I had never looked at the Harvard board before. So I was naive. But in fact the board of “the Corporation” is a big, big disappointment (WSJ), relative to the rest of the institution. Harvard seems to do best when the relevant decisions are not being made by the governing board. More fundamentally, viewed as a political economy problem, I don’t see which are the institutions or incentives in place to make the board really, really good, as it ought to be. Nope. So this month I learned something big about Harvard.
I have to say that you won’t see me getting on any “blame the board” bandwagon. Faculty are traditionally the main force at a university. And Harvard’s faculty drove out Larry Summers from its Presidency and backed Claudine Gay.
In the 21st century, one of the most important questions for Harvard is this:
Are students, faculty, and administrators to be selected for the content of their character or for the shape and color of their genitalia?
Harvard has chosen the wrong answer, as have many other institutions. A thorough, close-up historical analysis of how Harvard came to get this wrong would be a worthwhile project for an investigative journalist. I suspect that explanations based on any single causal factor will not hold up.
52% of Youngs say they discover new brands on new media (TikTok, YouTube, Insta), as opposed to 19% for the Olds and the Mids.
Young = Gen Z. Olds and Mids = millenials and older.
I have no handle at all on Gen Z. When I taught high school, I got along with the millenials. As they started to give way to Gen Z, I had more difficulty relating to them. At the time, I thought that it was just that I was getting older.
Two years ago, journalist and entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez declared that we were entering a new “age of orality.” By this, he meant that the primacy of text was declining in our culture, as younger generations preferentially consumed audio content over magazines. Perhaps Martínez could even have stipulated that this was the age of “audiovisuality.” Anyone producing podcast content knows that the “Zoomer” generation, those born after 1995, prefer not to subscribe to a feed proactively. Instead, they spend their days passively “consuming content” by leaving YouTube in the background at length. Nearly 40% of this generation spends four or more hours a day on social media, and 88% use YouTube.
Note that Boomers were wont to leave on one of the three TV networks, passively consuming whatever came on. In fact, a show’s success depended on having a popular “lead-in,” meaning the show on that network that preceded it.
Note also that we can have Martínez and Andrey Mir duke it out over who gets to claim to have spotted the trend toward orality. We definitely will discuss Mir some time early in 2024. Have you started to read his Digital Future yet?
Let’s just change one thing. Everything is the same in both cities. Population. Productivity. Cost of living. Weather. But, let’s say City B puts a moratorium on new housing. What’s going to happen?
What happens is that poor people get priced out of the market in city B, so they move to city A (which has no building restrictions). That is, poor people move out of SF and migrate to Texas. Erdmann suggests that a naive economist might think: Look at how much more productive people are in SF than in rural Texas. But what we are actually observing is the effect of housing restrictions, not something inherently highly productive about being in SF. You observe higher wages and worker productivity in SF because of who can still afford to live there, not because there is some magical “agglomeration economy.”
substacks referenced above:
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Erdmann's point is similar to one I have often seen made about high French labor productivity: it's not that France is such a productivity powerhouse, it's that their labor regulations price all the lower-productivity workers out of the labor market.
Arnold says it was the Harvard faculty that pushed out Summers. In fact, it was a large radical minority of only one of the faculties that did it. The majority just kept their heads down. There were some science faculty I know who went to the meetings to argue against Summers's ouster, but they told me that unlike the Leftists whose academic work is political BS, they have to get up in the morning and be at work in their lab at 8 AM, so can't stay all night. Summers didn't even try to defend what he had said, which was clearly correct, probably because he didn't want to open up a rift with the Democrats' activist base. Instead he unsuccessfully granted huge money ($50 million) to try to buy off the feminists. He was succeeded by one of them, Drew Faust. (Faust means "fist" in German). Of course the Board is useless; this is the case across the elite institutions, where board seats are sold for large donations to people who regard the position as a social and business asset, not a responsible job. The minute there is any strife that would affect the value of the asset, they immediately move to quiet it down, which means no support ever for any matter of principle that comes up from Leftist demands. At Harvard, it is even worse, since many of the Board members, and especially the Chair, are themselves committed ideologues and agents of the Democratic Party. The billionaire Chair, Penny Pritzker, was Obama's campaign finance chief.