can bring! Short version: investment firm figures out a way to milk federal government for student loans, giving students little or no education while pocketing the cash; students carry the debt. $215 million in profits last year; CEO compensated over $20 million. It's like having your college experience catered by Halliburton! And this seems to be a rational allocation of resources, since nobody is protesting very loudly against it.

Intimidation works. The Bolsheviks and Nazis learned this too.

Rick Ungar, on his Forbes blog, reveals that the point at issue in Wisconsin (and on which the public-sector unions had already capitulated, but the governor never intended to stop with victory) is not a pension plan underwritten by the state, but the amount of deferred compensation that public-sector workers were supposed to get. They'd earn the money during their careers, as part of their pay, but not receive it until after retirement: a tax strategy long since adopted by many of those blameless people in the top 1% who are supposed to be our idols. This news doesn't seem to have arrested the spin; too bad; but if you have the patience to read the comments on Ungar's article you will learn that there are people who believe that since public employees receive wages that are derived from tax dollars, they are not actually entitled to those wages. A novel economic theory? Not exactly; it recalls the norm in several large private-sector industries (agriculture, esp. cotton and tobacco) in a dozen or so states of this country, prior to 1865.