The Economist on the Events in Wisconsin

Everybody knows that The Economist is a silly piece of trash. There are, however, gradations in the degree of trashiness a magazine can achieve, and The Economist has chosen to climb to the top of the competition as to who manages to produce the crappiest piece of so-called journalism. In the past couple of years, it has become a virulent mouth-piece of the Tea Party. Given that the  Tea Partiers' knowledge of the economy is limited to the painfully stupid insistence that running a huge country's economy is just like balancing a household budget, the name of this magazine has become even more of a joke than it used to be.

Now The Economist decided to contribute on the events in Wisconsin. It published an article titled "(Government) workers of the world unite!" that defies belief in its blatant manipulation of facts, horrible written style, and the number of ridiculous lies. 

Take, for example, the following asseveration:

The private sector is dominated by competition and turbulence. Performance-related pay is the norm, and redundancy commonplace. The public sector, by contrast, is a haven of security and stability. Many people have jobs for life and performance measures are rare. The result is a paradox: the typical public worker is better off than the people he is supposed to serve, and the gap has widened significantly over the past decade.

As a professor at a state university, I obviously work in the public sector and can say that this is the most egregious lie I have encountered in a while. I have just gone through an Annual Merit review which has revealed that the folder of materials I have accumulated in the past calendar year to provide accountability for my scholarly and educational activities is still insufficient and has to be reworked. Which is the reason why I am at work today, even though I don't have to be. "Performance measures" (and what a clumsy, unintelligent verbal construction this is!) take place all the time. I am expected to account for pretty much every breath I take. 

Tea Partiers often accuse the progressives of being envious of the fortunes of the ultra-rich. This article demonstrates that it's the other way round: Conservatives go out of their way to stoke envy towards the public sector employees who are so much better off than everybody else in this quasi-journalist's diseased imagination. As a result, we the spoiled public sector brats are warned not to rely on the truly hard-working people's sympathies (like we ever did): 

Now that the sovereign-debt crisis is forcing governments to put their houses in order, the growing discrepancy between conditions in the public and private sectors has eroded much of the sympathy public-sector workers might once have enjoyed. 

Note once again the meaningless cliche-ridden verbiage that is aimed at introducing patent untruths as some kind of God-given truths known to everybody. Of course, not a shred of proof is offered for a single statement. Who needs proof when your only goal is to make the stupid readers envy and hate the stinky rich public school teachers?

Of course, the real goal of the article becomes clear pretty soon: demonizing the unions is the order of the day among Conservatives. In case you were wondering who or what caused the current economic crisis, The Economist is here for you to provide the answer: the mean, horrible unions. 

Public-sector workers earn, on average, a third more than their private-sector counterparts. Left-leaning economists reply that public-sector workers are, on average, better educated. Whatever the merits of this argument, three things seem clear. Unions have suppressed wage differentials in the public sector. They have extracted excellent benefits for their members. And they have protected underperforming workers from being sacked.

Once again, there is not a shred of proof that I, a non-unionized public sector employee, will not be sacked faster than I can say "retention Review" in case I underperform. But who needs proof when you can have propaganda instead. As Dr. Goebbels used to say, in order to be believed, a lie should be grandiose. That guy definitely knew a thing or two about grandiose lies, and today's print journalists are learning these strategies as fast as they can nowadays.

Here is an example of The Economist's egregious instance of lying:

Governments tend to give their workers light workloads and generous pensions in lieu of higher wages (which have to come out of the current budget). In America teachers teach for a mere 180 days a year.

As one of those teachers who don't teach between the months of may and August, I can't fail to be shocked by the gall of a journalist who conveniently forgets to add that while I don't teach in those months, I also don't get paid. Even though I still do massive research, prepare classes, and even talk to students in need of my help. 

This so-called journalist seems to be unable to write a single sentence that isn't a complete and utter lie. take the following asseveration, for example:

Public-sector unions combine support for higher spending with vigorous opposition to more accountability. Almost everywhere they have demonised competition, transparency and flexible pay.  

At my university, we don't account for our teaching-related expenses any more. We don't account for them for one simple reason: our funding has been completely frozen. last year, I spent $878 of my own money on buying supplies for my classes: DVDs, office supplies, etc. Of course, I could have spared myself that expense and just used the textbook and nothing else. But, a greedy, spoiled public sector leech that I am, I chose to spend my own money in order to give my students what the university is refusing to. And no, I didn't render account of the money I spent to anybody because it was my own money.

The Economist wouldn't fulfill its role of kissing corporate asses until its lips are blue if it didn't extol the virtues of the corporate model that is presented in this article as so fantastic that it might even deserve sainthood:

The rigidity of the public sector does not merely reduce the quality of services. It also discourages innovation. In the private sector innovative firms routinely experiment with new business models, measure the success of those models and then expand successful ones. But whenever public-sector managers have tried to do the same—by establishing magnet schools that focus on certain subjects, or charter schools with longer teaching days, for example—the unions have opposed them.

I could ask, of course, how much experience in teaching this idiot who can barely write a sentence has had in order to pass judgments on what constitutes innovative teaching, but there is no point. Print journalism is dying. Newspapers and magazines published by irresponsible, lazy, uneducated quacks are being displaced by free access blog and websites that offer intelligent analysis and good writing to the readers. I hope The Economist, a magazine that charges extremely high subscription rates in return for this uninformed drivel, goes out of business soon. And good riddance, too.

An Irresponsible Journalist at The Economist Spreads Lies About Graduate Studies

Dumping on academia has become one of the favorite pursuits of print journalists everywhere. As the higher education system in this country suffers one blow after another, journalists are happy to serve their corporate masters and promote the idea that education is bad, useless, and harmful. In their efforts to talk people out of pursuing higher education, such journalists stoop to half-truths and even outright lies.

Take, for example, a piece titled "The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time" that appeared a few days ago in The Economist. The author of this article demonstrates how partial truth easily becomes a full-blown lie. In order to prove that graduate students are often overworked and exploited, this irresponsible journalist says the following about Yale: "A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching." As somebody who graduated from the doctoral program at Yale, let me tell you how things really are.

A graduate student's stipend at Yale is, indeed, in the vicinity of $20,000 per year. A graduate student at Yale also gets a tuition waiver and medical insurance, which put the value of the entire package somewhere around $50,000 per year. You are guaranteed to get this funding for 5 years. Out of these 5 years, the first two are spent taking courses (not teaching, mind you) and preparing for the comprehensive exams. The next two years a graduate student does teach, but never more than one course per semester. For people who have the hardest teaching workload (those who teach language courses) this means working for 50 minutes a day five days a week. For the rest, it's less than that. The fifth year of the doctoral program is dedicated to writing the dissertation. You get the same funding as in the previous years but do not have to teach or, actually, be on campus at all. I, for one, moved back to Canada in my fifth year to spend time with my family and my Montreal friends. A simple calculation shows that a graduate student at Yale ends up receiving a total of $250,000, in exchange for which amount s/he is required to teach a total of 4 courses. Not too shabby at all, in my opinion.

The article's barrage of lies gets completely out of hand when the author states that "In the humanities . . . most students pay for their own PhDs." When I apllied (and was accepted) into several of the best graduate programs in the US, nobody asked me to pay for anything. Some universities had a worse package, some offered a better one, but there was never any talk of me paying tuition anywhere. The Economist's article goes out of its way to prove that "too many" people go to graduate school. Anybody with an ounce of grey matter would ask themselves where all these grad students are supposed to get the huge amounts of money to pay for this education. This quasi-journalist, though, is happy to spread unchecked falsehoods just to prove the point that more education is worse than less.

The article's author uses the favorite trcik of irresponsible journalists as Fox News, which consists of introducing unsupported, ridiculous lies as something that "some people say": "Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes." It would be nice to get a couple of quotes here from these "fiercest critics" and "business leaders", or at least to be given their names, but The Economist's authors feel no need to burden themselves with looking for proof for their outlandish suggestions. Only a complete idiot would think that a PhD is about "teaching skills." It's not like the information is top-secret, so there is no justification for this quasi-journalist's strange criticisms of academia.

Another egregious statement provided by the article's author is "Research at one American university found that those who finish [with a PhD] are no cleverer than those who do not." Of course, the university in question is never named and no link to this mysterious study is provided. I, for one, would be really interested in finding out how you measure "cleverness" and what kind of scientists conduct such idiotic studies. As a blogger, I can afford to write pretty much anything I want in my posts. Still, I challenge anybody to find a single instance when I talked about "a study at a university" and failed to link to the information I referenced.

The main argument this article provides about why graduate studies are useless is that not everybody with a PhD ends up becoming a Full Professor and making the average professorial salary of $109,000. Obviously, that's true. It is just as true for any other profession where becoming one of the top earners in your field is never a guarantee, no matter what your area of specialization is. Still, graduate school provides grad students with one undeniable benefit: five or more years that can be dedicated to bettering oneself intellectually, hanging out with friends, travelling, reading, thinking, writing, partying, etc. Grad school is the best way to delay one's entrance into the hamster race of the corporate world. Who else but the graduate students have the luxury of sleeping in until noon on a regular basis or staying in bed with books for a month well into their thirties? No matter how much one will end up making after graduation, having this experience is priceless.

By the end of the article, the author reveals the real reason behind her dislike of grad school: "Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology." It is no surprise to me that someone who writes so clumsily and puts out such an unconvincing, badly researched and dishonest piece of rubbish didn't thrive either in or out of grad school. Sadly, there are ignoramuses and under-achievers everywhere. Even the best system in the world couldn't guarantee a complete absence of unintelligent, uninspired plodders who are incapable of benefitting from it.

I have cancelled all of my subscriptions to pring media (except one to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.) I'm so frustrated with this irresponsible journalism that charges good money to provide me with material based on what "some people say" or "a study has discovered" that I now get all of my information from bloggers I trust. They, at least, never forget to offer proof for their statements and do responsible research before writing.

The Economist Invents Its Own Feminism

Who would go to The Economist to find out about the latest trends in feminism? Nobody in their right mind, of course. When this kind of magazine comes up with its own perspective on feminism, the result is hilarious.

The authors and the readers of The Economist are so terrified of feminism that they need to convince themselves that today's feminism has become the exact opposite of what it is. Feminism is not into defending gender equality any more, they claim. According to The Economist, today's feminists defend their reight to be "less aggressive" and "more nurtuting":

The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.

I don' know who the illiterate authors of the above-quoted texts are. What they say is stupid and uninformed. There are anti-feminist ideologues who use this "women-don't-need-success-they-just-need-to-nurture-men-and-babies" swill to brainwash the younger generations into despising feminism. Calling them "new feminists" in order to make people think feminism is stupid is wrong and annoying.

The author of this weird article proceeds to berate these imaginary "new feminists" for pushing the agenda of "gender differences." This, of course, is one of the most common devices aimed at discrediting a person or a movement. You ascribe to them some really idiotic ideas that they never held in the first place and then chide them for holding such obviously wrong views. Of course, no feminist can support this gender-differences rubbish. Also, nobody who considers themselves a feminist would react with anything other than utter disgust to these ramblings about monkey-like nurturing and cooperative women.

And the only monkeys I have encountered recently in discussions about feminism are the ones who wrote and published this idiotic article.