Humanities PhD = Starving artist.

The humanities are useless and don’t actually do anything: no patents filed, no divorces settled, no meds prescribed, no bones set, no cells babied, no stocks sold, no programs written (or debugged). Goodness, what a useless thing to do.

The smarter option is to follow a pre-professional or professional route. It’s productive, it provides one with a tangible skill, it’s more secure, and no one will wonder (verbally or no) why you’re wasting your time. In fact, Ezra Klein recently linked to a disheartening study of the incomes of graduates in different fields:

Pulling up the average are computer science, engineering, business, health, math, and vocational-technical. Pulling down the average are life sciences (why is this so low?), social sciences, humanities, physical sciences (again, why so low?), education, and “other technical/professional.”

At the 25th percentile, the really bad majors are life sciences (again, what are these, and why do they do so poorly?), humanities, and social sciences. Perhaps the 25th percentile of these three groups is what defines the unskilled college graduate. Note how much better vocational-technical looks at the 25th percentile.

And then there’s the even more disheartening articles by humanities professors who either say that students shouldn’t pursue it, or defend its pursuit by comparing humanities graduates to starving artists, as Wheaton College professor James Mulholland does in “Neither a Trap Nor a Lie”:

One of those reasons is the pursuit of the life of the mind. Not because we need another generation of teachers who are abused by stressful working conditions, unequal wages, little job security, and no health benefits, but because the lifestyle of academe is meaningful and rewarding in ways that are different from many other careers. Choosing to pursue that life—as irrational as it may seem, as hopeless as the prospect of achieving it might be—can still be a sound choice.

…[W]e must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship. We must admit that the humanities, now, is that way, too.

Goodness.

Mark those 21 march calendars!

219-212.

I have nothing to say that James Fallows, Ezra Klein, among many, many others haven’t said. In fact, Fallows says it so well that I’ll let him do the talking (next post). There’s a one-man live band playing French folk music outside my window, walking the street. A man with a trumpet and a cassette player. Love spring in Paris.

More nerdy fun stuff via Ezra Klein.

Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page has one of those sentences that make the Wall Street Journal editorial page such a daily delight: “Last week President Obama sanctioned ‘reconciliation,’ a complex tactic that would jam ObamaCare into law on sheer power politics.” The beautiful thing about this sentence is that it has no argument (nor is there any support for the argument in the sentences that surround it.) It’s sheer hand-waving, an attempt to muster every adjective in the writer’s power to make the process of voting sound frightening and sinister.

Likewise, I could write, “This morning, controversial foreign billionaire media boss Rupert Murdoch gave his cronies the go-ahead to chop down and mutilate hundreds of trees, pulverize the carcasses until they were rendered unrecognizable, and then order their underlings to fill the pages with propaganda for the business class, with any refusal to comply punished by the forfeiture of wages and access to health care.” But that would be a fairly slanted way to describe the process of publishing a newspaper.

From Ezra Klein’s post, here.

Super nerdy antidote for boredom!

To read comments sections of blogs!

From a commenter to Ezra Klein’s post on ‘What the Right Is Reading’:

Actually the “right”‘s reaction is the same reaction they’ve had to essentially any non-tax-cut program since FDR (or possibly since Teddy the Roosevelt). The sky has or will fall.

When the Republican National Committee sends out a ‘message’ presentation that openly admits that their key to their future success is FEAR, then what follows will be Chicken Little. “Its the end of the world as we know it”. Somehow fear is the GOP replacement for doing anything worthwhile about any serious problem (or, if possible, cutting taxes).

If you thought that GOP meant Grand Old Party you missed the U-turn that made it into Galloping Outright Paranoia. Careful folks, it is very contagious, without any treament possible, and completely silly in a fifth-grader kind of way. All they need to do is change their name to Know Nothing Party and join our flow of history back into the 19th century.

Might I just add that I feel I have especial right to talk about what the Right is reading/watching having been subjected to nightly viewings of FOX News while at home 🙂

On Harry Reid.

And via TNC –> Ezra Klein –> NYTimes –> Adam Nagourney on Harry Reid (this is before the Scott Brown thing). Interesting read. He’s 70 years old, jeez, no wonder he gets tired by the President’s agenda. On a side note: here, when they talk about Sarkozy, it’s always ‘Monsieur Sarkozy’. No Sarkozy this, Sarkozy that.

Bits from the article:

“I don’t like to read stuff about me, but I’ve become accustomed to it: you know, ‘Reid misspeaks.’ I’d rather people were saying, ‘Oh, that guy is a golden-tongued devil.’ ” He paused. “I have no regret over calling Greenspan a political hack. Because he was. The things you heard me say about George Bush? You never heard me apologize about any of them. Because he was. What was I supposed to say? I called him a liar twice. Because he lied to me twice.”

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He said he had been shocked by the behavior of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, since returning from his failed bid for the presidency. “My disappointment — no, that’s the wrong word; I’ll try to find a better word. My amazement has been John McCain. I thought he’d turn out to be a statesman, work for things. He’s against everything. He’s against everything! He didn’t used to be against everything.”

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He said he thought the White House erred in trying to win the support of Olympia Snowe, the Republican senator from Maine, for a health care compromise. “As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with her,” he said, “because she had no intention of ever working anything out.” And while making clear that he was not complaining, he said Obama may have been asking for too much in his first year. “I personally wish that Obama had a smaller agenda,” he said. “It would be less work.”

TNC on fake “objectivity”, Rahm, and majorities worth keeping.

From TNC, on Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff and on media bias masquerading as objectivity. I especially liked his comparison to sports commentary. Hate the team, love the team, the job is to talk about what’s going on.

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Ezra nailed it a few months back when he noted, and I’m paraphrasing here, that a majority is meant to be used and eventually lost. There is, in the press, a profane bias toward political success, a sense that success is strictly defined by elections won. Left uninterrogated is the ends to which those elections serve.

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What we’re really talking about is the fake “objectivity” which the press worships. Serious policy reporting necessitates making calls, and making calls open you up to the charge of political bias. A good one to avoid that charge is to cover elections, in the way you cover sports. Ron Jaworski may love the Eagles, but if they’re sucking it up, he has to say as much. Likewise, a reporter can be a socialist in his private life, but by covering the horse-race he’s magically become objective.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI.

I need to double-check this, but Paul Ryan the guy Obama joked about, beautiful family, don’t want to hurt you man, Paul Ryan?

From Ezra Klein:

This is my 12th year. If I lose my job over this, then so be it. In that case, I can be doing more productive things. If you’re given the opportunity to serve, you better serve like it’s your last term every term. It’s just the way I look at it. I sleep well at night.

I don’t know if he’s just saying what sounds good, or whether he’s legitimately willing to work with the Dems on health care. Both sides agree that something needs to be done. One hopes that something gets done.

[Update] Indeed, beautiful family Paul Ryan. Loved the exchange:

At another point, pushing for “a tone of civility instead of slash-and-burn,” the president said the media doesn’t report on the positive. “I don’t a lot of credit if I say, ‘You know, I think Paul Ryan’s a pretty sincere guy and has a beautiful family.’ Nobody’s going to run that in the newspapers, right?”

The crowd laughed.

“And by the way, in case he’s going to get a Republican challenge, I didn’t mean it,” the president joked. Turning to Ryan, he said, “I don’t want to — don’t want to hurt you, man.

So much better on tape. Scroll to 1:10:35. Or better yet, watch the whole thing.