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Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease

No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all.
--Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring

Note: here is a much shortened form of this book which focuses only on the post-scarcity issues:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?

These four projects all represent post-scarcity trends relating to a small local investment yielding huge results globally. A few million US dollars on Wikipedia turned into millions of person-hours of global labor (taken mostly from TV viewing) to yield a global multi-lingual resource that is changing the face of education worldwide. A college student (and grandson of a poet) named Linus Torvalds developed Linux in Finland, and, along with others' contributions (both volunteer and done while on payrolls), that free software now makes possible huge server farms and huge supercomputers (which previously were slowed by the inability to customize proprietary software, as well as essentially a tax per CPU); those supercomputers are promising all sorts of wonders including new medicines. A few million dollars spent developing WordNet at Princeton has led to a "cognitive revolution" in software that can process text. GNU/Linux and WordNet together made possible Google as it is now. While Google may have annual operating costs in the billions of dollars, it is saving trillions of dollars worth of time spent researching, and it is also improving the quality and timeliness of information used to make important decisions globally. In each case, a relatively small initial investment has produced enormous global benefits. Encyclopedic knowledge is no longer scarce. End-user modifiable software is no longer scarce. The ability to intelligently process text is no longer scarce. Timely answers to certain questions are no longer scarce.

And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, extrapolating from Moore's law, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often).

And, as will be mentioned later, everything that digital computing touches is seeing falling cost trends. Even food, despite the current grim news of food shortages from speculation, can and will get cheaper through agricultural robots and precision farming, and with another benefit of less environmental impact.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_farming
These exponential trends in rising capacity and dropping costs illustrate a very different future than the increasingly competitive gloom and doom ones most conventional economists tend to paint for the short term. They even suggest a future where money itself may be less and less important as a control system for day-to-day activities. As Ray Kurzweil puts it:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-)

So, here is some advice to prospective Princeton University (PU) students based on reading between the lines of the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW). And maybe it offers some advice for PU administrators and trustees too. And maybe even some alumni might get something out of it, as it brings up global trends related to an emerging post-scarcity society. But many others may find it of interest even if they have never heard of, say, Nassau Hall (where the office of the PU president is). I am sorry that to even begin to expose the scarcity-related (and other) mythology interwoven in only a few selected PAW articles, it has taken me about four times as many pages as the entire issue. :-( And all this is without even looking at the ads or class notes. :-)

The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community.

Here is another earlier and more abstract essay by me on post-scarcity ideas in relation to universities:
"The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
It also includes a little more of the theory behind these ideas. That essay is about one-twentieth the size of this one and might be a better choice to read for those daunted by the length of this essay, or the personal nature of parts of it, or the interwoven rebuttal of PAW's thoughtless choice of entitling an article "Jumping from the Ivory Tower", or the other Princeton-specific references.

One motivation for writing (or reading) this essay

I have written on these post-scarcity topics before. The biggest single motivation for the organization of this specific essay is the PAW article on "Jumping From the Ivory Tower".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html

Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/

The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.

(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)

That PAW article title was selected only a little over a year after this statement by a recent Princeton University alumna on behalf of her family:
"Cho family statement"
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooting.family.statement/index.html

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world. ... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. ... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).

Like how the Cho family describes Virginia Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, might have been able to develop his capacities for love further in a different context, whether he ultimately committed suicide or not, and whether he ultimately took others with him or not. We can, and should, ask how we can create institutions that help everyone in them become healthier, more loving, more charitable, more hopeful, more caring (even as they may be dying or even if they are tragically taking others with them). The last word on almost all airplane crash cockpit voice recorders is the same -- "Shit!" -- usually after the pilots' calm struggle for minutes with a seemingly impossible situation like trying to get an airplane with a multiple failing engines over a mountain -- they don't give up even when the task seems impossible. But those are just the aircraft tragedies, the same training helps pilots fly millions of safe and comfortable air miles.

We should also ask how we can create institutions which even help everyone in them become even more faithful in the sense of believing at least in values like health, love, charity, hope, community, and caring. As I say later in this essay, it is part of the human condition to have faith in something (even if it is faith in faithlessness).

That kind of deep questioning might help avert some extreme incidents, or it might even perhaps help bring some little peace to the Cho family someday. But a more important reason to ask those hard questions is to make life day-to-day better for everyone. The most extreme incidents are a bit like strobe light pulses illuminating for an instant in stark relief what is going on all the time. Ultimately, as sad and tragic as extreme incidents are, people die all the time around universities for all sorts of reasons, usually accidents or addictions or health issues. Consider:
"Top 20 Causes of Death - Young Adult (20 - 24)"
http://www.statisticstop10.com/Causes_of_Death_College_Age_Adults.html
That table suggest the roadway system is the biggest single predator of young lives in the USA (about 5700 a year), although murder (about 3300 a year) and suicide (about 2500 a year) come next. I don't mean to deny or minimize the grief all involved at Virginia Tech feel on a personal basis, but as a percentage of annual deaths, 33 deaths is 0.17% of the annual number of around 19000 in that age range. So, that tragedy is illuminating, but these numbers show the folly of focusing too many resources on preventing that one type of very rare incident.

Roadways can be made safer by looking at the issues surrounding automotive tragedies, including the rare multiple fatality incidents on the roadway, even if that does not help any with a tragedy that happened. With many accidents in cars correlated with a driver getting behind the wheel upset (or getting that way afterwards), even on the roadway helping with emotional issues make a difference (or coming up with ways emotional issue don't effect driving safety).
"Anger on the road"
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun05/anger.html
"Study finds emotional upset linked to accidents"
http://ink.news.com.au/mercury/mathguys/articles/1999/990215a1.htm
In that sense, a pleasant drive is a safer drive. But more than that, when you really look deeper at the whole notion of transportation you might think of things like self-driving cars as at PU or other rapid transit concepts as elsewhere including automated deliveries. Just think, for example, of all the lives Amazon.com is saving on the roads from trips not made to the local store. Ideas may appear that make life *better* for everybody (even those who don't drive), not just safer for a few who might otherwise be involved in automotive tragedies relative to some number of millions of miles driven.
"Accidental Deaths - United States - 1999-2003 -- [Motor Vehicle -- 1.3 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles]"
http://hazmat.dot.gov/riskmgmt/riskcompare.htm

I'd suggest the same may happen if we look deeply and creatively and life-affirmingly at issues affecting murder and suicide at universities and take helpful action on the findings -- that life might get better for *everyone* on and around campus. This essay does not in any way explore the specifics of the Virginia Tech incident. But, that incident did in a sense illuminate for an instant the landscape this essay explores, and an awareness of that tragedy was an aspect of my motivation to write this essay in relation to the PAW article.

This essay mainly uses the illumination from some tragedies I saw myself related to PU (although there are other tragedies in here too). But to counterbalance those tragedies, I also point out specific examples of caring people at PU, as well as try to add in a bit of humor (so think of this is a bit of a tragicomedy). This essay is sad at times and hopeful at times -- like my own personality. :-) And oftentimes, this essay tries to be both sad and hopeful at the same time. That's part of humor sometimes too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful

Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who must learn how to use his fertile imagination to help his son survive their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.

By the way, for anyone reading this who is feeling suicidal, or who even just has a friend or loved one who might be, one resource is:
"If you are suicidal, read this first"
http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/

You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible.

That web page also includes free hotline numbers, other suggestions, and some links. Or this general Google search would lead you to many others, just to show all the good people out there willing to help:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 1,810,000 for suicide prevention. (0.10 seconds)"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=suicide+prevention&btnG=Search

And for anyone feeling homicidal or war-like in regards to others, or if you know someone who might be, this book is a good resource for alternatives to killing anyone:
"Creating True Peace : Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World" by Thich Nhat Hanh
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-True-Peace-Violence-Community/dp/0743245199

Sometime, people who cannot find any way to resolve a problem with someone else are tempted to eliminate the problem by eliminating the other person. They wish the other person would just go away, die, or disappear. That desire may be strong enough to lead them to kill. Killing another person is not an act of freedom but an act of despair and great ignorance; it will not bring freedom or peace. (page 92)

Our enemy is never another person; our enemy is the wrong perceptions and suffering within him, within her [or sometime even within ourselves about them]. When a doctor sees a person who is suffering, he [or she] tries to identify the sickness within the patient to remove it. He [or she] does not try to kill his patient. The role of the doctor is not to kill people but to cure the illness within them. It is the same with a person who had suffered so much and who has been making you suffer -- the solution is not to kill him [or her] but to try to relieve him [or her] of his [or her] suffering. This is the guidance of our spiritual teachers. It is the practice of understanding and love. In order to truly love, we must first understand. (pages 89-90)

All of us can practice nonviolence. We begin by recognizing that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending o the strength of those seeds within us. When the seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us everyday, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence, and fear within us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace. (Pages 1-2)

And for those who are parents and trying to find ideas to apply in your home to raise peaceful and happy children, perhaps the single most illuminating thing I have learned about peaceful parenting is the difference between "authoritarian", "authoritative", "permissive", and "neglectful" parenting behaviors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
All parents are each of these four types at times, but what matters is the relative proportions in relation to the situation and the child's own growth. And matches of personality between parents and child also a big issue, with each parent personality and child personality matchup having its own unique issues as parents try to build on their strengths and accommodate their weaknesses:
http://www.motherstyles.com/
And, as with a critical reviewer of Thich Nhat Hanh (mentioned below) who says Thich Nhat Hanh overstates his case, it is the tension between these first three which can make it hard to find a path of peace in Western society. It doesn't help that US society (including the workplace) generally is often both parent-unfriendly and child-unfriendly. This isn't meant to blame anyone, just to illuminate the landscape of how peaceful families grow.
"Mister Rogers' How Families Grow"
http://www.fci.org/viewproduct.asp?ID=%7B01AF13CB-D655-4832-A2E9-CCA6A75EFE7D%7D
There are other specific cultural problems in the USA right now, including praising absolute qualities ("you are smart") or accomplishments ("good job") instead of perhaps sometimes effort ("you must have tried hard"), progress ("you are getting smarter everyday") or specific aspects of results ("giving that present must have made that person feel happy"); see in general:
"Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job!""
http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm
It can also be harmful to label kids, even with positive labels like "creative", instead of approaching them as whole people who are continually growing and changing, in part by their own efforts. Another difficulty is isolated Western nuclear families without as many ties to relatives in different situations and of different ages to learn from or seek refuge in. General knowledge is obviously no substitute for practice; where do children and would-be parents get a chance to practice parenting skills in our society before they need them? These issues are all interwoven into later life happiness for children. It is not fair to pick out one and blame one person or one aspect of a culture for a tragedy. They are all interwoven (including personal choices).

Psychologists are beginning to realize the study of psychological pathology can only get you so far. Probably the same is true for the study of ethical pathology. Ultimately, it may be a better idea to build on strengths rather that try to remedy weaknesses. From:
"Building human strength: psychology's forgotten mission" by Martin E.P. Seligman, APA President
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan98/pres.html

We have discovered that there is a set of human strengths that are the most likely buffers against mental illness: courage, optimism, interpersonal skill, work ethic, hope, [humor, :-)] honesty and perseverance. Much of the task of prevention will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to foster these virtues in young people. Fifty years of working in a medical model on personal weakness and on the damaged brain has left the mental health professions ill-equipped to do effective prevention. We need massive research on human strength and virtue. We need practitioners to recognize that much of the best work they do is amplifying the strengths rather than repairing their patients' weaknesses. We need psychologists who work with families, schools, religious communities and corporations to emphasize their primary role of fostering strength.

I now see "Positive Psychology" was probably something I unconsciously hoped to find in the PU Psychology department a quarter century ago, but sadly I did not find much of it at an academic level (though there was some at a personal level, thankfully). So, while this essay does consider tragedies at PU, it does, following positive psychology, suggest some ways PU could build on some of its strengths both in engineering & science and in the liberal arts.

On "quality" in a university setting, and a sketchy map of the landscape of this essay

That robot in the controversial car company commercial was supposedly suicidal because "everyone at [a Big Car Company is] obsessed with quality". Sound like any university we know? What does "quality" mean anyway? How many dimensions does "quality" have? Let's try to go beyond an abstraction like Pirsig's metaphysics of quality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_metaphysics_of_quality
and, as it were, "name names".

Are these all aspects of a quality experience at PU too? How much "quality" is in the PU experience by these various measures (both undergrad and grad)? And if we expect there to be an abundance of stuff to go around in the "future", why would we want to sacrifice any of these core humane values in the "now"?

Let's consider some specific tough questions about Princeton related to "quality" in the "now".
* Do, say, most people who start PU PhD programs usually get professorships?
* Does the typical person with, say, a degree in linguistics get to later do research on, say, the history of words after graduation?
* Do alumni who, say, endow professorships have long and joyful lives?
* Are donations doing unique good?
* Is there room for everyone, young and old, to give what they can to the local community and the global world?
* Are ethics integrated into science and engineering?
* Are the non-university surroundings strengthened in diversity and community by the university's presence?
* Are the students socializing Friday and Saturday nights in joyful settings promoting wellness and balance?
* Are PU assets producing the highest return in terms of people well educated globally?
Princeton is a complex institution, so there can be no definitive or easy answers to each of these questions. Still, this essay suggests that, more often than it should be, the answer to all of them is "No". So, I suggest, not only is Princeton conflicted about the "future", it even misses the "now". Which means it is time for serious change in how it sees itself.

Maybe, frankly, that's why "jumping from the Ivory Tower" is a little too realistic a problem for most PhD-granting academic communities. Or, as Leslie Farber suggests (below), why a life spent around PU might too often be spent just *thinking* about jumping from the Ivory Tower, either career-wise or really from Fine Tower? Why might that be? And might it get worse before it gets better unless strong action is taken?

There is also a mention in that PAW article of the term "post-academic". Maybe "post-academic" is not what the PU community should be talking about. Maybe a better thing to talk about is "post-scarcity"?

This essay (more like a short book by now) is written towards addressing both the issue of PU and "quality" (as it relates to "jumping from the ivory tower" in multiple senses) and also the issue of PU and "post-scarcity". These two issues are intertwined as well, for reasons this essay explores. And don't worry PU, this will be a narrative evaluation -- no letter grades here. Make of this what you will.

This essay is not a scholarly work. It is more a humorous (somewhat satirical) travelogue of a romp through a newly discovered island of ideas (myths, really) to which this issue of PAW has provided transportation, like the ship that brought the Swiss Family Robinson to their island. :-) Now that the essay is done, it seems more obvious how it could be structured to be clearer. I'll outline a map of that island of ideas for future explorers, but this essay remains as it is, and it will be up to real scholars to make better maps than I.

So, after the fact, I can now see how this essay would be better and shorter if I had just made a long list of myths many Princetonians live by, and then went through them one by one, to see just how true they are now including how much they are self-fulfilling prophecies, and then venture a guess how true the myths might be in a post-scarcity future or what might replace them. Some of the myths to explore might include:
* the value of competition vs. cooperation
* the value of individual success vs. collective success
* the value of excellence vs. joy
* the value of perfection vs. effectiveness
* the value of the market vs. a gift economy
* the value of materialism vs. voluntary simplicity and spirituality
* the value of reputation vs. playing the fool
* the value of self-censorship vs. free expression and personal growth through feedback
* the value of artificial scarcity vs. universal abundance
* science as truth vs. science as a faith
* external incentives vs. intrinsic motivation
* high anxiety vs. appropriate anxiety
* numerical grades vs. complex narratives
* technology as value-neutral vs. technology as embodying our values through what we build and research
* non-profit private rights vs. non-profit public responsibilities
* institutions as shadows of individuals vs. institutions as emergent beings
* the meaning in movement and ideas vs. the meaning in place or community
* knowing, dominating, and appreciating vs. caring for and being cared for
* classical views of academic intelligence vs. the value in a diversity of intelligences
And so on. Maybe these myths might be carefully captured in the wild from years of PAW or commencement speeches. :-) This essay does address a lot of these myths, just not in a coherent scholarly way. And I don't want to imply that these "vs." statements are mutually exclusive. One may well need some balance of, say, excellence and joy to have a happy and healthy life. Or even lots of both. :-)

I forget who said this: "Sometimes you need to go a long way out of your way to go a few steps correctly". Pogo?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comics)
Probably something I read in my class yearbook over two decades ago. Anyway, this essay is all those wrong steps. :-) But this work is freely licensed (see the end) so feel free to use it to help go a few steps correctly. :-) If I were to write it over, I'd try to be more upbeat about how PU was making steady progress towards a better future (from where it and our society was coming from). I hope someone can do that, and perhaps just show this essay is perhaps a dark shadow from the past.

The end result will be the diagnosis of mythological "heart disease" for the PU community, of which PAW articles like "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" are just a symptom (just like our current president in the USA is more a symptom of something wrong at the heart of the USA than the problem itself, given he could otherwise be easily impeached). If you ask any doctor about, say, heart disease, they would give you this typical advice (and I add what is in parentheses for keeping your mythological heart healthy, too :-):
http://mayoclinic.com/health/heart-disease-prevention/WO00041
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
* give up smoking (and competition),
* exercise regularly (especially your compassion, which studies show increases with practice),
* eat a healthy diet (and do good works and do joyful things),
* get the right amount of vitamin D from sunshine and supplements (and connect to the world around you in a balanced way),
* lose weight if you are physically obese (or give away money if you are financially obese), and
* have regular interactions with your health provider (and supportive community).

This essay goes into how to translate the parenthetical advice to a Princeton University context. :-) I also include a "Modest Proposal" for transforming PU into a post-scarcity organization, as well as a more realistic one, as as *starting* point for discussing these issues. It also seems to have turned into a bit of a memoir. :-)

As an incentive to perhaps get a few people in the current PU administration to skim this essay, I'll point out that this satire also has a section entitled: "The Abolition of the Princeton University Band". Or in other words, be careful what you wish for, you may get it. :-)

It has been pointed out to me since first writing this that the PU Band has curbed its excesses since I knew it in the 1980s, and, despite still having a fundamentally subversive voluntary and egalitarian nature, the Band has come to live more symbiotically with a compulsory and stratified university system and so is now flying under the University's radar so to speak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stratification

So, to further tempt PU administrators to read this essay, I'll mention a few more issues it "resolves" for the university: :-)
* sustainability and greening,
* traffic and parking,
* the Robertson lawsuit ( http://www.princeton.edu/robertson/ ),
* Congress' interest in mandating spending down the endowment,
* the changing landscape for financial aid, and
* the university's relationship with the eating clubs.

Well, this essay doesn't actually address the last very well, but some conflicts require more poetry than prose to resolve (like in the movie the Yellow Submarine where Jeremy gives the chief Blue Meanie a rash of roses and a song in his/her/its heart via poetry), so maybe some of these people might be able to help more with the low intensity social conflict between the University and the eating clubs?
http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

As one alumnus put it, this long essay is "Shakespearean". Thanks, Harold, I'll try not to let that go to my head. :-) And for the record, consider this essay as a vocal accompaniment arising to greet Harold's steady drumbeat of posting alternative views on TigerNet (PU's alumni mailing lists). You are an inspiration, Harold. Thank you for your persistence in the face of adversity. If this essay is of any value in the end to PU, also thank Harold "Happy Tiger" Helm '68 for his long lasting dedication to the higher ideals of the liberal arts. :-)

Or building on Harold's "Shakespearean" idea, this essay should perhaps instead start with:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Although, for the purposes of this essay, you can take "fortune" to be the WordNet sense of "abundance", thus increasing the *irony* of that quote as it applies in a PU context. :-) Yes, I am suggesting Princeton University's deepest trouble is the coming world of "fortune" for all. :-) And PU can take up arms against that fortune for all, or PU can accept these metaphorical slings and arrows, be thankful for them, and change its mythology to help bring good fortune to an inclusive world.

A taste of Post-Scarcity

Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero?

That's because any number divided by zero is infinity (except maybe zero itself. :-) You know all those "divide by zero" errors in economics simulators? Maybe they were telling us something?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22divide+by+zero%22+economics

Results 1 - 10 of about 18,000 for "divide by zero" economics.

An example:
"The Long Tail: The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance"
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/03/the_tragically_.html

I'm preparing for my talk on Long Tail economics at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in ten days, and I've run into a slight problem. The Long Tail is all about abundance: the economic effects of infinite shelf space. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics has virtually nothing to say about abundance. Indeed, the economics of abundance is almost exclusively the domain of extropians, a few other transhumanists, and science fiction writers. How can this be? Well, for starters the classic definition of economics is "the science of choice under scarcity". That's a warning sign right there. From Adam Smith on, economics has focused almost exclusively on behavior within constraints. My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw's otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn't mention the word abundance. And for good reason: if you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.

Also discussed here:
"The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0671.html?printable=1

So, any aspect of the economy which goes towards zero in cost, tends to make everything else also go to zero in cost (or infinite in abundance), whether zero cost food, zero cost energy, zero cost time, zero cost healthcare, or ... zero cost computing. Karl Marx and others talked about related (but not identical) ideas a long time ago.

And so, maybe more economists (especially at PU) need to start using a calculus of infinites, since infinity times anything is ... infinity. Well, that's true for infinity times anything except maybe zero, if, say, our global society chooses to blow itself up physically. :-( Is diverting our R&D resources to war really a better option than learning to share, and learning to use our collective imagination to make the world work abundantly for everyone, and thus learning to let those now obsolete neoclassical economic equations just blow up *numerically* instead of guiding our society to blow itself up physically fighting over artificial scarcity? :-)

See also:
"The Myth of Scarcity"
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/783

Perhaps the single most devastating myth on earth is that of scarcity. ... The irony of this tragedy is that while people eagerly embrace the myth of scarcity with respect to everything which in reality is or could be abundant if we use our imagination, they ignore the one thing that is actually running out for humanity - TIME.

Or:
"Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek [The choice is ours]"
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15736

Star Trek takes place in a world where all the ugly things about human existence have been erased. Interstellar globalization has brought us new technologies to make transportation and translation effortless. Machines called replicators can produce absolutely anything you want, so the economics of inequity are gone. The injuries of race and class and gender have been surmounted, if not forgotten altogether. Scarcity, borders, money, and culture have all ceased to exist. ... Galactica is sci-fi without that BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of peak oil and 9/11 and natural disasters compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy major cities. Galactica's message is that unless we come to terms with our own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999% of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven't learned: that exploitation leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your own oppression. ... These days, Battlestar Galactica's warning that technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is far more resonant than Star Trek's hope that technology and progress will solve all of our problems.

After an earlier version of this essay was up and people were skeptical that a post-scarcity economy is emerging, I issued a challenge on PU's Advocates and Skeptics mailing list to pick *any* industry and I would reply with a plausible way that digital computing can reduce the cost to near zero over the next few decades. :-) (I hoped. :-)

Here are what one person picked, along with my replies and some elaborations:

* "Aluminum smelting"

Generate the electricity with solar panels that are printed similarly to how computerized ink-jet printers print on paper:
http://www.nanosolar.com/
Energy is the dominant cost there.

Printing solar panels to make cheap electricity to power aluminum smelting involved computers, both for design and to control the printers. That all reduces costs.

* "Steel refining"

I could say the same as Aluminum. But for variety, replace most of it with plastics. Grow the plastics as specially bred trees. Use supercomputers to design the new materials and the new DNA for the trees.

Designing new types of plastics and bioengineered trees to replace steel involves computers. That reduces costs.

* "Transportation of people"

In cities:
"Personal rapid transit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

In rural areas:
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
http://pave.princeton.edu/main/

Suburbs perhaps best being demolished and returned to farmland? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

I know, you will object that these vehicles cost resources to build and operate? But what if energy is nearly free from those solar panels above and aluminum and steel-like substances are nearly free? See how all these trends start to interact?
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html

Machines to guide vehicles involve computers. As I pointed out, those will be free or cheap if the other aspects are free and cheap, and the rest of this explains how they will. That all reduces costs.

People may suggest materials will still be expensive, but what about robot mining?
"Robots Set To Change The Face Of Australian Mining"
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-00g.html

We need to differentiate between the true energy, informational, time, and physical capital costs of doing things compared to a societally-defined acceptable "rent" a few may charge for access to resources.

And when robots make the robots, they are all cheap too. So. that all really reduces costs.
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22robots+making+robots%22

* "Water purification"

Currently in design:
http://medgadget.com/archives/2005/05/lifestraw.html

LifeStraw™ is a simple device, still in a prototype phase, designed for those unfortunate people in the third world who do not have access to clean drinking water. The pipe is composed of two textile filters, followed by a chamber with beads impregnated with iodine.

And available for purchase:
http://giardiaclub.com/survival-water-filter-straw/index.php

At about an ounce in weight, this survival water filter straw takes out giardia. It will also make you the star of the backpacking trip with friends and colleagues. ... SuckUp Survival Water Filter Straw $9.79

And that's even without nanotech. This will only get cheaper and better as people at places like PU invent new materials (perhaps solar powered ones) to make these things filter better and last longer.

I wasn't kidding when I say later in the essay that dissolving Harvard would give everyone who is poor in the world clean water -- via one or two of these straws.

Granted, I don't know how long the straws can last. But that's the kind of research the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials is for, isn't it?
http://www.prism.princeton.edu/

Water purification using nanotech (and the internet to spread the word about earlier cheap solutions) involves using computers. That reduces costs.

* "Construction"

Theoretically near free for materials:
"MAGMA, CERAMIC, AND FUSED ADOBE STRUCTURES GENERATED IN SITU"
http://www.calearth.org/lunar.htm

And nearly free labor:
"Could This Robot Build A House In A Day? California Engineer's Invention Could Roll Out Concrete Homes Starting This Year"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/16/business/realestate/main2487598.shtml

Construction using robots involves using computers. As does related structural and materials simulations. That reduces costs.

Granted, this area needs work. But hey, the PU's CE&OR graduate program twenty years ago didn't seem to want me to stick around in their graduate program. :-) Granted, I was less of a nice person then. :-(

* "Furniture"

Already essentially free:
http://www.freecycle.org/

Welcome! The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,383 groups with 5,173,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on "Browse Groups" above the search box. Have fun!

OK, I'm playing here, but really, you want free furniture there it is -- or just cruise by PU just after graduation. :-)

OK, another answer: if you are growing free genetically engineered plastic as above, then why not grow it into chairs directly instead of logs you need to cut? :-)

Furniture grown using programmable DNA involves computing, as does freecycling coordinated over the internet. How much furniture does the world need anyway? How much is just landfilled when it could be repaired if it was designed better and people had more "free time" to fix it for fun? That all reduces costs.

* "Shoes"

Already essentially free:
http://blog.reprap.org/2008/05/shoe.html

I just reprapped a left shoe. It cost me 30 pence...

A custom shoe was printed in 3D already for about US$0.60. (That is printing a new one, not reuse.) That involves computers. What more proof do you want for the possibility of cheap things -- shoes made to your dimensions for about a dollar right now. Granted, the materials need more work, which brings us back to structural and materials simulations, as above. That reduces costs.

* "Movie production"

This is already essentially free (for some definition of "movie"):
http://www.youtube.com/

As with all of the above, people may object that I am discounting the value of people's time. But that is part of a point made later on. If things are easy or fun, motivating people to do them for their own sake is not very hard. Lots of people bake cakes, and the world could survive without cake (though it might be hard for some).

Movie are now produced and distributed "free to the user" using computers and computer-powered digital cameras. The people who make the movies generally do it for *fun* so the time is essentially free. That reduces costs.

* "Crop growth"

Agricultural plants are already free and self-replicating and powered by sun and rain. :-) And these self-replicating food plants have been the basis of most societal wealth through the past few thousand years. Our natural self-replicating capital of all sorts has sustained humanity for countless generations.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/need.htm

Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials. In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.

OK, how about asking who does the actually planting and harvesting and tilling? How about these agricultural robots from the 1970s sci-fi movie "Silent Running"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
http://www.jeffbots.com/silentrunning.html
http://www.squaremodels.netfirms.com/drone1.html

I saw that movie, which contains both multiple murders and a suicide when I was around ten or so on TV (who knew then from the advertising?). And it has in various ways, for both good and bad, been a force in my life. If you do watch the movie, please remember at the end to identify with Dewey, not Lowell. :-( Or maybe you should identify with the filmmakers? :-) It's taken me myself decades to reach that point of view though.

Robots tending crops involve computers. Precision agriculture to reduce fertilizer and water use is only possible by computers. That all reduces costs.

And contrary to what some might say, water and artificial fertilizer just increase yields -- they are not strictly necessary, at least if you return the nutrients from "night soil" back to the land like China has been doing for 40 centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_of_Forty_Centuries
Available here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=NOpEn8H1wmsC

Professor King provides intriguing glimpses of Japan, China, Manchuria, and Korea, with information about the customs of the common people; utilization of waste; methods of irrigation, reforestation, and land reclamation; and the cultivation of rice, silk, and tea. An invaluable, profusely illustrated resource for organic gardeners, farmers, and conservationists. 249 illustrations.

Ground rock dust also make great fertilizer.
http://www.fertilizeronline.com/rockdust.php
There are rocks everywhere. Some are better than others for this purpose, naturally.

* "Others?"

If you can think of something that eludes me in seeing how it can get cheap in a world trending post-scarcity, remember that I am only one person (granted echoing thousands of other voices I have read or learned of directly or indirectly). Imagine what would be possible if most of the people on campus at Princeton University and all the alumni decided to think about these issues too. :-) Just imagine...
"YouTube - Imagine - John Lennon"
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=imagine+john+lennon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOkxRLzBf0
(More on that later.)

Maybe that's the best song to answer Silent Running's bittersweet ending?

Or maybe this satire by Frederick Pohl is more likely our future than scarcity? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage.

Many capitalists, like members of any secular religion, still seem in denial about the trends Marx (and others) spotted long ago. The end is near for capitalism -- admittedly in part through its own success. :-) Some people end up that way too: :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_lennon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/

If Jesus of Nazareth was anything, he was an extraordinary friend of the down-trodden, definitely a Liberal, whose advocacy on their behalf so infuriated the ultra-Conservative religious and political leaders of his day that they had him killed to prevent the public from hearing the very liberal teaching that you will see quoted abundantly in Jesus' own words on this web site!

Capitalism, like the USSR as the Berlin Wall came down, is already history. And all the stuff people have been saying with precise sounding economic numbers has not helped them predict its ongoing demise, just like the collapse of the USSR took the US government by surprise -- and studying the USSR was a major reason for the CIA's existence and high level of funding. Some in the CIA may have understood what was coming, but few listened to *them* either. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_Soviet_collapse
As with this change, likely there will be no accountability, either. :-( But, in this case, I don't mind. :-)

For reference, as I learn more about this myself:
"The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted"
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17426424.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n41/ai_17426424

Another reason [for incorrectly assuming no one at the CIA predicted the USSR's collapse] is that the intelligence community has indeed failed in other cases, and it is often easiest to paint with a broad brush. The most famous example is probably the intelligence community's failure to alert U.S. policymakers of the weakness of the Shah of Iran, the strength of his opponents, and, in particular, the support enjoyed by the Islamic fundamentalists. In that case, the evidence confirms that the failure occurred because the United States, in trying to maintain friendly relations with the Shah and the Iranian intelligence service, failed to develop independent sources of information within Iran. The Soviet case looks like the Iranian case -- Uncle Sam betting on the wrong horse -- and so people have assumed that it is the same.

Of course, that last line is callous and out of touch with reality (like the "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" article title) given that what the USA was "betting" on was controlling other people's lives outside the USA with state-terrorism like the Shah used.(%)

I'm sorry to be another bringer of the bad news to Princetonians that the capitalist world view is way out of date. :-( Our society is in the midst of transcending to something beyond it. Whatever any of us do. I do feel we can make a difference here and there though -- to represent the virtues we chose to believe in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue
Still, there is something to be said for the time honored tradition of "shooting the messenger". :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
It makes messengers take their work more seriously -- they are only going to deliver a message if it is really important. :-) Of course, I don't expect the people on top to do that, they are realists -- what would it accomplish? But no doubt, the same pettiness and cruelty that has so warped many capitalists and their minions will play out in other ways as it continues to resonate around the world and even into my own home. :-( As it does in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib or for, that, matter, any prison, even a "Prison Planet" so many seemingly eagerly build.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/

Still, maybe we can ask, economics aside, what are the more deeply held values and virtues you see in the market or yourself? And maybe we can see how they would apply in a post-scarcity society? This essay does not explore that issue, but maybe as individuals we could?

(%) An ironic Iran-related disclosure about my family and me:
"A rant on financial obesity and Project Virgle & an ironic disclosure :-)"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/701471e5e9af8b00
So, in some sense, you can thank the global intelligence community for my "free time" to do all this analysis work for them. :-) And, another benefit is that those same analysts who would have gotten fired for writing this can now spend all their time analyzing it to see what about it is totally off-base. :-)

No, I haven't met Mr. P. personally (avoiding rank here :-). But I know he sincerely means well (I think. :-)
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
http://www.samueljohnson.com/road.html
Of course, the same might be said of my own work. Time will tell. :-)

Another good free thing to come out of that work (by my wife):
"Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization"
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
And for the record, my wife was always above board with what she was doing. And what intelligence agency would not have known about me? :-)

And even though this essay is all about personal growth, I won't speculate on what sort of person Mr. P. has become from his own trials and tribulations. A better one, I hope, as I have become. At eighteen, I thought all Iranians should be forced out of the USA for the hostage crisis (until I met one at PU, even though he kept throwing his knife into the ceiling tiles in the dorm). I'd have still been cheering on the current Iraq war and recommending even more flaming death as what those impudent Iraqis deserved for mishandling "our" oil. I would not be distinguishing between the people and their guards (let alone having compassion for even the guards). I was all for bombing the oil fields in Iraq in Gulf War I to teach them a lesson (which rightfully shocked my mother, whose house was firebombed during WWII and lost almost all her personal possessions like clothes then). People grow. Even famous or infamous or anonymous ones. :-)

My wife, by coincidence, is currently working on a study on "The future of volunteerism" for a non-profit consortium. Hint: a major issue is that volunteers don't have enough "free time". A post-scarcity society promises a lot more "free time" to volunteer. So, a lot of the issues relating to the emerging post scarcity-economy relate to transitioning from a mostly command economy (whether central government commands or market financial commands) to a mostly voluntary economy. And, in many ways, from child raising to elder care, the economy is mostly voluntary (even given some daycare and some nursing homes). A related idea is that most homes are currently heated with solar energy even when we say they are heated with oil, which would be pretty obvious if the Sun suddenly went out. So, while it seems like the "economy" is all about money, if you look at actual hours spent in activities, from voluntarily watching endless TV sitcoms (and commercials) as a "consumer" to voluntarily cleaning up vomit (and blood) as an "EMT", the economy is already, and always has been, mostly volunteer. It's just hard to see that sometimes unless you turn off the television.
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/

Some economic numbers related to Post-Scarcity

About two to three billion people on the planet live in technological societies out of approaching seven billion people. That's a lot of capacity, even if the other half of the planet may have more social capital and ecological capital than industrial capital.

In the dollars everyone wants to talk about, the global economy is about US$60 trillion annually as a gross world product (GWP).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy
There are naturally problems focusing on money -- this is one alternative view:
"Redefining Progress"
http://www.rprogress.org

Or, per capita:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Gross world product (GWP) is the total gross national product of all the countries in the world. This also equals the total gross domestic product. See measures of national income and output for more details. The per capita GWP in 2000 was approximately $7,200 US dollars (USD). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their Third Assessment Report (TAR), predicts a maximum per-capita gross world product in 2100 of approximately $140,000 (in year 2000 dollars). The IPCC reports a survey of "economic literature" as providing a maximum value of approximately $110,000 (2000 USD).

That's a lot of per-capita income projected ninety years from now. :-) But let's ignore it as "speculation" even if it is what this essay is about in some sense. That would make things too easy. Also it would be misleading, as it assumes our current economic structure would persist when everyone on the planet could essentially be a millionaire by today's standards. So, let's stick with the current GWP of US$60 trillion and assume in rises only slowly.

On that scale of a US$60 trillion annual GWP, none of the costs for the four projects above, even billions to operate Google per year, are even barely noticeable. That's all part of this issue of post-scarcity -- the costs to do big public digital works whether Google, WordNet, Mammalian Genetics Simulation, or anything else likely to be of breakthrough value are so trivial as to not be noticed. One billion dollars is 0.002% (rounded up) of GWP. Trivial. The entire venture capital sector in the USA is a laughable 0.06% of GWP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

A recent National Venture Capital Association survey found that majority (69%) of venture capitalists predict that VC investments in U.S. will level between $20-29 billion in 2007.

So, do we need to structure our *entire* global economy a certain way because Princetonians and others strongly control 0.06% of the money flow?

That makes no sense as a big picture. That's not even the tail wagging the dog. That's a flea wagging the dog. Naturally, it's still a flea that is a lot bigger than my own personal net worth. :-) Unless I count differently, like measured in free time. :-)

OK, the global equity market is a big thing too.
http://www.ssga.com/library/esps/hoguetswfandglobalassetprices20071231/page.html

Estimates of the size of the world's capital market vary; the average of figures compiled by the McKinsey Global Institute, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch place the total stock of global equities at roughly $33 trillion; global government bonds - $21 trillion; private sector bonds - $24 trillion.

That's US$78 trillion for all three together. But, that is still only a little over one year's global spending. So, while that is not a flea, it is still a tail wagging the dog if you consider global spending over twenty years.

As long as investors think in terms of private gain, not public gain, they will emphasize investments that can be the best guarded, not investments that maximize social returns they do not see on their balance sheet. Sometimes, as with Google, they can still make a lot of money, because the trillions in annual saving from Google (for time saved searching, and improved quality of results) leaves a lot of money falling off the table to grab some of somehow.

But if you don't need much funds, because you are frugal, or you are retired, or your parents support you as a student, then you can do whatever you want with your "free" time. :-)
http://www.linux.org/

Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License , the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. [Find] out more about the operating system that is causing a revolution in the world of computers.

TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year:
Mining the Cognitive Surplus
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258

Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms.

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years:
Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1313223

So. we are looking at about one year of global GWP going into foundations over the next 25 years. If something is worth doing as a digital public work, money is not the problem. Again, nor is time when "TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year". Mythology is the problem. Which is why I wrote this presumably ignored email around 2001: :-)
"On funding digital public works "
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615

So, what is even a *billion* hours of human work on those scales compared to sitcom viewing on TV? It is about 0.5% of the total hours devoted to sitcoms.

What is even a trillion dollars on this scale? Nothing.

I've seen an endless parade of articles reassuring the US public how "affordable" the Iraq war is as a percent of the USA's GDP -- a war now projected to cost three trillion dollars or more. If that exercise in fantasy and needless suffering and spawning terrorists is worth that much, then surely we can as a society spend much more than that on real investments in a happy future for everyone on the planet?

There is plenty of time and money for a massive number of massive projects. That we don't see so many projects has more to do with the economic mythology still dominant in our culture.

Again, the investment right now of US$600 billion that would give everyone on the planet a mesh-networked laptop is only 1% of just one year's global GWP. In ten years, as the GWP increases, and the laptop costs decrease, this will be less than 0.1% of GWP. Or, a trivial amount not even worth mentioning considering the potential benefits of reducing global want and ignorance. Well, it would reduce technical ignorance, as I suspect the social ignorance is on the other side in the "developed" world and the industrialized nations will actually get more out of it than the materially poor ones. :-) There would be some consumerist blowback no doubt as poor people became dissatisfied, which is why laptops for everyone is just the start of a transcendence beyond money, not the end of one.

One reason Google looks free is because, relative to how powerful computers are now for a little money, and relative to the $60 trillion global annual GWP, Google is *essentially* free to operate. :-) And Google search (along with the world wide web it indexes) enables trillions of dollars a year in cost savings and increased productivity and quality. My essays and emails would be effectively impossible without Google search or something similar (I know, I'm wide open for a joke here about the time people spend reading my emails actually reducing productivity. :-)

In twenty to thirty years (assuming continued exponential growth in technological capacity along the lines of Moore's law like price/performance, which most experts agree will happen),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
likely even a $100 laptop computer in 2033 will be literally a million times faster than today (as the OLPC is approximately tens of thousands of times faster than an Apple II). At that point, you could hold the equivalent of all of today's Google physical computer equipment literally in your lap. :-) And likely, someone would be throwing one out to get something better, so if you "dumpster dived", you could get a "Google" of today's computing power for free. :-) By the way, that computer could likely hold all the surface internet of today in *RAM*. And if I turn out to be off by ten years, so what? I was off by two years here -- it still happened:
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html

I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics)
"Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000"

I predicted five years for the $100 rugged laptop, it took seven. Just by thinking about about a cheap playful toy and what it really meant for humanity as you follow Moore's law along. I don't see the predictions here as much different in approach, though they are broader and so likely to be fuzzier. And in the end somebody else did it, not me. Which is OK by me -- if they had only got the software better by not trying to dumb it down. :-(

As John Taylor Gatto puts it:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates—these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.

I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.

So, even with the best of constructivist intentions, the OLPC project, filled with people steeped in these traditions, went wrong in underestimating what kids can and will learn if they want to be part of a global community. :-( If they had just said -- "here run any GNU/Linux application you want, you decide", maybe with a streamlined desktop, as was suggested by this article:
"The OLPC Sugar Interface: Don't Do it"
http://www.osnews.com/story/16582
the project would likely have been a bigger success (it is otherwise a tough call as a free software developer whether to invest in porting stuff just to it.) But, so what if some tens of millions spent on development of the first OLPC XO-1 was not 100% a success? That amount is nothing to $60 trillion a year in GWP. We can try that a thousand times as a development project and it still will be less than 1% of GWP. As an experiment, the XO-1 is a world changing success. Even if I find the two I have in some sense disappointing. But we are close to something amazing. To many amazing things. And some dangerous ones, of course.

Recruitment in an emerging Post-Scarcity world

Let's start from the heart of the matter these days, as always, for any quasi-military organization like academia needing cannon fodder: recruitment.
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

In The Republic Plato asserted that the state should take responsibility for training children from the age of three and that each citizen could be guided by the system towards an ideal conception of justice and into the social class and occupation best suited for him. Education had to be universalized so that all citizens could be effectively screened and placed. In this Plato was emphatic that it was the state's job to support and control schools and to make them compulsory. There was no question in Plato's mind that schools should be designed by the state to support the state. ...

Among those who saw the value to the State in controlling schools was Napoleon, who centralized all education bureaucracies in France and took complete control of education in the country.
"No one" it was decreed "may open a school or teach publicly unless he is a member of the imperial university and a graduate of one of its faculties ... No school may be set up outside the university and without the sanction of its head" ...the whole system was modeled on the military regime of its founder. The university, in fact, was organized like a regiment. The discipline was severe, and the teachers were subject to it as well as the scholars. When a teacher infringed any regulation and incurred censure, he was put under arrest. There was a uniform for all members of the university: a black robe with blue palms. The college was a miniature reproduction of the army. Each establishment was divided into companies with sergeants and corporals. Everything was done to the sound of the drum. It was soldiers and not men that were to be made.

Consider a prospective Princeton student evaluating whether an elite education at Princeton is a good investment of four years of her or his youth -- as well as a the direct expenses and indirect opportunity cost of lost wages. How should such a person evaluate the Princeton University "brand" these days, given, say, Donald Rumsfeld '54 as a PU poster boy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
"Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html
And also, how should a bright student interested in a future of independent intellectual effort see a PU investment in relation to perhaps a future PhD and professorship if they stay on the academic track all the way? Is it worth it? Should they really sacrifice, say, creating their own personalized "brand" on their own in the internet age from day one, as opposed to trying to build a life under the Princeton "brand" and so perhaps follow in Donald Rumsfeld's footsteps?

Here is an analogous example of someone choosing to pass up working at Apple to continue developing their own personal brand:
"Why I passed up the chance to work at Apple"
http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000809.html
A visitor comment from that web site:

Apple has nothing on Cameron Moll. Sure, Apple is a wonderful brand. But where Apple is in the business of design, Cameron strikes me as one in the business of the art of design, and that may appear to be a subtle difference at first glance. But it isn't. ... You have built a brand for and of yourself, and I personally admire your accomplishment. I believe you describe an important self-discovery: you value the Cameron Moll brand more than you value the mighty Apple brand.

By coincidence (if such really exist? :-), such a prospective student need look no further that the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Cover story: "The new rules of financial aid"):
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/table_of_contents.html
to understand how the "Princeton University" brand may need to be rethought in a collaborative GNU/Linux & Wikipedia internet age. Is it still advisable to align oneself with the historic Princeton University brand in an emerging post-scarcity society? Or, to be fair, to align one's personal brand with how that historic PU brand is now seen by the public, acknowledging there is always a lot going on at Princeton in different directions? I'd also suggest there are more alumni than just me who have stopped buying PU-related automobile window stickers (see below for more on that).

That choice of self-branding versus main-stream branding in the internet age is related to the idea of "post-scarcity". I will define that better later, but for now, let's just imagine a future where beer everywhere in the world is as easy to get anywhere as it is at Reunions after someone gives you a badge. :-) Or, a little more seriously, where you can print pizza as easily as you might print this web page. Examples:
"Funny video of a person interacting with a future computer and printing pizza"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=topeBoB-ApQ
"Printing sushi" (for real, sort of :-)
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/02/03/0330238.shtml?tid=133&tid=126

Prospectives probably know about such things, or will soon. The question is, does Nassau Hall know about them, and is Princeton ready for such prospectives and their concerns? As is suggested here:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_goheen.html

Traveling through New Jersey in the late 1960s with two classmates from Harvard, Stephen Goheen stopped back home in Princeton, where his father, the president of Princeton University, invited the trio out to lunch. Cambridge, even more than Princeton, was gripped by antiwar protests and unrest. Stephen, who later would perform alternative service as a conscientious objector, recalls that his father asked all manner of questions. Afterward it dawned on him that the elder Goheen had been "conducting research. He was trying to learn what we were thinking."
That was Robert Francis Goheen, always listening. ... He hired a young assistant professor from Harvard, Neil Rudenstine '56, as dean of students when he realized that nobody in Nassau Hall really had a clue about the late-'60s generation.

No, I'm not looking for that job. And in any case, I'm not "qualified" as I don't have a PhD. :-) The last time I was in Nassau Hall was about twenty years ago and a Dean was essentially telling me I should find a research institute to do creative research work related to sustainability and post-scarcity-related issues, not expect to do it at PU in a graduate program. :-( I'd not planned to ever set foot in there again, even though that Dean was 100% realistically right, maybe even helpful. And even if PU has come half way: :-)
http://www.princeton.edu/sustainability/

But to be fair to everyone at PU at the time, I was not then the person I am now. I have grown. As I'm sure people at PU have grown. And the institution may have grown, if such is possible. Maybe someday I will set foot again in Nassau Hall as a visitor, just for curiosity or just to mark my own growth. :-) Also, as my wife says, forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. :-)

Also, as I say here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/1edbf78087d42843

Where would I be if, for example, I did not recognize, despite the pain and trouble it caused me, the ultimate funny irony of people working in Von Neumann Hall (and surrounds) at Princeton having no interest in studying self-replicating systems? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
"Von Neumann also created the field of cellular automata without the aid of computers, constructing the first self-replicating automata with pencil and graph paper. The concept of a universal constructor was fleshed out in his posthumous work Theory of Self Reproducing Automata.[13] Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing large-scale mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by using self-replicating machines, taking advantage of their exponential growth."
Although John von Neumann's life is so complex and full of contradictions (whose isn't?) that they did have a lot of issues to chose from. :-) Maybe arms control was more important. And at least a handful of people there were thinking hard about green energy back then (even if the rest of the University thought they were nutty, if they thought of them at all :-).

Why am I am taking the time to write this essay as my alumni contribution then? Is it maybe just an "I told you so"? :-) Frankly, I'm *not* writing this essay out of much concern for Princeton University as an institution. I'm writing it mainly out of concern for the world my child will be living in twenty to thirty years from now (as well as maybe some general concern for the people themselves who make up PU as an institution). And I think that world would be a better one for my child if PU changed in ways that will coincidentally also interest prospectives right now, as well as help current faculty, staff, students, and alumni (since the changes might help everybody). Make what you will of that.

People who read this might rightfully say I am at the very least somewhat "bitter". OK, I won't disagree. What you have to really ask is, am I an isolated case? And if there are many bitter like me, then why?

The rest of this essay considers what, reading between the lines, PAW is admitting about the declining value of the "Princeton University" brand these days and the related spread of "heart disease" (in the alienation sense) on campus and beyond. And it suggests why aligning oneself with that PU brand might lead both staff and students to eventually consider "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" (either consciously or unconsciously). :-( And it has the beginnings of ideas on how the PU brand might be renewed in a different direction.

But what high school student, let alone one busy enough to get into Princeton, would be likely to read through more than 700K of dry text, even if it might save their life? Maybe there needs to be some added motivation, since youth generally think they are immortal? :-) So, here are some "teasers" intended to appeal to late teen prospectives. :-) As fair warning, there is stuff about "prostitution" (both on and off campus) involving "money" in here. Mostly safe for "work" though -- well, sort of. :-) And, yes, with an essay this long, especially one touching on "jumping from the Ivory Tower", there is a murder mystery in here, too, but a very sad one. :-( One in which I myself may have had a role to play. :-(

And, I would expect all this talk of sex, some mixed with money, and also my personal admission of potential involvement with a possible murder :-( would stir up some controversy, enough to perhaps cause some troubles for myself. To quote the current US President, as he expressed his support and concern for the welfare for our brave and dedicated troops in Iraq (who in some ways are the most idealistic young men and women in the USA, or would be if we brought them home), "Bring them on". :-(
http://www.unknownnews.net/insanity9.html
Oh, sorry, wrong quote. :-( Maybe I can find a better quote by Princeton's president about concern for the youth of the world? (We'll see. :-) Again, sorry, I would not want our youth to question the concern our current institutions have for their long term welfare, or should I? And some institutions clearly *are* concerned with people's long term well being, so no need to be too cynical:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4750

More and more evidence suggests a relationship between the risk of cardiovascular disease and environmental and psychosocial factors. These factors include job strain, social isolation and personality traits. But more research is needed on how stress contributes to heart disease risk. We don't know if stress acts as an "independent" risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Acute and chronic stress may affect other risk factors and behaviors, such as high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, smoking, physical inactivity and overeating.

Oh well, no doubt no matter what I say this essay will cause trouble for me. But if those young men and women can (in their minds) risk their lives for me, maybe I can risk most likely less for them -- even if they may not appreciate it at the moment. So, trying to be brave and self-serving at the same time, I'd appreciate it if someone could bring this essay to the attention of higher authorities at PU as grounds to kick me off Princeton University's TigerNet (which I have spent too much time on anyway, including writing this), as well as to revoke my diploma (which I see mostly as an embarrassment at this point), and also to suspend my "free" subscription to PAW (which serves as a constant reminder of my youthful indiscretion in not seeing past Earthly wealth and power). Thanks in advance. :-)

Think of this as a follow up to the classic movie about the Princeton admissions process called "Risky Business". :-) Why not supply prospective Princetonians with some fun involving sex, prostitution, lots of money, and maybe death, as in the movie? :-) OK, the death part isn't funny. :-( But some of the rest is hopefully funny, like any tragicomedy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy refers to fictional works that blend aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy refers to a serious play with a happy ending.

It's been said that US American public suffers from seeing too few tragedies in the fictional media. Tragedies help keep us humble -- and out of places we shouldn't be, like Palmer lake (with a new Porsche). Or Iraq. Or technology and science-filled "Brave New World" dystopias filled with military robots and other nasties (more on that later). :-( Or, dare we even think it, maybe Princeton?

But with this serious non-fiction essay inspired in part by the current issue of PAW, the happy or tragic ending is still to be written -- hopefully a happy one helped along by at least some in the Princeton community.

Using PAW for mythological analysis, or Goldilocks and the three PAWs: Too easy, too hard, and just right

Let's find some PAW article as a starting point for analysis of Princeton's current mythology (meaning, the way it explains itself to itself) as an aid to seeing whether Princeton's values are aligned with an emerging post-scarcity society of abundance and security for all (along with "liberty and justice" of course).

OK, let's flip hopefully, to, say, lucky page 13, "Campus police seek approval to carry weapons".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/notebook.html
Nope, that is just too easy to criticize. :-( "Great news, prospective students," the Orange Key guides can say, "the Princeton campus environment is now so intrinsically insecure it had to arm itself." :-( That would just be echoes of Amory Lovins and Brittle Power, but in a personal security way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. A resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current.

When I was in an engineering graduate program at PU, about twenty years ago, (actually it was the third time I was there after being an undergrad and, later, staff) I used to stay and chat with one of the uniformed officers who let me in when I came into the Engineering building late at night. He had quite a tale to tell about creeping fascism in the on-campus security. To the administration's credit, when I raised a concern about this with a PU dean, they may have taken it seriously because not long after there was a coincidental review of PU security issues. The music CD that officer recommended to me when I asked his opinion on music (when running into him by chance in a Nassau Street music shop) has become one of my favorites: Grover Washington, Jr: "The Best is Yet To Come". Maybe this was a hopeful choice for Princeton's future, especially coming from a man who used to tell me stories about the old Princeton town, when there were things for young kids to do on their own and the place felt more like a friendly neighborhood, and the sense of community and available options and strong role models kept young kids mostly out of trouble.

This was also before the University expanded into more and more aspects of everything "Princeton" as in the town. :-( Kind of like was feared in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit

Dolores informs Valiant that if the missing will is not found by midnight, a company called Cloverleaf Industries will be able to buy Toontown.

Except it actually happened in reality in some sense. :-( So, if the spirit of Toontown (no offense meant) is long gone (though perhaps also from larger social trends than just the University's operations), how can that great loss at least be retroactively justified by helping other towns elsewhere be happier and safer places -- in part by finding the "will" to do it?

Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more challenging article that explains PU mythology.

Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do.
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/prezpage.html
PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians.

In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in DeNunzio Pool:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/onthecampus.html
(I know the article refers to the Dillon pool, but I don't see how that pool is big enough and deep enough for a shark of that size. :-) Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard to keep in captivity. :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/3cb25c402e201c88
http://ask.yahoo.com/20010911.html
Still, are those PU scientists and engineers doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten? That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-(

Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark "smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a bigger problem? :-(

For example:
http://7dp.blogspot.com/2007/08/shark-week-super-smart-shark-edition.html

So, in an effort to save their funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule! And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten.

Also:
http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/deepbluesea.html

Some scientists are out in the middle of the ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. Hooray.

I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made horror film. :-)

For a more serious take on this issue, consider:
"Is "bootstrapping" part of the problem?"
http://www.welchco.com/04/00067/60/00/12/1901.HTM
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/2168.html

As someone who had spent time living around Navajo people once told me, the Navajo had a saying something like:

If you begin a thing with the right spirit, it is a success even if it fails.
If you begin a thing with the wrong spirit, it is a failure even if it is a success.

That's not the sort of thing that would be possible to explain to many Princetonians. Was Kit Carson a PU alumnus, perhaps, figuring out the most efficient means of taking long walks? :-( So I won't even go there. Sadly, other than a splash of cold water or two, that divorce of science and engineering (and economics) from the humanities and ethics is a mythological idea so entrenched at PU and in our society that it is *way* too hard for me to address.

Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me? Still, it's pretty clear Einstein was not suggesting our societal problems would be solved by getting Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Molecular Biology all together to work on more atomic weapons or smarter sharks, or even to fuse the two. Smarter sharks with laser guided nuclear weapons -- now that's an "interdisciplinary" idea to have PU students think about while enjoying the "tree house" (while it lasts, till the sharks learn to target it from DeNunzio Pool). :-( Or maybe smart armed sharks isn't such a good idea: :-)
"Military Robot"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_robot
"Killer Military Robots Pose Latest Threat To Humanity, Robotics Expert Warns"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080226213451.htm
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
http://pave.princeton.edu/main/
(Actually, I like the idea of self-driving cars, given the potential to reduce road accidents, free drivers to do other things en-route, or make possible driverless automated deliveries. So, I can respect that sort of work at Princeton if done in the right spirit and freely licensed, like, say, WordNet was. But you have to wonder when the military funds anything what their scarcity-oriented plans are.)

WordNet was developed at Princeton, and in the internet age is Princeton's greatest claim to fame (well, maybe other than Amazon :-):
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Maybe someday free software for ethical cars and robots might be a claim to fame by Princeton, too? :-)

Ultimately, you can't reason without assumptions, including assumptions about what reasoning tools are valid or valuable. :-) And then you also need values and desires to direct your oh-so-feeble flashlight of reason in different directions in a larger murky mystery. Even PU's early attempts towards vehicle AI begin to deal with such issues -- like whether certain memories are valuable to hang on to versus painfully abandoning them in pursuit of a certain mission. :-) Like I'm asking alumni to do by writing this essay. :-) So, "assumptions", "reasoning tool preferences", "values", "desires" -- a lot of faith there through all those (in a sense) in any life -- even in a scientist or engineer who might claim to be an atheist. :-) All these help define your personal ethics whether the roots of them are store-bought or self-crafted. :-)

To be clear, what I am really pointing out is that needing to have "faith" in something (even in just the validity and usefulness of our perceptions and reason) is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, as is then needing to build on top of that faith. This isn't meant to tear down any specific faith, whether hand-made existential humanism or even, say, off-the-rack Roman Catholicism (there are far worse faiths out there in many ways, and why take away something that works for many unless they will get something much better in return, not the risk of nihilism, even though even *that* takes a leap of faith. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Nihilism is often described as a belief in the nonexistence of truth. In its more extreme forms, such a belief is difficult to justify, because it contains a variation on the liar paradox: if it is true that truth does not exist, the statement "truth does not exist" is itself a truth, therefore showing itself to be inconsistent. A formally identical criticism has been leveled against relativism and the verifiability theory of meaning of logical positivism. A more sophisticated interpretation of the claim might be that while truth may exist, it is inaccessible in practice, but this leaves open the problem of how the nihilist has accessed it. It may be a reasonable reply that the nihilist has not accessed truth directly, but has come to the conclusion, based on past experience, that truth is ultimately unattainable within the confines of human circumstance. Thus, since nihilists believe they have learned that truth cannot be attained in this life, they look upon the activities of those rigorously seeking truth as futile. Of course one may add that nihilism is a self fulfilling prophecy, as without making any attempts to attain the truth one is presumably less likely to find it.

See also:
"Thinking As A Hobby" by William Golding
http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/ThinkingAsAHobby

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion-namely, that I myself could not think at all. ... Grade-two thinking, though it filled life with fun and excitement, did not make for content. To find out the deficiencies of our elders bolsters the young ego but does not make for personal security. I found that grade two was not only the power to point out contradictions. It took the swimmer some distance from the shore and left him there, out of his depth. I decided that Pontius Pilate was a typical grade-two thinker. "What is truth?" he said, a very common grade-two thought, "but one that is used always as the end of an argument instead of the beginning". There is still a higher grade of thought which says, "What is truth?" and sets out to find it. ... [Though Golding has more to say, even on the folly of grade one thinking, but I won't spoil his essay. :-)]

It would take someone more like, say, Langdon Winner to *really* know where to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
But he's at RPI. Maybe in a pinch Professor Michael Mahoney at PU could fill in for Prof. Winner, as he assigned Winner's "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" at least when I took one of his courses. Of course, I did not bother to read it much until after I graduated. :-) Now I wish I had paid more attention in his class. So it is never too late to learn what PU humanities professors have to teach, and then pass on that new color of illumination to someone else as a gift, to help them complete their intellectual rainbow, and pass more colors onto others. Until the whole world is rainbows. Even for the sharks so badly maligned by that picture (as indicated by the scattered applause reported in Dillon when that animal was blown up in the movie). :-( See:
http://www.savingsharks.com/

You can help save sharks by telling everyone you know to watch Sharkwater and spread the word. We need to give sharks a new image and make ocean conservation a part of our daily lives.

But the original movie "Jaws" shows the power of myth. Even though sharks pose only a small risk to humans in most cases, several species have now been hunted to almost extinction:
"From the Jaws of Extinction"
http://www.nova.edu/ocean/ghri/jaws_extinction.html

The irony of the shark myth, according to Dr. Harvey, is that some species of sharks are being hunted to the point of extinction by humans, not the other way around. "Many species are at critically low levels and if we do not act immediately on their behalf, then entire marine ecosystems could collapse," Harvey explains.

So, where can I find something in PAW a little easier to discuss than essentially religion, but not as easy to discuss as getting more guns onto campus? I need something to chew on, not too hard, not too soft, to provide the main course of this essay. :-)

How about on page 12, "$25 million gift to strengthen engineering-liberal arts ties".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/notebook.html
Sound like a promising Navajo start, with a heart setting off in the right direction. But towards the end of the article, a black hole shows up unexpectedly:

Security, for instance, includes traditional work in national defense as well as newer research topics like secure information technology and electronic voting.

Whoa, slow down there. The USA is in the middle of spending three trillion dollars (see below) on "traditional" national defense which is making everyone in the world less secure (just ask them), and some of this "engineering for a better world" money is to be added to that boiling-over pot?

Now there is a theme we can talk about: a secure and prosperous future for all on the planet and beyond, and how the Princeton community has perhaps lost sight of it. How could that future be achieved through bold and noble investments (by people who look as very happy as that donor from being able to give a gift to the world)?

So, what does the rest of the PAW issue say about whether the mythology guiding the Princeton community helps or hurts security and prosperity for all? Or even just professor wanna-bees?

Future security and prosperity is likely a major concern of prospective Princeton students these days, who are choosing whether to give the university the gift of their youth and presumed future allegiance. Is the "Princeton University" brand up to that challenge, as the social pendulum swings from "greed is good" back to "the love of money is the root of all evil"? How does the "Princeton University" brand interact with an emerging post-scarcity of abundance (of which GNU/Linux is just the beginning)?

Also, if Princeton's current mythology is a good one, then it should be reflected at least in a lot of happy intellectuals, like newly minted PhDs, right? We'll see. :-(

What does "post-scarcity" mean exactly, anyway?

Joke:
http://www.textfiles.com/humor/JOKES/laws.lst

Murphy's (First) Corollary: Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

And also, to keep us humble:

Murphy's (Second) Corollary: Every solution breeds new problems.

The idea of "post-scarcity" is a central theme in this essay, so let's explore what that idea means.

It has nothing to do with "posts" being rare. :-)

And it has nothing to do with not getting enough mail from friends and family. :-)

The term "post-scarcity" means "after" scarcity. So it is about a world where most everything essential to human life is so common and easily obtainable that anyone can take practically as much as they would like without metering. An example now is how people can breathe as much air as they like (even if hyperventilation can give people a headache or much worse). Or at the beach anyone can drink as much sea water as they like (which isn't very good for you either, of course). Or, almost anyone with an internet connection can now surf to as many web pages as they like (which is not good for you either in excess).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=internet+addiction
Relative to individual human needs, the atmosphere, or the ocean, or free-to-the-user web page views are effectively infinite. Of course we may be polluting each of those three commons via industry, but that is a different issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

What happens to society when most physical things ranging from automobiles to bicycles to computers to dentures to energy to food and so on to zirconia all become essentially free-to-the-user?

Some might suspect what I am talking about would be European "socialism" or Soviet-style "communism". But I'm not. I am talking about transcending those economic rationing and taxing and working issues altogether. And I am saying, as above, that this is a virtually unstoppable trend (short of cataclysmic war) that is happening with or without our individual involvement.

For reference, from Wikipedia on "socialism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism refers to the goal of a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community. This control may be either direct—exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils—or indirect—exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an economic system, socialism is often characterized by collective ownership of the means of production, goals which have been attributed to, and claimed by, a number of political parties and governments throughout history, due to this, socialism has been identified with communism mainly because the distribution of wealth is controlled as a whole and not individually.

For reference, from Wikipedia on "communism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems believed to be inherent with capitalist economies and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Communism states that the only way to solve these problems would be for the working class, or proletariat, to replace the wealthy bourgeoisie, which is currently the ruling class, in order to establish a peaceful, free society, without classes, or government. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism and Luxemburgism, are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarchist communism) also exist and are growing in importance since the fall of the Soviet Union.

That's not to say, of course, that a lot of ideas in socialism don't make sense -- from using increases in the money supply as a "social credit" dividend to progressive taxes that equalize the rich-poor divide and produce public works. :-) It is possible to use laws to try to make a "market economy" work to meet some social goals (more on that later).

But I am really talking about something else than market-interactive socialism and the taxation it usually involves.

Also, one could perhaps draw parallels to "communism" as defined abstractly above, but still not at all to how communism has ever been put into practice, since "common ownership" generally translates to "strong state control of production by bureaucrats" and assigned "work" which is tightly supervised (even though it does not have to).

Still, yes, I shall admit, in a broad sense, I am asking Princetonians to think about communism and *beyond* (as in going beyond "work" and "school" as ideas, towards "play"), because "from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs (or wants :-)" is happening right now in various ways -- even in the USA, and Princetonians can no longer stop it. So even if you have a visceral bad reaction to that idea, read on so you can think of ways to stop it. :-) But, as a hint, maybe you can't, and maybe you would not want to -- so essentially, there is not much of an alternative to heading these words sooner or later. :-) Other that blowing most of everything up, of course, as in "better dead that red", or is it, "read"? :-(

To see the difference (at least from anything tried recently :-) let's read together the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Princeton-related "This Side of Paradise",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise
where the main character, Amory Blain, toys with socialism. From the (free) text:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/805

"Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before--populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and--we're _dawdling_ along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster." ... If we had government ownership we'd have the best analytical business minds in the government working for something besides themselves. ... "Let me tell you" -- Amory became emphatic -- "if there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours' work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours' work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they'll sweat their heads off for that. If it's only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they'll work just as hard. They have in other ages." ... "How can they get it without taking it? For years people have been stalled off with promises. Socialism may not be progress, but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You've got to be sensational to get attention."

Amory Blain talks of going "faster", but does not talk about in which direction. Is he just trying to be another "catalyst for change"? :-(

Amory Blain raises competition as an organizing force, but we will see that Alfie Kohn suggests there are better ones (see the middle of this essay).

Amory Blain is mean to the chauffeur, but Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah will show a way forward through gentleness (see the end of this essay).

Amory Blain also suggests government ownership of a centralized means of production, but what if much production was decentralized back to the neighborhood or household -- even for, say, couches or cars?

And what if everything was so cheap that who was to pay for it all stopped being an interesting question?

From Wikipedia ():
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity

Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.

Note that "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" is itself a great example of the post-scarcity trend.

A history lesson: pre-scarcity times (Eden), then scarcity times (Dickens), then post-scarcity times (real soon now)

Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.

Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html

For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes.

Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.

As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization.

Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to a more scarcity-dominated agricultural and industrial way of life today for most people.

The Genesis story in the Christian Bible can be interpreted that way as well, as the story of rising populations resulting in part from hunter-gatherer success and increasing technical knowledge and social bureaucracy ending the happy hunter-gatherer days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis

God forms Adam "from the dust of the ground...and man became a living being."[5] God sets the man in the Garden of Eden and permits him to eat of all the fruit within it, except that of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, "for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." God makes "every beast of the field and every bird of the air, ... and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name ... but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him." God causes the man to sleep, and makes a woman from one of his ribs, and the man awakes and names his companion Woman, "because she was taken out of Man."[6] "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed."[7] The serpent tells the woman that she will not die if she eats the fruit of the tree: "When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,[8] knowing good and evil." So the woman eats and gives to the man who also eats. "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons." God curses the serpent: "upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life;" the woman he punishes with pain in childbirth and with subordination to man: "your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you;" and the man he punishes with a life of toil: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground." The man names his wife Eve,[9] "because she was the mother of all living." "Behold," says God, "the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil," and expels the couple from Eden, "lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever." The gate of Eden is sealed by a cherub and a flaming sword "to guard the way to the tree of life."[10]

(I thank one of my homeschooling friends for reminding me of this Genesis parallel.)

What went before Genesis is apparently lost. But some of those older peoples still have more detailed stories about what life used to be like and in detail how awful that transition was from the freedom of hunting and gathering to the bondage of agriculture, or as Chaplin suggests, to industry. There were even rough times when agriculture finally started working well and populations grew and people invented industrialization. So it was worse than now in the time of Dickens, but if you go way, way back, to the times Sahlins talks about, certain aspects of life might have been better that they even are now (not all aspects, of course). For example, art, music, story-telling, poetry, dance, conversation, gift-giving, and child-rearing had a more central role in some of those hunter-gatherer societies than in many of the industrialized societies of today. Those are the kind of things people tend to do when they have idle time. :-)

Trends towards increasing per capita production relative to wants still continue, made possible by the very success of industrialization and the growth of shared knowledge, like by the internet. People are also developing robots and 3D printing, plus all sorts of other new things like easy-to-make solar panels. Those systems are potentially so productive that only a few people might be able to provide much for all. Or everyone might only have to labor just a little to get a lot. At some point, industrialized goods, including cars, electricity, computers, and even eventually food may become so easy to get they are no longer scarce. Someday, people will not have to spend much time thinking about them or spend much effort to get them. Essentially, we return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but instead of picking fruit off the trees, we pick it from our robotically-stocked refrigerator. Instead of making tools from stones, we might print them using a 3D printer. All those trends are happening now, from how Amazon ships books now or soon:
"Filling Amazon's Tall Orders"
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/12/amazon/source/1.htm
"Smart Warehouse Technology - Automatic Guided Vehicles"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLwI-pHUvRQ
"Warehouse & Distribution Systems"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUCkDrICkqo
to how WoW custom figurines get made:
"WOW 3D Printer Application - FigurePrints"
http://3dprinters.blogspot.com/2007/12/figureprints.html
"How 3-D Printing Figures To Turn Web Worlds Real"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119742129566522283.html?mod=djemTECH

Here are links to today's early 3D printers, both commercial/proprietary and F/OSS:
http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/ZPrinter-450/spage.aspx
http://www.reprap.org
http://fabathome.org

And here is a blog about them:
http://3dprinters.blogspot.com/

And here is a a related but broader "Fab Lab" approach:
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/about2.php

Fab Lab is an abbreviation for Fabrication Laboratory. It is a group of off-the-shelf, industrial-grade fabrication and electronics tools, wrapped in open source software and programs written by researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms. Currently the labs include a laser cutter that makes 2D and 3D structures, a sign cutter that plots in copper to make antennas and flex circuits, a high-resolution milling machine that makes circuit boards and precision parts, and a suite of electronic components and programming tools for low-cost, high-speed microcontrollers. MIT has additionally written a Computer-Aided Machinery (CAM) program that can read all of the different kinds of ways that people describe things digitally and turn them into tool paths for all of the different ways it's possible to make them. Researchers have written another program for Fab Labs which helps users share their files and experiences as they work, so that users can teach each other rather than relying on a fixed curriculum: http://fab.cba.mit.edu. Fab Labs are evolving as our research evolves. A full Fab Lab currently costs about $25,000 in equipment and materials without MIT's involvement. It is a rapid prototyping platform, and as such is meant to encourage local entrepreneurs to take their own ideas from the drawing board to prototypes to starting local micro businesses, Fab Lab also teaches users critical skills in computing, electronics, programming, and CAD/CAM fabrication techniques--a set of internationally recognized skills. It is additionally a platform from which a community's technical challenges can be shared with an international roster of engineers, who can help problem solve and design solutions for the community. In return for the involvement of trained engineers with the community, engineers have an opportunity to work on real life design problems faced by large, under-served communities at the lower end of the consumer market.

All are just the beginning of a "personal fabrication" revolution. This is what prospective Princeton students might have access to *now*. What will they have access to twenty years from now when that prospective is in the middle of his or her career? Consider, for example, the difference in quality between the output of a 1980s dot matrix printer and a color inkjet printer of today (2008). There are huge differences in output resolution, color availability, quietness, ease-of-use, non-fanfold paper handling, and so on. And they are cheaper now, or even come free with computers. So, we might expect that with continued innovation that MIT's "fab lab" capabilities may be nearly free in twenty to thirty years too.

What is coming could be termed "post-scarcity" as it is the time after scarcity issues dominate our thinking and our politics. Not everyone agrees on the meaning of the term 100%, but the general outline of abundance for all with little "work" is clear, as in the Wikipedia article above. At that point, "money", which is mainly used to ration access to goods and services, ceases to have much meaning.

A half-way step from a market economy based around fiat dollars might be a "social credit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
of enough money to support at least a graduate student level of existence, guaranteed to everyone by right of birth. This is essentially "welfare and medicaid for everybody" with no means testing (and so less paperwork). The cash is either taxed or taken from increasing the money supply. Then people would continue to set prices for things and to self-ration using those prices. Additional independent activities would produce further income if desired. As more productive capacity came online, the social credit would be increased. Such a system is described here as future sci-fi, but it might work even now:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
Right now, at about 300 million people in the USA, at $10,000 per person, this system would cost three trillion dollars a year to operate. I might expect as a guess that universal quality health care might cost another trillion per year. The US GDP is about fourteen trillion dollars a year, so this would require taxing about 30% of the GDP for that. Note that the US government already takes in approaching that in taxes.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/summarytables.html
Benefits from this include a much smaller government from less paperwork, reduced expenses for things like schools since parents could educate kids at home and in the community, and likely there would be much less crime. Parents would be able to spend a lot more time with their kids, likely making for a much happier society overall. The workplace would in general also be happier and also more efficient, as only the people who wanted to work would work. Entrepreneurship might blossom countrywide as people would be able to take more risks knowing they had a safety net.

A country like the Netherlands has moved somewhat in this direction (not entirely, of course, just a trend) and it is a happy place.
"Why are Dutch children so happy?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6360517.stm
Note that in the same report referenced that puts Dutch kids as tops in happiness, US and UK kids are at the bottom of the list. :-( So, clearly, past Ivy League leadership for the USA leaves a lot to be desired, at least if you ever were a kid or plan to be a parent. :-( Anyway, the same brilliant Princeton economic minds that will no doubt find all sorts of flaws in this essay might better spend a lot of time explaining this inconvenient fact of US kids taking it on the chin for empire and capitalism. And it is likely not coincidental the last global empire before the USA (the UK) is last, and the US second to last. As is explained here:
"Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young"
http://web.archive.org/web/20070812002003/http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html

"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates."

That is the childhood experience that an empire focusing on enforcing local and global scarcity has created. Social credit is one approach to a band-aid fix. But it does not address a lot of deeper issues as a post-scarcity society approaches with the eventual abolition of most work and most rationing. Ultimately, making things too cheap to matter (see below) is where this is all heading. And trying to do such a system via taxes or the money supply raises difficult questions of compulsion through taxes or an inflationary tax by increasing the money supply. It might be better that the present system for most in the USA, but it would soon be obsolete. It also would not address the issue of *global* prosperity. So, I outline this half-way house to universal prosperity for completeness, but I don't see any exponentially advancing technological society staying there very long. Of course what lies even further down the road (a technological singularity) is more like a mirror we can mainly use to see ourselves and our heart's desires, like in Harry Potter's "Mirror of Erised":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-mirror-of-erised.htm
Kurzweil sees conservative libertarian-ish capitalism in that mirror (which has done well for him personally); I see something else -- a circling back to the spirit of how we used to be, a return to the better parts of when we did not need so much clunky technology to survive. :-)

It is important to consider this a circle, to see that it is a return to some older ways more than it is something completely new. Because then we can see from history that art, music, story-telling, poetry, dance, conversation, gift-giving, and child-rearing can once again become priorities. So, we don't have to go into such times without a guide. To see what the future might hold for such a society, imagine if the whole world looked like Princeton University right now but with everyone on the planet accepted from birth on full scholarship as well as on full salary as tenured faculty with no teaching duties. :-)
http://www.princeton.edu/main/
Right now, that front page shows a picture of happy smiling people doing African dance.
"Harvey brings lively beat of African dance to Princeton"
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S21/08/01G63/

But we are obviously still seemingly far away from that world today. Only a few people, for a short time, get to freely dance at Princeton. And some of the more reflective of those are likely sad about the growing rich-poor divide and the difficulty of doing anything about it. As is suggested in an introduction to a 1950s short story by Theodore Sturgeon, "The Skills of Xanadu" (which helped inspire the World Wide Web) in his book, "The Golden Helix":

Dr. Toni Morrison, novelist, essayist, and educator, gave a commencement address at Bard College in 1979 in which she said (among many other powerful things) that your freedom is worthless unless you use it to free someone else, and that happiness is not happiness unless it makes others happy

And even worse, as the disaster of the Iraq war shows, this issue of "helping" others is a slippery topic. We need to distinguish between:

"If I knew...that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." -- Henry David Thoreau

versus:
http://djterasaki.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/lila-watsons-quote-well-sort-of/

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." -- often attributed to Lila Watson, but more complex than that as it came out of a group culture

Ironically, in my one attempt many years ago, I was unable to convince the current rights holder to free that fifty year old "The Skills of Xanadu" story about freedom (achieved in part by using advanced information technology and nanotech) for non-commercial distribution on the internet.

Making the whole world into Princeton University, or how Princeton locally stands in the way of Princeton globally :-)

So, the question becomes, how do we go about getting the whole world both accepted into Princeton and also with full tenured Professorships (researchy ones without teaching duties except as desired? :-) And maybe with robots to do anything people did not want to do? This is just intended as a humorous example, of course. I'm not suggesting Princeton would run the world of the future or that everyone would really have Princeton faculty ID cards and parking stickers. Still, that's a thought. :-) That motel for scholars, The Institute For Advanced Study, is already a bit like this (no required teaching duties), so it's an even better model. :-)
http://www.ias.edu/about/mission-and-history/

But you might object, who will run the kitchens, repair the roofs, plant Prospect Garden, and so forth? Essentially, who will be the Morlocks to support and maybe eat the Eloi on staff? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

Well, that's where this analogy breaks down, although one could perhaps imagine robots as the Morlocks (maybe without the whole eating PU staff for fuel thing).
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156

A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory.

Also, idleness is nice on occasion, but ultimately, to quote E. F. Schumacher:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give [a person] a chance to utilise and develop [his or her] faculties; to enable [a person] to overcome [his or her] ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

Ah, maybe that explains why so many Princetonians are unhappy? :-( As well as their overworked servants? :-(

That wasn't really fair, as Princetonians are typically the working class of the wealthy (doctors, lawyers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, US presidents, and so on), not the "top out of sight" "super rich" :-) who indirectly employ Princetonians etc. to keep some notion of order in the world as they see it, or at least so suggests Paul Fussell in his book: (don't know whether to take it seriously :-)
"Class: A Guide Through the American Status System"
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
See also:
"The middle of nowhere"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adirondack_Park
(That's just coincidentally where my immediate family lives, as it is still a somewhat intact ecology, and my wife likes trees. :-)
and:
Tour of the US Income Distribution, "The L-Curve"
http://www.lcurve.org/
(Note, really "super rich" people are maybe off even *that* curve, since even "Bill Gates" might be the working poor by their standards :-)

Contrary to popular opinion, Fussell suggests the super rich can't see any relevant difference between Princeton and a lowly state school, and so their kids might attend either or none at all. No matter who the kid marries, they'll be super rich. :-) That's the calculus of infinites for you. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
But for the rest of this essay I'll assume Princetonians run things. And they do even in Fussell's view, but more in a sort of administrative way. :-)

Also Fussel suggests a way out in the book -- to live as "Class X" which is perhaps what my immediate family is, not "super rich", or even plain "rich", but living in such a way as it does not matter (much. :-) Really, how many sunrises can you enjoy each day? How many beautiful dandelions can you look at at once? How many organic eggs you raise yourself can you really eat at one sitting? How big does your office really have to be to fit a treadmill and a computer with a few LCD screens? And so on. As long as you don't want to boss millions of people around, there is not much difference between "Class X" and being "Super Rich". And you might expect even bossing gets wearing and boring after a while.

Also, assuming for a moment that Fussell was right about there being "super rich" people, this essay would then be about convincing the super rich to let everyone else (including most Princetonians) become super rich instead of killing all poor people (say people with less than a few billion Euros in liquid assets) as a precaution with military robots, mutant sharks with laser beams, or related stuff (see especially Marshal Brain's "Manna" story).
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
One can only hope the super rich might see that in a calculus of infinites that allowing more super rich people might make the planet and solar system more interesting. Like the society of Star Trek's "Q Continuum".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)
I'm not talking about actual help, naturally, (and which would take all the fun out of it), so much as just not standing in the way. :-) But let's just pretend I did not say all that, or that Fussell isn't serious about the "super rich". Also, I've taken some liberties with his analysis -- he's not as extreme in his definition of the "super rich" as I am. :-) Besides, accepting the existence of the "super rich" with Princetonians as the "working poor" would make analyzing PAW harder (but also, admittedly, funnier. :-)

So, for the rest of this essay, I'll assume the "scarcity" world (at least in the USA) currently works more like, say, G. William Domhoff suggests:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/who_has_the_power.html

Q: So, who does rule America? A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. ... I will try to demonstrate how rule by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and organized opposition:
* "The rich" coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
* Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
* There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape policy debates in the United States.
* Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
* The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
* Working people have less power than in many other democratic countries.

And what is the current result of that system of social organization? We create a self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity in part through fearing it, and then acting on that fear. (And the only antidotes to fear are things like joy and humor. :-) Consider, say the US military and Iraq. The USA invades Iraq and produces terrorists that now justify having invaded as well as now devoting more money to the military. :-( Now people are saying the Iraq war, promised as a "cakewalk" will cost about three trillion US dollars before it is done. So, now we need to cut back on US social programs like R&D and nursing homes and also reduce aid to poorer countries (which might have truly helped prevent more problems). Thus we ensure more scarcity at home and abroad.

How much of the US monetarized economy goes into managing "scarcity" in terms of person-hours of work?
* A big chunk of the prison system,
* A big chunk of the legal system,
* A big chunk of the military and police,
* Cashiers,
* Most guards,
* Most of the management chain,
* Most of the banking system,
* Most sales people,
* Most of the insurance industry,
* Most of the Welfare and Medicaid government program staff (eligibility and oversight),
* Most lawyers and related proceedings,
* Much of the schooling and grading system, and
* Most of the government.

Add it all up, and maybe it is 90% of the person-hours consumed by the money economy by now? That's just a wild guess, of course. :-) I'm sure someone else better with numbers could refute or affirm that. But it is loosely based on a study mentioned in the essay linked below.

If you consider that a lot of service work is unnecessary if people had more free time (babysitting, restaurants, teaching, home construction, entertainment) then even less hours in the money economy are really needed in a society with a lot of leisure to raise children, cook meals, putter around the house, take on apprentices or educate neighbors on demand, and sing their own songs or make up their own stories.

And of course, child-rearing and day-to-day housekeeping and volunteering probably represents many more person-hours than the 10% or so of the total person-hours that the money economy uses for real production (actual work on factory goods, actual labor in agriculture, actual work making energy etc.). So clearly people will do important tasks for intrinsic benefits.

Things may have been different 100 years ago when most US Americans still lived on somewhat subsistence farms, and so most work was local and for one's own family and business. But somewhere during the past century, I'd speculate a shift happened where the amount of hours spent guarding exceeded the amount of effort spent producing. And then it probably just got worse from there, to the current situation where most work was related to guarding, even though work that is mostly guarding may also euphemistically be called "cashiering", "teaching", "managing", and so on. Pick almost any job and take most of the guarding out of it and it becomes more enjoyable.

It's important to look at the hours people work on various tasks, not the money value assigned to the tasks. If all those person hours are going into guarding functions, then of course there is little time left over for playful productive work.

And note, this estimate is without even giving a long hard look to rethinking how things could be done to be easier or more fun. Down the road, once tasks are redesigned to ignore the guarding aspects, they might be more efficiently done. For example, think of all the time people waste waiting in supermarket checkout lines or at toll booths. Or the time educators devote to attendance and grading.

The above is all an echo of this essay by Bob Black :
"The Abolition of Work" (written as I graduated in 1985, but I only saw it a couple years ago through the internet)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

How might a "post-scarcity" society really work?

So, how might a "post-scarcity" society really work? How could a "post-scarcity" society emerge at all, given this (obsolete) elite social deadlock Domhoff outlines?

What if some people get some "free" stuff somehow, and they use it, and in the process of using it they make more free stuff than they got? Let's assume these people then freely give this extra stuff away for free to others who use it to make even more free stuff. If everyone starts doing this, soon there could be an enormous amount of free stuff going around. A chain reaction (but a good one). Of course, as with any exponential process, with ever more free stuff on the way from more and more people, the problem becomes, where to find the space to put it all? (Hint: maybe "Space". :-)

Can't happen you say? Well, to keep us humble, consider:
"10 impossibilities conquered by science"
http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13556-10-impossibilities-conquered-by-science.html

The number of scientists and engineers who confidently stated that heavier-than-air flight was impossible in the run-up to the Wright brothers' flight is too large to count. Lord Kelvin is probably the best-known. In 1895 he stated that "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible", only to be proved definitively wrong just eight years later. Even when Kelvin made his infamous statement, scientists and engineers were closing rapidly on the goal of heavier-than-air flight. People had been flying in balloons since the late eighteenth century, and by the late 1800s these were controllable. Several designs, such as Félix du Temple's Monoplane, had also taken to the skies, if only briefly. So why the scepticism about heavier-than-air flight? The problem was set out in 1716 by the scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg in an article describing a design for a flying machine. Swedenborg wrote: "It seems easier to talk of such a machine than to put it into actuality, for it requires greater force and less weight than exists in a human body." Swedenborg's design, like so many, was based on a flapping-wing mechanism. Two things had to happen before heavier-than-air flight became possible. First, flapping wings had to be ditched and replaced by a gliding mechanism. And secondly, engineers had to be able to call on a better power supply – the internal combustion engine. Ironically, Nicolaus Otto had already patented this in 1877.

In a sense, this is what has already happened with GNU/Linux. With the productivity of modern technology and the internet, just a few hundred serious maintainers of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution can provide plenty of free stuff for hundreds of millions of users:
http://www.debian.org/
Imagine if things started to work that way for physical objects too. Things like cars or toolboxes. Or even non-physical services like educations. :-)

This is an organization trying to do something like that with livestock in materially-poor communities:
http://www.heifer.org/
A fundamental part of their assistance is the notion of "passing on the gift" which both helps others and lets the previous aid recipient feel more self-respect as they are now a philanthropist and not a needy recipient.

But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind? My mom, a hard worker, dreamed of being a slacker in a big house with servants. You know where she found her dream? A nursing home. :-( So, be careful what you wish for, slacker wannabees. :-)

If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages. :-)

Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot
(and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?

This is the world the prospective Princeton student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon. :-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?

I'm not talking about the market apologist version of "post-scarcity" at, say, Stanford:
"Post-Scarcity Prophet: Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28243.html
If you read that carefully, that supposed "Post-Scarcity Prophet" seems more obsessed with ensuring an abundance of ... scarcity. :-) There is not much talk of "free" or "cheap" for *everybody* as much as an obsession with more patents and more copyrights and more secrets -- which are all ways to create artificial scarcity in a market economy. So, a supposedly brilliant economist presumably would promote even more artificial scarcity through draconian copyright and such. This person (shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, the article says) can't understand that if *all* the basics are essentially "free" to the user through the miracles of improving F/OSS technology and a healthy natural world, then people's personal time for more desktop innovative R&D is mostly "free" too. :-) An example where he misses that is when he says: "If you're going to be giving things away for free, you're going to have to find some system to finance them, and that's where government support typically comes in." Maybe that is true now, but it is less and less true with each passing day. And no charge for this "free" essay, by the way. :-) A typical related problem is to confuse or ignore free as in "freedom" and free as in "price" by the way. This essay is free as in both (see the license at the end. :-)
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm

"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.

To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where what is defined as "the basics" grows and grows over time. :-) And one of those basics is unrationed access to important information. Ration units went out of use with World War II, you might object. But what is a US Federal Reserve Note (commonly called a fiat dollar) if not essentially a "ration unit"? So, in that sense, to quote Iain Banks, "Money is a sign of poverty", meaning that money's presence in a society indicates the society believes (as part of its mythology) that there is not enough stuff to go around.

I suggest Princeton economists start ignoring the next Nobel Prize sure bet listed above, who is claiming to be "post-scarcity" while taking us down the road to Marshall Brain's scarcity dystopia linked above (though read to the end of Marshall Brain's story for some hope).

The Debian community (which puts together a distribution of GNU/Linux) is an example of the true post-scarcity mythology in action:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
(which is an idea represented in that last link both by the contents of the article and also by Wikipedia itself.) So, I also suggest the Princeton community think really hard about the really good post-scarcity stuff like is happening at Debian:
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202

That report above essentially defines an approaching iceberg of an emerging post-scarcity society. Is Princeton University ready for it? :-) Because, frankly, Princeton can't hold it back any longer, even if it wanted to. Though it could probably make the future turn really bad for most people if it tried hard -- producing the dystopia linked above, run through polite military robots.

The "what and how" versus "why" of the PU brand's current dismal situation

In the introduction of my 1985 PU undergraduate senior thesis ("Why Intelligence: Object, Evolution, Stability and Model") I distinguish between studying the "why" of intelligence as opposed to studying the "how" or "what" of intelligence as was then in vogue (studying the "why" of intelligence is now called "evolutionary psychology" but did not exist very coherently as a field back then). Well, it seems to me that PAW in this current issue ("The new rules of financial aid") is finally starting to admit to the "what" and "how" of the failure of elite education and the related Princeton brand, but apparently won't touch the "why". :-) So, that leaves a duty for a "Fool" like me (see below on "Fools", too. :-)

Brands fail all the time and need to be reinvented; remember all those funny commercials around 1999 (like the guy hiding food in his jacket in a supermarket and getting stopped by the guard to get a receipt?) as IBM spent more than a billion dollars on advertising to reinvent its brand? It's not uncommon; these things happen as society changes and some institutions lag behind, or are perceived to. A related overview of some of these issues:
"Brandus Interruptus: When Good Brands Go Bad"
http://www.dbdintl.com/davidbrier/brandus_interruptus.html
But like anything dysfunctional, when it actually happens to you, it is often a painful surprise. "We were doing everything right; how could this happen to us?", you might ask. Well, that's where this essay comes in. :-)

So, the rest of this essay suggests what PAW won't say. :-) Or perhaps, more charitably, these are things that PAW staff simply "can't" say, despite being staffed by far better and more succinct writers than I am, sorry. :-(

Consider a three supposed "needs" implicit in almost any PAW article over the last few decades:
* the supposed need for competition (as well as excessive consumption) to produce "excellence",
* the supposed need to personally concede altruistic ideals and aspirations to economic "resource" pressures routinely, and
* the supposed need for a good academic reputation (to get "scarce" grants and publications) and thus the related need to "watch what you say" at all times, as disciplined self-censorship.

The career success of Noam Chomsky is a rare exception:
"Education is Ignorance"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm
What happened to military veteran Ward Churchill (dismissal) is more the unwritten rule, leading to widespread self-censorship of even the few academics who can still contemplate dissent (rightly or wrongly):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

These implied needs of academic living in a capitalist fish bowl are all so non-obvious as water is to a fish at this point -- to almost all PU alums living anywhere on the planet in the USA's global empire. In their defense, PAW writers no doubt also have no time or peace-and-quiet either for the intellectual effort of imagining transcending any of these "needs" which produce a huge and growing (and explosive) rich-poor divide. They probably would not even have time to read this essay, let alone rewrite it into something succinct and effective (as I do not at the moment, unfortunately). PAW writers likely have simply no "free" time to explore all this even as those supposed needs are based on a fleet of related mythological ideas PAW implicitly and even explicitly promotes, the ideas for which the consistently #1 (in the college rankings) Princeton University is the flagship. And it is indeed an impressive flagship, even if a few aboard are also a bit nervous about that big white thing floating over there or are even actively trying to steer clear or get the lower class emergency exit gates unlocked if the worst happens:
"Titanic -- the movie"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_%281997_film%29

Yet, while PU deservedly pats itself on the back with doing away the need for student loans for financial aid at PU, allowing a few more of its graduates to go into public service, or while it fights it out in court over control of the Robertson funds, the biggest public service picture slips away.

What's really the problem with the Princeton University brand?

Princeton University has serious brand issues upcoming. And no, I'm not talking something as obvious as this:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm

Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies.

A problem like being a kept university would be relatively easily fixed if the university community chose to do something about it someday. I'm talking more serious damage than being called a "mistress". I'm talking damage to the PU brand itself, or essentially being called an "ugly mistress". That might happen from too many grant funded bonbons, but it also might happen from when societal tastes change, like when flat flappers went out of style and busty beauties came in (or the reverse, which happens too, like heroin chic). And how many "ugly mistresses" get "kept" for long?

Heroin chic? Hmmm. Drugs -- that's what I forgot to include in the teasers above for high school students. :-) And music. Dang. This essay is too focused on just sex and money. :-)

Well, let's at least put some music in here right now. And let's have the Princeton community face it. :-) Here is a Chomsky example, naming Princeton, as some background:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream"
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of corporations. It's true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It's dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

See why those (in my words) "supposed" needs listed above are so non-obvious to most PU alumni at this point? See, through Chomsky, why they are essentially unquestioned and unquestionable? Almost anyone who questioned them would not be a PU alum (or at least, not one with money and thus worth listening to). Some PU alumni (and staff, students, and faculty) do question these assumptions, of course, as I do again here -- no system made by humans and made of humans can be perfectly disciplined. :-)

It was the same with the navigating officers on the Titanic, who were warned of icebergs but did not reduce speed or post additional lookouts:
http://www.rmstitanic.net/index.php4?page=faq

Below, after a little more background, is a detailed Chomsky-inspired "reading between the lines" of the current issue of PAW for people as clueless as I was when I blew all my self-earned money on PU (and also took on debt and so on to pay for a ride on the flagship of US capitalism.) And, have no fear at the PU admissions department, any prospective student will probably ignore this essay, as I ignored this other essay even having read it before PU: :-)
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" by Caroline Bird
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf

For the sake of argument, the two of us invented a young man whose rich uncle gave him, in cold cash, the cost of a four-year education at any college he chose, but the young man didn't have to spend the money on college. After bales of computer paper, we had our mythical student write to his uncle: "Since you said I could spend the money foolishly if I wished, I am going to blow it all on Princeton."

Writing with prospective students in mind is mainly just a rhetorical device. I know the IM generation probably won't read this far. Even if a few of their lives may perhaps depend on it. :-(

I can admit that if some poor "lower class" student gets a lot of grant-based financial aid, and adding in the general endowment subsidy and non-profit tax exemptions which help everyone who attends, then PU can be a good deal for some specific individuals in some ways (as for me, but see below). Being part of a flawed system does not entirely take away from PU being the best it can be within that system -- even as PU also defines and sustains that system by the mythology of wealth and the ideal of financial obesity (or even intellectual obesity :-) that PU promotes explicitly or implicitly. And, in my case, Princeton (well, the people there, faculty, staff, students, and town) may well have made me a much better person in various ways. I can be thankful for that, even as many might read this as biting the hand that fed me. If biting was the main reason for writing this, I wouldn't bother; I've got other things to do, like play with my child. And no, I don't want to have more to do with PU and changing its mythology than write this essay. But think on this -- Princeton is not our mother. It is an institution (an abstraction, which is itself a myth). And we feed that institution, with our time, attention and money. We even fed it when we were undergraduates. Maybe we should be careful about what myths we chose to feed, including by what children or grandchildren we sacrifice to those myths.

What am I up to with that PU education myself? Besides being a part-time stay-at-home Dad, I'm busy these days in my "free" time (along with many in the world, such as these people: http://www.reprap.org/ :-) attempting to help take down the intellectual scaffolding of global capitalism one myth at a time in a controlled safe manner where no one gets hurt, same as these people do when demolishing physical structures past their usefulness:
http://www.controlled-demolition.com/

And behind each successful project stands the CDI team - a talented group of professionals with decades of experience dedicated to absolute perfection on each new project.

See, there are people whose whole careers are devoted to the safe demolition of historic structures. And this essay is not intended in any way to defend anyone who intentionally destroys structures in a way intended to hurt people.

Rethinking the mythological scaffolding of the Princeton community

Now, I am a duffer when it comes to mythology. The one time I found myself at Princeton surrounded by extraordinarily beautiful women along with another geeky guy in a too small room, it turned out we were both in the wrong place ("History of Science and Technology" being in a room with a confusingly similar number down the hall) and it was instead an Art History class. Art History in some ways focuses on our collective mythology through the ages; maybe I should have stayed for the articles (seriously. :-)
http://www.psychology.stir.ac.uk/staff/alittle/index.php

My research has focused on whether an evolutionary approach can help answer the question of what makes certain faces attractive and why certain traits may be valued.

But here is a more serious student of contemporary mythology -- a trial lawyer gone "Conceptual Guerilla". Here's what he has to say about myth:
"The Mythology of Wealth" by conceptualguerilla.com
http://kai-zen.livejournal.com/46079.html

Can we use the power to "levy taxes" and spend money for "the general welfare" to do things like educate people, feed the hungry, and generally provide them with what Abraham Lincoln called "a fair start in the race of life"? You're [expletive] right we can. Thomas Jefferson said so. The "market place" isn't a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a human invention, created by our laws, customs and institutions. The vast fortunes of our elites are likewise the product of a mythological legal infrastructure that bestows access to resources to some people and denies it to others. "Wealth" is just the latest in a long history of myths used to divide the world into the people who work and the people who live off of them. We created this mythological system, and we can change it if we feel like it. We can regulate it a little -- or a lot. We can modify any one of its elements, or all of them. Or we can abolish it altogether. It's called "democracy", and you should now understand why cheap-labor defenders of the "haves" don't like it.

Someday, all those PU lawyer alumni may yet prove their worth to society. :-) As some do already, of course; for example:
"Becky Hiers '85"
http://www.sunrisemediation.com/

Sunrise Mediation provides a variety of Conflict Prevention and Conflict Management services to help meet your needs.

Or, the more obvious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader

Here is a thought -- a lawyer's career is based entirely on free stuff. Lawyers cite laws without paying a fee per law. The legal documents they submit to the court generally become part of the public record, along with judges decisions related to those, which other lawyers learn from. They advise clients on stuff clients could look up themselves in any law library (obviously lawyers may do that more efficiently than clients, which is why they pay for the service.) Lawyers may also use services to help them save time. But essentially, their entire career is based around free stuff, crafting custom solutions for individual unique clients, but essentially drawing from the public domain. They are already the post-scarcity beings many of them deny are possible. :-) A lawyer is the embodiment of free, but she or he has been trained not to see it. :-(

If you want to see how the legal profession would look otherwise, here is a satire I submitted to the DOJ when they asked for comments on "in order to help plug the [analog] hole, watermark detectors would be required in all devices that perform analog to digital conversions."
"MicroSlaw"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999

The laws of the land are in some ways like a computer program defining our society. In some ways, computer programs are mythologies too -- just ones that happen to be directly executable on the matching computer hardware. With myself, after more then twenty five years of programming experiences, I find those skills starting to bleed over into my essay writing skills. You want to know how programs I write look to me? They look a lot like this essay, with interwoven themes, forward and backward references, successively refined structures, external library calls, and so on. And as I said at the start, now that this essay "runs" (even with bugs), I'd be the first to agree it could improve by being refactored, like almost any big program after it is first written. Or maybe these ideas could benefit from being transformed entirely into a freely licensed work of poetry, music, video, dance, theater or even live stand-up comedy? Maybe by you? :-)
"In the End, It is the Violin that Wins"
http://counterpunch.org/shalev12032004.html
Just like many of the ideas in here in some sense come out of the arts, especially music, like by my listening to the "Mystery Men" soundtrack over and over while I wrote some of this.

In the same way that in my mind two set of skills that were completely isolated from each other for many years are starting to merge, perhaps we will soon see, say, lawyerly skills of Princetonians being redirected to post-scarcity mythological ends? Like this law professor is doing (although Eben Moglen is at Columbia, and PU has no law school anyway):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen

Moglen says that free software is a fundamental requirement for a democratic and free society in which we are surrounded by and dependent upon technical devices. Only if controlling these devices is open to all via free software, can we balance power equally. Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law is the idea that the information appearance and flow between the human minds connected via the Internet works like induction. Hence Moglen's phrase "Resist the resistance!" (i.e. remove anything that inhibits the flow of information).

From the research agenda on Eben Moglen's site:
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/research-agenda.html

Current research proceeds by facilitating high-energy collisions between widely-dispersed non-homogeneous randomly-motivated incremental acts of individual creativity and large masses of ill-gotten wealth. The primary collision domain is the thin layer of executable software that enables production and distribution of all zero marginal-cost goods (bitstreams) in a globally transformed economy. Ongoing complete destruction of monopoly control in this layer triggers secondary fission in adjacent layers (music; video; literary as well as scientific, technical and medical publishing; higher education policy; criminal prosecution vel non of scientists and scholars; etc.) Observation is complicated because collisions occur in an atmosphere heavily contaminated by wide-scale political bribery. Despite observational difficulties, multiple independent observers report increased likelihood of basic transformative shifts in loci of political control and social authority. This phenomenon is conventionally described in the relevant literature as "revolution."

Or as Eben Moglen writes here:
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html

A Spectre is haunting multinational capitalism--the spectre of free information. All the powers of "globalism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of "intellectual property" was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.

Was that a little bump I heard from some drifting post-scarcity sea ice bouncing off PU's hull? :-)

That manifesto reminds me when I was at PU in a staff member's office and saw a CD-ROM of art they had on their computer, but they said that while technically easy to let everyone share access to it campus wide, they could not make it available on the campus network for copyright reasons. But now, I can do this:
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=1&hl=en&q=art+history
"Results 1 - 20 of about 47,500,000 for art history. (0.02 seconds)"
Or even, dare I: :-)
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=1&hl=en&q=princeton
"Results 1 - 20 of about 3,820,000 for princeton [definition]. (0.04 seconds) "
Oops, too general:
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=1&hl=en&q=princeton+university
"Results 1 - 20 of about 922,000 for princeton university. (0.02 seconds) "
That's still a respectable almost million images.

OK, let me repeat that in bold: About a million images related to Princeton University are viewable for free on the web. Granted, that is an imperfect search process. Many may be incidental. But many are not. That search process will likely only improve as PU Professor George Miller's WordNet continues to help facilitate the "semantic web" or the "semantic desktop".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop

At some point, after you are done building a new building (or a new post-scarcity society) the scaffolding comes down. :-) But unlike the easier time CDI has with demolishing vacant structures, it's much harder if people (including PU alumni) still mistake that competitive capitalist scaffolding for the post-scarcity building full of abundance the scaffolding surrounds (and likely always did. :-) And I'm definitely hoping for that intellectual scaffolding's removal in a controlled way, not a big crash like these where often people get hurt: :-(
"Images of catastrophically collapsed scaffolds"
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=scaffolding+collapse

Here is my young child's contribution to this essay. And I have also taken perhaps too much time from our relationship to write this, sorry, so that is another contribution. So if this essay helps anything, thank in part my kid, who helps make me a better person every day. From:
"Fighting Fire Trucks" by Larry Shapiro
http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Fire-Trucks-Enthusiast-Color/dp/0760305951

Chapter 5. Special Units. Workers didn't need to be told what the creaking noises meant as they ascended the construction elevator outside the 26-story building in Times Square. They quickly shouted over their radios that the scaffold was about to come down, alerting pedestrians and co-workers alike to get clear. Moments later with a loud crushing sound, 14 floors of steel dropped the equivalent of one story to rest on the bottom 10 floors. One of the two elevator tracks came raining down on a neighboring building and the street below. The incident would turn out to require a fire department presence for several days. The Mobile Command Post was ordered to the scene as a base for chiefs and other supervisory personnel.

That metaphor of dedicated brave people helping the current partially-collapsed economic "scarcity" scaffolding come down in a controlled fashion to reveal a beautiful and joyful "post-scarcity" society for everybody is what I'd suggest a prospective Princeton student meditate on. :-) And then she or he can ask the hard questions about whether Princeton (and perhaps then grad school) is a good investment of time to help realize that future. It's also a scaffolding built using dollars as war time "ration units", so more dollars and more financial obesity aren't going to fix the problem in the end (Princeton's main selling point in the public imagination).

What is happening isn't even really the failure of global capitalism (focused on creating and managing scarcity) so much as the transcendence to a new society (focused on creating universal abundance). A society where everybody (apparent slacker or not) gets as a right of birth at least the frugal basics of fresh air, clean water, organic food, quality shelter, 3D printing, health care, internet access, and education, and yet also still has a song in their heart (and hopefully love in their family, too; see: :-)
"All I Really Need" by Raffi
http://www.last.fm/music/Raffi/_/All+I+Really+Need
That's quite a challenge, obviously, but it is happening. The issue I am considering here is how Princeton as an institution and as a community decides to relate to that trend.

And that is likely a world very different looking than the one IBM painted in that previously mentioned "brand renewal" commercial obsessed with RFID and scanners and accounting using personalized receipts for getting the basics from a supermarket. The basics of life support in an age of automation and nanotech-based solar power,
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.nanosolar.com/
will likely finally be "too cheap to meter" at some point, like some internet services are already now. Even TigerNet is already "too cheap to meter", given operating costs (a few dollars per alumnus?) are still insignificant compared to the potential value to the community it serves (and TigerNet could easily be hosted for "free" at, say, Google Groups these days if cost were the major issue).

And that emerging new society is one where, through rethinking "work", more and more of "work" turns into "play" and "hard fun"; see Bob Black:
"The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ... What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

(See, this was the "not safe for work" part. :-)

On to reading between the lines of the current issue of PAW; I asked PU years ago to stop mailing PAW etc. to me (especially given the internet if I really wanted to read it), so I guess this is payback for PU ignoring a polite request. Or maybe just good (or bad) fortune. :-)

See:
"The Farmer's Luck"
http://joyofreading.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/zen-shorts-ii-the-farmer%E2%80%99s-luck/
Basically, and old farmer keeps saying "maybe" to whether things that happen on his farm are "good luck" or "bad luck" as they interact with each other, sort of like parts of a complex essay. :-)

The "how" versus "why" of the failure of the PU PhD system

From PAW, here is the "how" of the failure of the PhD system:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html

"One of the things that are a real frustration for graduate students is that, when you're in the academy, all the people around you are professors who've gone this "traditional path," says Peter Fiske '88. "But, if you look at the numbers, only about one in four Ph.D.s in the sciences remains in academia." The reason for this is simple mathematics: There are not nearly enough positions within the academy. (page 32)

Things are actually worse than that, since typically only about 50% of people who start PhD programs finish. So, if about 25% of the finishers get academic jobs, that's 12.5% of PhD starters who get academic jobs (at least out of school; a few get them later). In any case, this essentially rounds down to zero as far as calculating the human cost/benefit of the PhD process (to the prospective student) as it is currently designed. :-( So think about what that means for the next generation of academic professorial scientists if that is what a prospective student wants to be. Essentially, there is no realistic chance of success anymore, compared to the years of toil and often heartbreak (assuming you don't just submit to authority for fun; some do).

People may object at this point that students learn valuable skills in graduate programs that they can use in non-academic settings. That may well be true sometimes to an extent, especially in the sciences or engineering. And if you spend between three to ten years of your 20s around academia (or anywhere else :-) and you are bound to learn *something* useful. But clearly, PhD and other graduate degree programs were not originally designed for making people a happy part of a happy society -- they were designed for making people professors (sometimes that coincides, of course. :-) The fit is (usually) at best very rough for self-employment or working collaboratively, the whole notion of a PhD dissertation is somewhat irrelevant to most industrial work in most cases (even if some skills transfer sometimes), there are vast gaps in the related experiences for self-empowerment or helping others, and the "mining, sorting, and polishing" assumptions underlying the whole system (outlined and depth by Goodstein in his article linked below) are deeply flawed from that point of view.

Related:
"Links About Academia"
http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/

Sample link:
"Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html

Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ...

Here is the "why" of the failure of the PhD system, from Dr. David Goodstein:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.

By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever. ...

The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's. ...

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ...

I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. ... We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all.

That's the Vice Provost of Caltech talking, even if it takes a "Fool" like me to quote him in public. Related, the sci-fi novel:
"Fool's War" by Sarah Zettel:
http://www.amazon.com/Fools-War-Sarah-Zettel/dp/0446602930

In "alien contact" science fiction, the aliens come from far off, light-years away. But what if the aliens were closer to home? What if the next great life-form with which we must contend isn't from the stars but from our hard drives? In Zettel's second novel (after Reclamation), Katmer Al Shei, owner and engineer of the starship Pasadena, and her crew become pawns in an elaborate scheme to bring human beings and artificially intelligent life-forms into deadly conflict. But the real protagonist ends up being Evelyn Dobbs, the ship's Fool, who, hired to amuse the crew for its long voyage, finds herself trying to contain the threat of war.

That book is a product of a Muslim-oriented imagination, by the way -- a representative of the kind of people the USA is busy killing (facilitated earlier by PU alumnus Donald Rumsfeld '54) as "collateral damage". An example from the book: the starship captain wears a burqa and she likes it as it assists her in contract negotiations (not saying this is good or bad, just imaginative. :-)

Compared to a major PU alum setting the stage for killing and dislocating vast numbers of Muslims, the fact that most professor-wannabes get their dreams smashed and live on food stamps and then they then have to sell themselves other ways (see below) is small potatoes, of course. Still, both are ways the Princeton brand is eroding, globally and locally.

The "how" versus "why" of being a happy intellectual

From PAW, here is the "how" of having a long healthy and happy life:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/books.html

What can people do to maintain healthy brain function later in life? Have an intellectually engaged lifestyle and undertake physical exercise. People who engage in fitness training to get the heart rate up, and who do intellectual work for a living or who have complex intellectual hobbies like learning a language or bridge, are more likely to retain executive function. Executive function, which begins to decline in people's 70s and 80s, is a set of abilities including self-control, making plans for the future, and decision-making. The more education you have, the more likely it is you will maintain healthy brain function later in life. Physical exercise increases blood flow to the brain and the amount of energy available to the brain. The short slogan in the book is if you do physical things for a living, you should get an intellectual hobby. If you do intellectual things [for a living], you should get a physical hobby. (page 38)

Again from PAW, here is the "how" of having a shorter unhappy life:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/perspective.html

Most of the time nobody is tacky enough to say this out loud, so let's go ahead and do it: Regardless of what field you're in, the Princeton clan wants you to be a big success, and if you're not meeting expectations, well, the brood has gentle ways of letting you know. Upon acceptance to Princeton you're introduced to a family where the siblings constantly are comparing themselves to each other, and Mom and Pop Nassau are in no rush to stop it. ... Even though I'd managed to carve out a gratifying career writing feature stories for magazines like Esquire and Details and Entertainment Weekly, I hadn't yet delivered my hardcover debut, and from the Princetonian perspective, a writer without a book is like a venture capitalist without a private jet. ... (Jeff Gordinier '88)

But surely all this suffering must be worth it -- say to promote good science? At least the ends of academic results justify the means, right? (Even if ignoring that in general they do not: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_code

Consider, again from Goodstein's "why" linked above:

The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.

The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.

Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.

Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.

As above, almost everyone who begins even just at the PhD level won't get an academic job. Even the ones who do must then fight it out in a career of unspoken and unacknowledged fear and fraud (often also breaking up marriages with split-career moves). They try to survive on the failing scaffold of the collapsing PhD pyramid scheme to build and maintain a reputation which translates into grant money and limited intellectual freedom (while preparing the next generation for a similar or worse life). The entire PhD institution PU helps support is thus effectively obsolete; as a machine it rarely produces happy intellectuals as output compared to the vast input (given so many get culled, and the rest get a messed up and ethically questionable life preparing others for the same). Goodstein also talks of "The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates" in explaining why the USA has "the worst science education in the industrialized world". So everyone else suffers too, even K-12 students and the regular taxpayer.

That all helps explain "Hot for Words" perhaps:
(Safe for work, barely. :-)
http://www.hotforwords.com/

Who is HotForWords? Her name is Marina Orlova, she's 27 and she's a philologist! Now you might be asking what the heck is a philologist? Well, it's someone who studies linguistics and etymology.. and in Marina's case.. she has applied her Philology degree to specializing in word origins. Marina burst in on the scene in mid 2007 launching her YouTube channel HotForWords, where she takes requests from YouTube viewers for words to discuss, and she releases about five videos each week discussing the origins of these words, in a fun and playful manner! ... Marina was voted the World's #1 Sexiest Geek by Wired Magazine's Sexy Geek of the Year Contest ...

See what getting a degree in linguistics and etymology does to people? :-)

Shouldn't words and the minds who study them be valued for their own sake, not because they are all mixed together in a "hot" body? Is this what the value of an academic degree in a less commercial area has come to, as far as being a happy independent intellectual?

And what of the word aficionados who may not be as good looking right now to many of today's youth? Example:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/~geo/
(Sorry, George, but it's true. Not bad for past 65, of course. :-)

This is not to disrespect Marina's choice as to how to express her own sexuality and intelligence if that choice was freely made. But I suspect, given the above on graduate studies, that economics played a big role in her choice, as it often does in today's intellectual world. It does sometimes take a bit of effort to get people to appreciate the inherent fascinating value of a seemingly dry topic like linguistics, so we can respect her for that certainly -- assuming again her new profession was freely chosen.

George A. Miller has done an amazing and generous thing for the world through decades of patience and perseverance and insight in building WordNet as a free gift to the world (whatever his past or present looks. :-) His gift to the world is helping bring about the emergence of a post-scarcity society (WordNet powers several internet services as well as many research explorations, sponsored and volunteer). But how many budding word lovers (even ones that look "hot") will get their chance for a similar happy academic life these day if they expect to repeat George's success after the "Big Crunch" Goodstein describes above?

For the record, George was my advisor at PU, and he was the best advisor I could have hoped for under the circumstances of being in a competitive college like PU. Please don't blame him for any of the words I'm using at the moment. :-) And, of course, presumably he was "hot" at one point to young people and even might have always been, at least to the eyes of his wife, Kitty. :-)

Still, could anybody have his career now? See this article in Psychological Science:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2004

Although Miller's degree was not in psychology, after graduation Ramsdell offered him a position as an instructor, and then helped him get into graduate study in summer school at Harvard. "They admitted me in spite of the fact that I knew nothing," Miller said."

That's the kind of thing that happened in the years before Goodstein's "Big Crunch" came in the 1970s, during the exponential expansion of academia with plenty of abundance (in terms of money). The next George Miller, without credentials, is more likely to be the janitor George mentions in the article in Psychological Science (more on janitors later :-).

Sure, his career may still be possible even now in very exceptional cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Will_Hunting
but it is a lot rarer. What is more true now, after the "Big Crunch", is that academia is like a railroad track -- derail once and you will never be let back on the line. Why help the next George Miller get on a new track if he made a "mistake" early on in choosing his major and there are many others already on the right track? This is all part of the closing of science to new ideas and new perspectives, in part from a finite amount of cash relative to the exponential production of PhDs.

And that makes little sense. As one biology professor told me, there are enough unknowns about life on Earth to keep millions of biologists busy for centuries. From basic research come all sorts of new ideas for supporting more people in a sustainable but also stylish way. This exponential trend towards the noosphere is being stopped by the myth of money -- not any real physical limit. There is no real reason everyone on Earth who wants to cannot be a researcher in a post-scarcity society. But instead people with PhDs are driving cabs (instead of letting robots do the driving). And people with PhDs are building weapons or even being weapons (instead of mentoring the next generation in their passion, be it the history of the woods or the history of words). Why build bombs you never want to use instead of build ethical intelligences to be interesting companions? Unless you somehow deeply believe in scarcity and the need to fight over it? The myth of scarcity has become a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point in academia and elsewhere. There are not the resources PhDs need to freely innovate because PhDs are not allowed to freely innovate. And instead, academia and science spirals down the drain of infighting and fraud.

As Douglas Adams said:
http://www.motivatingquotes.com/happiness.htm

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it was not the small pieces of paper that were unhappy.

This essay is all about sex and money :-)

There are post-scarcity aspects to Marina's "Hot for Words" site -- in the sense the content is both free and fun (for people of certain sexual orientations).

Ultimately, unlike WordNet, Marina's site is probably not about words in their pure form though. Five words a week? George could do add that many words to WordNet in an hour, I'm sure, even approaching ninety years of age. Now, IMHO that's truly the performance of a person who is "hot for words". :-)

And also, while I respectfully won't speculate on George's private married life with his late wife Kitty, ultimately Marina's site is probably not even about wholesome *sex* in its pure form either (since not much involving sex and the internet can be that wholesome anyway, in a humane sense, at least when used in isolation).

And I'd suspect even the famous sex therapist parent of one of George's other advisees might mostly agree:
"Doctor Ruth Westheimer"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Westheimer
Though I'm sure she'd point out all sorts of nuances related to healthy and unhealthy behavior and the internet depending on the relationships somebody was in, whether the behavior was addictive or displacing other interactions, the type of content, and so on.

OK, I *will* speculate on my undergrad advisor's sex life anyway, since I've broken about every other Princeton taboo, and since George did after all preside for a time over a bunch of probably sex-obsessed psychologists. :-) From the way George and his wife affectionately interacted even in their 60s while working together on WordNet, one can suspect they had a lot of "wholesome and hot marital bliss" even then, bless 'em. :-) So, not only were they both apparently hot for words, they were apparently hot for each other, which is more important. Here's to a good love life for everyone for all their lives. :-)
"6 Steps to Better Senior Sex"
http://seniorliving.about.com/od/sexromance/ss/6step_seniorsex.htm?rd=1

Many older adults and seniors report that their sex lives actually improve as they age. Once the children are grown and work doesn't require the energy it used to, couples can relax together and enjoy each other without the old distractions. They find that senior sex gets better. With a little creativity and communication, you can improve your sex life too. ...

And I'd expect Doctor Ruth would entirely agree with that, too. :-)

Instead of "words" or "sex", what Marina's "Hot For Words" site is most likely about is really *money*. :-( So, in that sense it might be seen as a form of intellectual prostitution even more direct then most PhDs admit they engage in:
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/09/academics_as_in_1.shtml

The system of journal editing existing in our field at the present time virtually forces academics to become prostitutes: they sell themselves for money (and a good living). Unlike prostitutes who sell their bodies for money (Edlund and Korn, 2002), academics sell their soul to conform to the will of others, the referees and editors, in order to gain one advantage, namely publication. Most persons refusing to prostitute themselves and to follow the demands of the system are not academics: they cannot enter, or have to leave, academia because they fail to publish. Their integrity survives, but the persons disappear as academics.

OK, I said at the start I'd talk about prostitution, both on and off campus, so those out there just looking for salacious gossip can stop reading now. :-) Except for the sad murder mystery ahead. :-(

Joke:
http://www.textfiles.com/humor/JOKES/laws.lst

Todd's First Two Political Principles: [or Academic Principles, or Wired's "Sexiest Geek of the Year" Principles: :-)]
1. No matter what they're telling you, they're not telling you the whole truth.
2. No matter what they're talking about, they're talking about money.

That joke is not going to change for word aficionados like George, Marina, or anyone else, even these people:
"NSA poised to hire 7,500 people"
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/040410-nsa-hire.htm
"Linguist up to his ears tracking security threats"
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/nsa/stories/listeners/index.html
until we move beyond money. The NSA was likely the alternative career path for someone like Marina. By coincidence, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was trained as a sniper. Or not really coincidence since military demands related to fighting over perceived scarcity dominate a lot of R&D and even the structure of schooling itself:
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
So, stuck in some sense between choosing between sex and the military, can we really stand in judgment of these women? Especially since the world does indeed benefit from entertaining education about sex and words? And as to George, one can guess a lot of his funding came through military channels, but I have to salute him with respect in the end for using the money to build a free-as-in-freedom gift to the world as WordNet. He could have kept it proprietary. Also, you didn't think a place like Princeton, especially in the 1980s after the "Big Crunch", would either fund such a noble effort or make it easy to give it away, did you?

Might Marina Orlova have been the next George Miller? Because of the nature of the scarcity-related myths that drive academia and the larger society around it, we may never know. As sad as we can be for those likely lost dreams, whatever worldly success Marina now enjoys, she is not the only one who has had to face hard choices about her intellectual or artistic interests in our society:
"The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet"
http://www.amazon.com/Murdering-My-Years-Artists-Activists/dp/1887128786

Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace.

Is "murdering their years" the best we can do as a society for some of the most altruistic people in the world outside the military? (And no, that is not the murder mystery. I wish it was only that. :-( )

OK, I'll add another teaser since you stuck with this essay this long. There is talk about toplessness on campus later on. :-) Yeah, yeah -- you know by now what to expert when I say something like that. :-) So, I'll add that I will discuss certain "essential services", originating from a certain roadside bar in Illinois, which are being supplied to students, faculty, staff and alumni -- as well as administrators all the way to the highest levels of Nassau Hall -- and which are knowingly paid for by the PU trustees to the total of millions of dollars per year. And I'll even provide documented proof of that. :-) But if I have lost you anyway here, at least go read about Eliot Spitzer '81 to see another cautionary tale about being a PU undergrad and getting involved with prostitution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer
I'll ask now, but leave unanswered, did Eliot Spitzer's competitive experience at PU have anything to do with his tragic fall? :-(

And for those who still want something salacious, here:
"Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure" by Jeannette Angell
http://www.amazon.com/Callgirl-Confessions-League-Lady-Pleasure/dp/0060736054

When a bad boyfriend leaves with the contents of her checking account, professor and novelist Angell (The Illusionist; Wings; etc.) decides to stabilize her finances by responding to an ad seeking escorts. Surprisingly, the world she enters isn't all that different from the Boston dating scene she already knew; it's just far more lucrative.

More about moving beyond money

Even for the NSA linguists, like the ones reading this someday, :-) eavesdropping has got to get old after a while. I'm sure many there would take up, say, gardening if they felt they could once the world was safe from money, :-) and thus the worst of the "war racket" (see below).

And of course, you might think some of the other parts of the US military would find that torture gets old too, including from learning the fact that it does not work the way it seems to on TV:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6510593.stm

It really is a better plan to try proving to prisoners that they will eat better in your prison than they do at home. The only conceivable circumstances when torture is the only way is when time is tight, and the creatively fertile writers of 24 have to invent those circumstances because the ticking clock scenario is unlikely in real life. Terrorists usually take their time. The real problem is with people who want to be torturers.

Maybe in a world that has transcended money, there might be more interesting things to do than torture people? Or be prostitutes? Or maybe not: :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect

The book is very graphically violent and sexual, especially in earlier chapters (there are eight in all). The story of the novella explores the nature of human desire and the uses and abuses of technology in the satisfaction of desire.

In any case, fortunately, and seriously, at least a very few academics and others are on the job working hard at moving beyond money, even if their "Santa Claus Machine" (a term coined by Ted Taylor as he tried to atone for nuclear bomb designing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus_machine
may not fix all social or psychological problems (as above), and will no doubt even create some new ones. For one example, see:
http://www.reprap.org/

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. ... [RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment...

And RepRap is just one of many related projects; some are commercial products:
http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D_Printers/138/spage.aspx

Now you can print 3D color models so quickly and affordably, you'll do it every day. Introducing the ZPrinter®450. The ZPrinter 450 makes color 3D printing accessible to everyone. The lowest priced color 3D printer available, it outputs brilliant color models with time-saving automation and an easy printing process. (About US$45K)

Remember how much laser printers used to cost in the 1980s? They literally cost tens of thousands of US dollars. Now you get laser printers for *free* with computers. Think what that will mean as we print more and more in 3D. And when you can print more printers, like RepRap works towards, the economy as we currently know it with long supply chains will implode. (Remember those collapsed scaffold pictures? It's coming.) Money in many areas of life will cease to be as significant, especially once these printers can disassemble ("unprint" or "recycle") as well as print.

And things don't need to be entirely free for profound changes to happen -- even very cheap things will make for big social changes.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cheap+linux+devices
http://www.laptop.org/

Banks' Observation on Money: "Money is a sign of poverty."

Fernhout's Corollary to Banks' Observation on Money: "The degree to which money needs to be handled in a society is inversely proportional to the abundance of imagination, skill, freedom, effort, and community present."

And mathematically:
M = 1 / I * S * F * E * C

Any mathematician inspecting that formula might easily tell you, say, that as the amount of freedom or imagination in a society goes to zero, the amount of money goes to infinity. But is that a good thing to thus have so much money lying around?

But how can we ensure the collapse of money as scaffolding for society happens in a more orderly and safer way than a catastrophe? Even just the catastrophe of avoidable suffering through ignorance and poverty for some extra years for many people on the planet? As someone suggested on slashdot.org a while back, the year the food replicator is invented by capitalism, everyone will starve from economic forces. :-(

That's the sort of problem that will challenge prospective Princeton students down the road in their careers. And not just in some distant future, but in the next ten to twenty years, perhaps even before someone starting PU next year can get tenure -- or maybe a third post-doc. :-( And such a prospective Princeton student has to ask themselves, is Princeton University (the current flagship of global capitalism) the right place to find or make answers to those sort of problems? I frankly do not know, having been out of the physical university community for so long -- but based on the current issue of PAW alone, I suspect the answer is still, "Not yet". :-(

We seemingly rush headlong to a technological singularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
that is otherwise in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
And academia has a big part to play in this -- but it is conflicted as to where it stands and what virtues it will emphasize in years to come.

So true these days of exponential change: "A liberal can turn into a conservative in twenty years without changing a singe idea." Is Princeton as a "kept university" starting to look a little ugly these days or does it have the potential to be something more beautiful again in the mythological transition to a post-scarcity society? Is it possible that Princeton's strengths in areas like the humanities might help it to be a better flagship for a new post-scarcity fleet that nimbly moves with the flow of the sea ice, rather than, say, the technology-heavy MIT? Or even better than the giant Harvard dreadnought, which, while it also is strong in humanities, is likely impossible to steer away from a direct collision even if the institution wanted?

The collapse of the PhD system is just one example of a potential larger social collapse into a black hole of a "nasty" technological singularity. How can we make it more likely we instead fall into a "nice" singularity filled with joy, and laughter, and dare I say it, love? Or, in other words, the "utopia" instead of the "oblivion" that Buckminster Fuller talks about? That more hopeful outcome seems unlikely unless we shift those competitive values as the main driver of our motivation as a society. And that shift in values is done in part by changing the day-to-day myths we live by. And then, we need to change our habits of thought and action to accord with our new mythology.

If Princeton University is implicitly pushing all the old myths, why should any prospective "post-scarcity" student want to go there? It seems that a place like, say, Berea College (mentioned in that PAW issue) might be better preparation, even for the brightest academic minds, because a "work college" helps build the collaborative and community oriented skills which are so needed in a post-scarcity internet age of personal brands. In fact, one might argue an experience like at Berea is even more essential these days for people who have been immersed too long in competitive academia even just at the high school level from which Princeton recruits undergraduates. Still, Berea is presided over by a PU graduate alum, one who is quoted as saying lack of debt may imply "entitlement" -- as if people were not entitled to lots of basic things in a decent society. One can see there the power of Princeton mythology -- and how it extends even into places like Berea. Again from:
"The Mythology of Wealth" by conceptualguerilla.com
http://kai-zen.livejournal.com/46079.html

This is the difference between say, George W. Bush and you. Dubya went to prep school. You went to the public high school. Dubya went to Yale – ahead of someone with better credentials because he had family connections. Dubya had wealthy friends, through family, "skull and bones", etc, who bankrolled his oil drilling business. Ask some of his friends to bankroll your oil business. Let me know if they stop laughing before their bodyguards throw you out. Even if you managed to persuade an investor to bankroll some enterprise, you're going to have exactly one shot. If you lose, you won't be getting a second chance. Dubya, on the other hand, went broke, and then his friends bankrolled him again, before finally getting him a one percent share of the Texas Rangers. See how it works? People with money help each other out. They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness". They say that a harsh "got mine, get yours" social environment breeds "market discipline" by rewarding the most resourceful and competitive. Some extreme cheap-labor conservatives don't even believe in public education. They say it is the family's responsibility. If your family can't afford to send you to school, well, that's not their problem.

Maybe in the end, this change is exemplified by, say, the difference between a small group of academics using a lot of "defense" dollars to build WordNet (as thankful as we are for that, and it was a good "defense" investment IMHO) versus the world building Wikipedia in its free time (more on free time and Wikipedia later). I don't begrudge the academics like George Miller the fun of building free tools like WordNet (and what an accomplishment that was, only starting it in his early 60s -- that man must be smokingly "hot for words" healthwise, :-) leading one to question the notion of mandatory "retirement" altogether, in academia or the rest of life.) But Wikipedia shows we as a society are no longer absolutely depend on a grant-based system to get digital public works built -- even big things. And even with the non-profit world still making mostly proprietary works:
"On funding post-scarcity digital public works"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615

None of this is meant to disrespect true academic excellence. Or even to disrespect Professor Emeritus George A. Miller in his pursuit of that, even if I use his professional career, perhaps unfairly, as a foil to Marlena's "hot for words" sexualized one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foil_(literature)

Still, any psychologist might acknowledge a lot of life and the internet is about sex, overtly or sublimated. Probably a lot of PU competition too. So in the end, like James P. Hogan (who I met through PU's sci-fi society),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
I'm suggesting the PU community find ways for prospective PU students and alumni to compete about sex that don't involve hundreds of millions of already born children suffering, as is the case today. :-(
http://www.netaid.org/global_poverty/global-poverty/
Or even unborn ones, however one feels about the ethics of abortion, since poverty and abortion are clearly linked:
http://www.princeton.edu/~lawjourn/Fall98/stewart.html

Moreover, as Cuomo pointed out, truly respecting the lives of the unborn requires providing women in general with the opportunities necessary to lead full and productive lives, and supporting pregnant women with the encouragement they need to see their pregnancies through to the end. These tasks alone should take lifetimes to complete.

How about more PUers showing how sexy they are by doing more about that? And in a collaborative way? (Or, at least, via "coopetition").

So, this is not to deny excellence, or even competition, but to instead say that excellence is happening more and more in a different way than the old scarcity myths related to competition inform us about. And there remains much to do in making better myths -- including looking at the pre-scarcity myths, like still persist among many older cultures from the Iroquois to the Hmong.

The need for balance even with a new mythology of abundance

As is suggested here, I personally feel life and society need a balance of meshwork and hierarchy:
http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm

Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation.

As well as a balance of selfishness and altruism:
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html

If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function.

But it has to be a balance of those things in a mythology of abundance, not a mythology of scarcity that the current Princeton University is the flagship for. I used to think "exclusive" meant "high quality" -- now, thanks to the academic work of George A. Miller and others, I understand it just means:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=exclusive
"not divided or shared with others" among other senses. And frankly, I don't think the world really cares if they are excluded from PU Reunions, but everybody cares if they are excluded from the very basics of life -- including a conception of "mutual security" which Donald Rumsfeld '54 seems not to be able to understand in setting the tone for military doctrine (before "resigning").

Paradoxical suggestions for the prospective undergraduate intellectual

Even for those who just plan to get an undergraduate degree, and who don't plan to ever attempt a PhD and then pursue the ever smaller per capita grants, it is likely many, like the PU author quoted above, will end up with major frustrations from the "so obvious it is hidden or unspoken" elephant-in-the-living-room curriculum of competition at PU. The "why" of this will be explained a little later by Alfie Kohn. So, just following the "how" above, if prospective student truly wants to have intellectual freedom in a collaborative hobby-like "Professional Amateur" way,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_amateurs
he or she may be better off learning something like carpentry or plumbing or farming (instead of academics) at a place like Berea where their hands are rented, but their minds are still free, and then they can pursue ideas as a serious hobby in their spare time to make a balanced and healthy life. It would be a life lived in frugality. That frugality would buy more time off from any physical job for intellectual community, but frugality is the life of a perpetual graduate student or perpetual post-doc anyway. With the internet, such a life built around a physical job like plumbing with an intellectual hobby like number theory is quite possible anywhere while still being connected to the emerging "Noosphere" now that it contains more than was ever in the Princeton University library system.

Any downsides to this advice? A downside to trades is that in your 50s your knees may start to give out. But that is somewhat fixable these days, and will be only more so in the future. :-) A worse downside is that once you have kids, something has to give, and usually it is your hobbies. Nothing is perfect, but frugality maximizes your options, even with kids:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/14/smbusiness/Saul_Griffith.fsb/?postversion=2007111509

FSB: What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs? SG: Learn to live cheaply. Learn to live like an animal. One thing we had going for us is we all spent a lot of time in grad school, and long periods of grad school teach you how to live well on a low budget. That's good training for becoming entrepreneurs. It's easier to have a high-risk tolerance when you know where the dumpsters with free food are. ...

So, I'd suggest creative dumpster diving is another class that should be taught at PU. Especially for those planning to get wealthy by being entrepreneurs (a whole other essay, or see these books :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Business-Shambhala-Pocket-Editions/dp/1570621799
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Laws-Money-Michael-Phillips/dp/0931425417

Similarly, I might add, someone seriously interested in physical things like doing fine carpentry at their own pace might be better off going to Princeton instead of Berea, :-) so as to have an academic day job and then go home to do what they really care about -- playing with wood and following the grain at their own high quality pace, "messing around in boats", doing gardening, or so on. But ultimately, we need a balance of both physical and intellectual work for a happy and healthy life. And that suggests in some sense both institutions are flawed in separating education from normal community life. And the flaw extends, as with PU and George Miller, to separating out retirement too:
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583
(There is a sad murder mystery in that book, too, of a relation of Richard Bolles. :-( That murder was over "money" and "secrecy", even though most are not. But I'd like to point out that that Stanford professor above is still pushing "money" mixed with "secrecy". So is he indirectly and unknowingly pushing "murder" too? :-( )

I remember how unfair it seemed to me that another beloved professor of mine, Prof. James T. C. Liu, and his wife were forced to leave the faculty housing near campus they so enjoyed just because he had to "retire", yet with so much left to give. This was a person who had spent his whole career studying and teaching about a set of interrelated societies and philosophies which generally respected the elderly -- yet he was literally turned out into the street by the University because he was getting a little gray. Granted he had resources, no doubt, like a PU pension, so he and his wife did not starve or go without the basics, but I'm sure the social changes hurt, no matter the grace and good humor he found to accept them (with his practice of Tai Chi Chuan no doubt helping him keep his mental as well as physical balance). I'm not saying there is an easy answer to this question of "faculty housing" or "retirement", but it still bothers me. It's also a sad fact that a good percentage of the elderly slide slowly into dementia too, whatever their professions. Still, I suggest that enforced career "suicide" and enforced community "suicide" by a university at some age is a deep issue that relates to some failure of the university concept as a learning community. See also some related ideas I suggest here about learning communities:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
And I am glad at least one of my professors, George Miller, managed to sidestep that, and build during his "retirement" Princeton's greatest claim to fame in the free internet age IMHO. But frankly, not every professor who could do something like that gets a chance. Maybe instead they get broken hearts? :-( And on the other hand, the graying of the faculty without mandatory retirement only adds to the "Big Crunch" theme mentioned above.
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/notes/01/01-jan.htm
That suggests another reason the entire academic pyramid scheme is failing and needs to be rethought. And it also suggests why students with academic interests should question enlisting if, given the internet, academia is no longer the only intellectual game in town.

And no matter how amazing each college may become someday on the back end, both Princeton and Berea are also limited on the front end by taking in students in some sense intentionally warped by our current economic system and the "Seven Lessons" K-12 teachers teach in lieu of education. New York State "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto describes those seven lessons here:
http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SevenLessonsTaughtInSchool

All of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.

Often at the price of family financial sacrifice, homeschoolers and unschoolers usually have successfully kept their kids from getting scarred by a K-12 compulsory educational system which breaks apart a unity of work, leisure, education, family, and community and in the process also labels and pigeonholes everybody. Yet, it continually amazes me that these same parents then offer these same kids so willingly to the colleges. And these parents are proud and validated when their frequently imaginative and hard working kids are eagerly snatched up by the colleges. Such is the power of a "brand" or a "myth" to get parents to sacrifice their children to a quasi-military organization for some unspecified future reward (as the Napolean related quote above attests to).

As an alternative, a prospective Princeton student with academic and scientific inclinations can still apply in order to go work on RepRap in academia, even working all the way through the PhD system. :-) Or he or she could work on similar projects and ideas (advanced biotechnology, copyright reform, new forms of economics focusing on the calculus of infinite abundance, and so on). But note that those are just objectives within the academic system towards transcending it by helping bring it down in a controlled way and replace it with something post-scarcity.

But can I in good conscience foist off the problem of fixing the decaying and out-of-date Princeton University institutional brand onto the next generation?

As Goodstein suggests, the PhD mining operation is broken beyond fixing.

Gatto says of mass schooling:
http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/columnists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml

Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there.

The $20 billion dollar question (see below) is, does Princeton fit that description these days?

And no, that is not the murder mystery part, either, of the frustrated institutional desire to have kids "eat, sleep, live [presumably grow old] and die" in schools. I wish it were as simple as a hypothetical death. No, someone really died in this mystery, sadly. Someone I knew at PU. :-(

And if a prospective student goes that route to climbing the ladder to push it down from the top, he or she should first read "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
As is indicated there, he or she should prepare for years of living like a POW resisting "discipline" (in part by using some of the same social and psychological techniques the Army teaches its soldiers to survive in POW camps, as are outlined in that book).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=disciplined+minds+pow+schmidt
(61,100 hits, I'm getting so trailing edge here, thankfully)
See, the military is good for some things. As Mr. Rogers says, "No one is good all the time. No one is bad all the time. We don't all do the things we should do all the time." And while I have commented on multiple people in this essay, including President Shirley M. Tilghman, this should not be taken as a belief that they are doing less that a human best under trying and ambiguous circumstances. Well except maybe for the USA's president, but he's a Yalie. What can you expect? Still, even Yalies can change. The US president gave up drinking. In a less stressful situation, he might be a wonderful neighbor, parent, or friend.

In a sense, this other statement by Socrates is no longer true in the internet age (at least, if you live frugally):
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.

I might argue, in the internet age, perhaps, compared to academics who need to fight it out over reputation in a collapsing system while in some sense preying on the young, manual laborers (including part-time "stay-at-home" parents like me :-) may be the only ones with the time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.

The "how" versus "why" of the cost of Princeton

From PAW, here is the "how" of the cost of elite education just at Princeton:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_aid.html
The article (page 22) starts simply, quoting a song: "Princeton is free!"

That is, to be clear, Princeton is essentially cheap for a few of the poor, in terms of not asking for loans (and ignoring the opportunity cost of earning money instead). So a PU education is free as in free beer (well, more like cheap as in loss leader discounted beer) for one person, not free as in freedom for all. Ironically, despite all I write about PU, I am almost one of the small percent each year with the typical background to have benefited from Princeton's social class boost for the (lower) middle class as described in here:
"Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" by Paul Fussell
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
What do I do with that PU degree now? It helps give me the social confidence to be a (part-time) stay-at-home Dad in our anti-feminist and anti-child culture:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/

The purpose of this site is to increase my ability to communicate the awe that children strike in me and the lessons I continue to learn as I spend my days in an amazing human laboratory that allows me and all who pass through the doors of number 8 Elm Street to be ourselves exactly as we are.

So, I can be thankful to PU for that social confidence.

I might add Chris' insights are what comes of seeing children as people, not academic subjects -- as important as dispassion can be, sometimes.

Also from the PAW article above:

Though some schools have followed Princeton's lead in eliminating loans for all students, most colleges simply cannot afford it. Princeton's endowment — $15.8 billion at the end of the last fiscal year — enables the University to pay out more in financial aid than it takes in through tuition, but few others have that flexibility.

Using the endowment to provide financial aid to hundreds of poorer students every year sounds wonderful on the surface.

But the article itself points to a deeper "why" type problem:

Several of the alumni presidents note that financial aid alone cannot greatly increase the representation of poor students in higher education in general and elite schools in particular. All the aid in the world, they say, can't make up for the diminished educational and enrichment opportunities throughout the K-12 years that often accompany lower socioeconomic status. To tackle college access in a serious way, Nugent, like many others, predicts that four-year colleges increasingly will forge partnerships with elementary schools, secondary schools, and community colleges to work on the more fundamental problem of college preparedness — which she argues would be a better investment than helping out the upper-middle class.

Hmmm. This gives this maybe "bitter" Princetonian an idea for a "Modest Proposal" to help fix "the diminished educational and enrichment opportunities throughout the K-12 years that often accompany lower socioeconomic status". And fix it in a *big* way. :-) And maybe even resolve the Robertson lawsuit at the same time. :-)

Still, bitterness is not very healthy way to live one's life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resentment
See also, as in later:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgiveness

A Modest Proposal for the use of Princeton's assets for the maximal public education

Consider, if Princeton had a "going out of business" sale and sold its physical plant on Nassau Street (and just freed its patents and copyrights, please) it might raise a few billion US dollars, on top of the endowment. :-) So, the total PU assets are probably about $20 billion. Well, that's enough to buy 200 million $100 laptops. Is a "free as in beer" Princeton education for a handful of students next year worth 200 million children remaining in want and ignorance next year (or more, approaching a billion kids if four or five children share a laptop). Essentially, if kids share OLPC laptops, the dissolving of Princeton as a "non-profit" would educate all the billion poorest people in the world. In that sense, the cost of just *one* elite academic institution in the OLPC era is massive global ignorance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc
As well as global tyranny (as I wrote about in 2000):
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html

Consider millions of these [$100] devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...)

Princeton could justify this as a sincere attempt at "partnerships with elementary schools, secondary schools, and community colleges to work on the more fundamental problem of college preparedness". :-) Or some other high sounding academic language. They can turn here for ideas on how to write dismissal letters to the faculty: :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Style-Anti-Textbook-Richard-Lanham/dp/1589880323
There's a good example of something similar in there by the way as a starting point. It begins (page 28): "It the face of the severity and continuing character of the budgetary stringencies which we thus face, we have concluded that we must undertake an immediate and thorough programmatic review and reordering of academic priorities..."
So drafting the dismissal letters should not be the problem. I might even be persuaded to set foot again in Nassau Hall to help write them, although with the internet, we can just collaborate remotely. Which is the whole point. :-) I'm just being facetious there -- I actually have the highest respect for most of the faculty, so writing such letters would be pretty painful, but still a lot less painful than thinking about a billion kids without hope.

And getting rid of all of PU's assets would end any lawsuits against PU (Robertson or otherwise) once and for all. (See, I said I'd address that concern. Be careful what you wish for. :-)

And look at what is possible even without adult involvement beyond setting computers up:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html

Dr. Mitra heads research and development at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Just outside his office is a wall that separates his air-conditioned 21st-century office from a slum. Mitra decided to place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine. "When they said, 'Can we touch it?'" Mitra recalls, "I said, 'It's on your side of the wall.' The rules say whatever is on their side, they can touch, so they touched it." Within minutes, children figured out how to point and click. By the end of the day they were browsing. "Given access and opportunity," observes O'Connor, "the children quickly taught themselves the rudiments of computer literacy."

Obviously, this is not to discount the value of face-to-face interaction in an education, but many "poor" (in a material sense) communities are very "rich" in social capital and human interactions, often more so than in, say, the USA. But many of these kids do not have access to even books. Let alone computer simulations or communication tools.

And bringing these cultures on-line might actually bring some of the better parts of these society's ancient social and technical wisdom into cyberspace, with benefits back to the USA. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopiracy

In response to biopiracy threats such as this, India has been translating and publishing ancient manuscripts containing old remedies in electronic form. The texts are being recorded from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic; they will be made available to patent offices in English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish in 2006. The aim is to protect India's heritage from being exploited by foreign companies. Hundreds of Yoga poses are also kept in the collection.

Clang! Is that another noise from under the PU hull just from drifting sea ice? What's all the shouting going on below decks about taking on water? And we are still not even anywhere near the real post-scarcity "free" iceberg. :-) But already "cheap" is making significant changes in what is possible and thus what is justifiable as ethical.

Objections to the Modest Proposal

An alum has quite rightly pointed out the need to be suspicious of global solutions not rooted in local culture as well as "one-true-way" solutions. I'd agree that locally rooted solutions are best. The OLPC suggestion is for comparison (as in, better than nothing or better than a somewhat-even-if-unconsciously-destructive elite institution); it is not the ideal, and at best would just be a start. I'd agree that ecovillage ideals (as that alum also suggested) are a bigger part of good solutions.
http://www.ecovillage.org/
But I might suggest the connectivity of the laptops might help even with that by allowing ecovillages to share ideas. Some dusty ideas of mine from 1990 on that (since mostly surpassed by the internet):
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/081919dbba30d1f7
One other aspect is to see something like that as a two-way flow -- where a lot of different indigenous local ideas and ideals flow around the globe because they are now easy to publish, not a one way flow of conventional mainstream Western ideals everywhere as is happening now with TV. My first internet access outside of a university around the early 1990s was using the Institute for Global Communication's "Econet"
http://www.igc.org/
and also the Whole Earth Electronic Link (WELL) from the same people as the catalog, and those were important services for connecting people with similar interests at the time. Connectivity has limits and issues, but I feel these people should themselves have a choice to reject it if they wish.

Oh sure, PUers might also point to:
""Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs"
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/_free_is_killing_us_blame_the_vcs
But if you read the comments, it depends on whose perspective you take on this -- or who the "us" is meant to include.

I think the real thing companies should be asking themselves is why they were trying to charge so much for something in the first place? Chris Anderson's article on why free is the future of business over at Wired.com makes it clear that costs have gone down dramatically. But some companies refuse to accept that this might mean that they just have to settle for making less money. The music industry is a great example. Instead of lowering their prices right away when their costs came down with digital distribution, they tried to fight it, and they got burned by free. Other similar companies need to realize that the world has changed, and there is less profit to be had. Until they do, they will get burned as well.

How much does PU tuition cost again? And what do kids these days really get for it? A new science library with no ethics books and less materials than what is browseable on the internet? A faculty that is engaging in (according to Goodstein) fraud and duplicity? Alumni donations for integrating humanities and engineering that get heaped in part on three trillion dollars gone up in smoke in Iraq? A diploma from a financially obese school and a chance to join an alumni community that may soon be called "so 20th century"? A gymnasium swimming pool with mutant sharks in it?

OK, so maybe that last one thing makes PU worth attending, for some. That's the kind of thing it's difficult to do at home. :-) Except maybe via simulation: :-)
http://www.stensland.net/java/erin.html

This simulation exhibits the cyclic rise and fall of a predator prey Lotka-Volterra model. On the rectangular grid of the upper left corner, the red blocks represent predator ( sharks ) who eat any adjacent green prey ( fish ). If the sharks cannot find fish after X iterations starvation takes claim. Both species ( fish / shark ) reproduce after given intervals.

The article mentioned in that quote:
"Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all

The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There's nothing new about technology's deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination. ...

What Mead understood is that a psychological switch should flip as things head toward zero. Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them. ...

Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get.

I'd suggest that is the sort of prospective Princeton University think hard about recruiting -- one who takes "free" for granted. PU could try to recruit the kind of prospective who would laugh at this essay as being so obvious as to not be worth writing (some youthful arrogance is discountable, of course :-), and, even worse, suggest that this essay is even behind the times because of X, Y, or Z which they are involved in personally. :-)

Otherwise, seriously, if PU does not have the spirit of the likely future, why can we not educate literally a billion of the poorest kids in the world next year "for free" instead of just a few hundred at Princeton on financial aid (and so on until post-scarcity hits full force)? It would cost the same in charitable capital either way in a sense. One approach produces a thousand or so more people a year of the "Old Guard":
http://www.princetonoldguard.org/
What are they guarding, by the way? Maybe guard duty is getting old by now? As the article above on senior sex suggests, there is a lot more to do than stand around and guard as we age. :-) See also:
"Your Health: Is Sex Necessary?"
http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/08/cz_af_1008health.html

This alternative approach of dissolving the PU status-quo produces maybe a billion or so more K-12 educated people over the next five or ten years for the "GNU garden". :-)

I'd suggest Whig-Clio have a debate on it at least. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Whig-Cliosophic_Society
Resolved: Princeton University should be dissolved as a going concern in order that the approximately US$20 billion in combined endowment and physical assets can be given to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation.
http://laptopfoundation.org/

Oh sure, people will come up with all sorts of reasonable sounding objections to my modest proposal, same as for this one by Jonathan Swift:
"A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
That is one thing "reason" is good for -- coming up with excuses for something your heart, or stomach, :-) is not ready for.

But, in an ironic twist on The Time Machine's plot referenced earlier, who are really the Morlocks here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock
but the beautiful PU Old Guard and PU faculty and staff? And who are the Eloi being eaten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloi
but the disease-ridden and thus apparently ugly children of the poorest globally who are being denied an education (as well as food, clean water, etc.) which it is easily within the Princeton Alumni community's power these days to give them, like by dissolving Princeton University? PU alumni could easily switch from TigerNet services to, say, free Google services. Arrangements could no doubt be made with whoever purchases the PU physical plant to rent back part of the PU campus during reunions for the P-rade. So, aside from a PAW which had somewhat different articles focused on the problems of educating a billion kids all at once using laptops, I don't see that the PU alumni would notice much difference, except maybe by feeling better about themselves. As to the staff and faculty, no doubt other universities would pick them up -- or maybe many of them could be transferred to the employ of whoever buys the PU physical campus as part of the package? Maybe one of the pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey might be interested? And any current PU student could either transfer out or just receive diplomas, even would be sophomores.

The Heart of the Matter

Why is the Princeton University community's heart not ready to make this switch? Why has it not, to my knowledge, been proposed before? Beyond legal constraints on gifts to Princeton, consider the flaw in Princeton's guiding mythology of individual excellence through competition:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm

No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers. ... No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message.

Or from an Amazon review:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395631254/wwwalfiekohorg

In this inspiring and well-researched book Alfie Kohn describes how we, in our compulsion to rank ourselves against one another, turn almost everything into a contest (at work, at school, at play, at home). Often, we assume that working toward a goal and setting standards for ourselves can only take place if we compete against others. By perceiving tasks or play as a contest we often define the situation to be one of MEGA: mutually exclusive goal attainment.
This means: my success depends on your failure. Is this wise? No! Is this inevitable? No! This book brilliantly shows how: 1) competitiveness is NOT an inevitable feature of human nature (in fact, human nature is overwhelmingly characterised by its opposite - co-operation), 2) superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence (because competition often distracts people from the task at hand, the collective does usually not benefit from our individual struggles against each other), 3) competition in sports might be less healthy than we usually think because it contributes to the competitive mindset (while research shows that non-competitive games can be at least as enjoyable and challenging as competitive ones), 4) competition does not build good character; it undermines self esteem (most competitors lose most of the time because by definition not everyone can win), 5) competition damages relationships, 6) a competitive mindset makes transforming of organizations and society harder (those things requiring a collective effort and a long-term commitment).
I think many people reading this book will recognize in themselves their tendency to think competitively and will feel challenged and inspired to change. And that's a good thing. Our fates are linked. People need to, and can choose to, build a culture in which pro-social behaviors and a co-operative mindset are stimulated. The competitive mindset can be unlearned. By developing a habit to see and define tasks as co-operative we can defy the usual egoism/altruism dichotomy: by helping the other person you are helping yourself.

So, the "healthy competition" idea is part of the "why" PAW does not discuss about the cost of Princeton. Give a billion poor kids a leg up, and that's just unfair and unhealthy, because they don't deserve it compared to a bunch of 18 year olds who already have had a fantastic K-12 education and so proved they are competitive? I'll be curious to see how people justify not doing this. Words like "leadership" will pop up, I'm sure. But think on this, Princeton has already produced many of the leaders who let (or made) this rich-poor disparity happen. Why should it get a second chance?

Nothing new here, really, Marx and many others (even Jesus) have talked about all this for a very long time. And Bucky Fuller's "World Game" said the same thing decades ago, that we can redirect a fraction of the US defense budget to make the world work for everyone. They were even said in a letter to the US President in 1964:
"The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Demilitarization, and Civil Rights"
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

This statement is written in the recognition that mankind is at a historic conjuncture which demands a fundamental reexamination of existing values and institutions. At this time three separate and mutually reinforcing revolutions are taking place:

The Cybernation Revolution: A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs.

The Weaponry Revolution: New forms of weaponry have been developed which cannot win wars but which can obliterate civilization. We are recognizing only now that the great weapons have eliminated war as a method for resolving international conflicts. The ever-present threat of total destruction is tempered by the knowledge of the final futility of war. The need of a "warless world" is generally recognized, though achieving it will be a long and frustrating process.

The Human Rights Revolution: A universal demand for full human rights is now clearly evident. It continues to be demonstrated in the civil rights movement within the United States. But this is only the local manifestation of a worldwide movement toward the establishment of social and political regimes in which every individual will feel valued and none will feel rejected on account of his race.

We are particularly concerned in this statement with the first of these revolutionary phenomena. This is not because we underestimate the significance of the other two. On the contrary, we affirm that it is the simultaneous occurrence and interaction of all three developments which make evident the necessity for radical alterations in attitude and policy. The adoption of just policies for coping with cybernation and for extending rights to all Americans is indispensable to the creation of an atmosphere in the U.S. in which the supreme issue, peace, can be reasonably debated and resolved.

The only big difference here is instead of comparing apples and oranges (guns versus butter), I'm comparing two varieties of apples -- educating 1000 or so rich and middle class kids next year (and each year for a decade or two after that until the whole socio-economic system implodes from 3D printing) versus educating a billion really poor ones right now (and maybe producing the next George A. Miller). Given that there are many other elite colleges besides Princeton to attend, how can anyone possibly justify *not* dissolving Princeton University and educating a billion really poor kids instead? Seriously, if the Princeton community is about education, how can *not* doing this dissolution possibly be justified, even by the PU trustees? Beyond the 50000 or so alumni and staff and some town businesses, who would really miss Princeton at this point if it had a "going out of business" sale and educated a billion children with the proceeds? Maybe people can invent reasons not to do this, but hopefully they would be way better than educating a billion children, and if so, let us hear them. What can Princeton contribute to the world that is more important that giving literally a billion children access to all of modern knowledge via the internet?

Anyway, now maybe you can begin to see the shape of that big white thing in the mist that PU as the flagship of global capitalism is heading towards. I'm sure in time Nassau Hall will have a ready answer to this idea. But I doubt they have one as of when I write this. Because I doubt they have ever thought about it. Again as above:

That was Robert Francis Goheen, always listening. ... He hired a young assistant professor from Harvard, Neil Rudenstine '56, as dean of students when he realized that nobody in Nassau Hall really had a clue about the late-'60s generation.

Those who study history are condemned to see others repeat it, or something like that. :-)

For me, this is one of these moments in history Howard Zinn talks about here:
"The Optimism of Uncertainty"
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040920/zinn

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

As of this moment, ethically, Princeton University, the flagship of elite academia and global capitalism, is "history" IMHO. At least, the myths are gone, even if the buildings remain (more on that later).

Or also, as I wrote here, from a different perspective about most schooling:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.

With all that said, what makes sense for us as individuals may not make sense for us as a society, otherwise my family would not have a private library approaching 5000 books. :-) Princeton is, as universities go, a fine institution, although as with human relationships what matters most is a good "match" not picking the "best partner" on some absolute grounds.

I was glad to see PAW mention Berea college (a "work" college) even though it was in a somewhat elite dismissive tone (for poor people). Again, ironically, the value of a "work college" might be the largest for those with the greatest *intellectual* aspirations, since, with manual labor, while your hands may be rented out, your mind remains your own to read and think as you like (an idea a mathematics aficionado who did her work-study as a student peeling potatoes in food services told me). See also:
"The Joys of Janitorhood: Reflections on a low status career field"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/janitor.html
But then, once one starts thinking about "work colleges" as "learning communities", then why make college a special place at all? People of all ages have a lot to learn from each other, if we can move past a (literally) Medieval system of education. Maybe then when learning grows in an area, it would not have to kill the spirit of the physical town it is associated with, as that Princeton security guard talked about (way back at the start of this essay).

A digression on some aspects of my relationship to the Princeton University community and "trade skill"

One reason I could afford (emotionally) to take Princeton less seriously than my peers was that I developed a trade skill (programming) before attending. But it could just as well have been plumbing, carpentry, or farming. So, even if I failed, I knew I could support myself.

I also wrote a (derivative) video game the summer before PU. I think I may have annoyed my first year Princeton Inn College dormmate across the hall a little with that "Intruder Scramble" program and related tiny royalties, and maybe that competition helped spur him on to ambitious heights: "[In] 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair, becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do so". Though see where that got him in the end: :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Goldman
(July 17, 1964 -- December 26, 2003)
As someone once told me, the graveyards are full of monuments to "indispensable" people. :-( Or, I might add, ambitious ones. :-( (More on Phil and me later.)

I didn't in the end rewrite that VIC-20 game for the Commodore 64 (which might have made me much money). This was in part so as to focus on my PU studies and to learn to play the flute. And I *did* benefit from that time with faculty, students, and staff (including janitors). And I met Gerry O'Neill in person (and later became a fan of his ideas).

And I met George A. Miller, of course, who continues to inspire me with his commitment to life and free content. Plus I later (as a grad student) met the "other" George Miller (really, "Dean George J. Mueller") in the engineering quad, who I remember walking with across campus as he made his way to human resources a day or so before he ended his own life in a park. Which illustrates two very different approaches to the issues raised by this complex world, whether as individuals or communities. And I thought the other George was less than his usual talkative self that day due to some problems *I* was having at the engineering school, otherwise I would have talked to him more, not wanting to impose. How self-centered we (or I) can be. We miss you, the other George. Thanks for staying with us so long.

And no, this is not a comment on the PU HR department. What else do you need to say about a place that in its name implies people are only just "resources"? :-(
http://www.princeton.edu/hr/
Even though people do have aspects of their lives that are "resource" related in a sense, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

A large section of the book is dedicated to showing how population growth ultimately creates more resources. The basic argument echoes the overarching thesis: as resources become more scarce, the price rises, creating an incentive to adapt. The more people a society has to invent and innovate, ceteris paribus, the easier the society will raise its living standards and lower resource scarcity. People, on average, add to a civilization more than they take away.

Though we can transcend markets for that feedback, of course. And with stuff much better than the US government apparently helped destroy the first September 11 (1973, in Chile):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_coup_of_1973
So, two myths with one stone. Or even three. But I remain sad as to the deathly occasions of it all. :-(

I am glad there is an award in George Mueller's memory.
http://www.princeton.edu/engineering/eqnews/summer00/feature11.html
But as with Phil, I can't help but wonder if there is something wrong with PU emphasizing:

evidently combined high scholarly achievement in the study of engineering with quality performance in intercollegiate athletics.

instead of affirming our more basic human values like gentleness or compassion or even joy:
http://www.georgeleonard.com/cage.html

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

Another myth to live by. Giving thanks to the great Mystery every day helps remind of us of it, even as we acknowledge our smallness and dependency, but perhaps hopefully still not total insignificance, including the significance to help others see their own significance in our limited lives at this Earthly party.

In this amazingly titled book by Leslie Farber I once wanted to use at PU for "charades" (people thought it too hard :-):
"Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life"
http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Despair-Jealousy-Suicide-Drugs/dp/B000O8DCZ8
Leslie Farber makes the point that individual suicides are best thought of like a "trap door" that springs open under a person, and that endless "what ifs" get us nowhere useful. I'd add that death gets us all in the end, whether from a flawed assumption or a flawed heart valve. But as Leslie Farber points out, it is how we live our lives before then that matters. Including whether we spend too much time thinking about "jumping" from towers, and not building better ones we don't want to jump from, because we are all jumping together inside to the beat of African dance music.

Or jumping to whatever inspires our passion for life, even "Fermat's Last Conjecture". Or now, should I call it, "Andrew Wiles' Theorem"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles
Bless Andrew Wiles for his courage and stamina in finding a reason to live a glorious mathematical life around Fine Tower, but why did he have to be forced to be so alone to do his work for seven years in his attic? Why wasn't his office (presumably among colleagues in Fine Tower) good enough? OK, mathematicians often need quiet to think. But was that all it was? Or did he, in some sense, need to jump from the institution every day that otherwise threatened him with "career suicide" for doing what he cared about? Of course, as with my comments above on Marina's choice, this is not to disrespect Andrew Wiles' isolated mathematical life in an attic (and with a confidant or two) if that was freely chosen.

Perhaps what helped me myself survive my (fortunately?) three years at Princeton was that, like perhaps Andrew Wiles, and many others probably hidden at PU, I always felt I was "racing alone"?
http://www.calearth.org/products_files/racing.htm
"Is it really sane to follow one's ideals and dreams and race alone in today's world? Is it really reasonable to insist on holding to one's visions against all odds, and after many trying years?"
But there is often an unfortunate human cost for that when attempted in an institutional context like PU. And even "racing alone" or "racing against" yourself can be damaging if taken too far, given it is ultimately issues like joy and connectedness that help us build a good life.

So, even given what Farber writes, it still might still be useful to consider aspects of our social institutions that make suicide (physical, career, or just moving on) more likely either for individuals, institutions, or even entire societies?

One of the greatest preventers of suicide is meaningful human relationships. And these rarely come from an adversarial approach to life, like the ones Princeton both implicitly and explicitly promotes. From:
"On Caring" by Milton Mayeroff
http://www.amazon.com/Caring-Milton-Mayeroff/dp/0060920246
http://people.virginia.edu/~jfo/quotes/quotes1.html

Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a [person] live the meaning of [his or her] own life. In the sense in which a [person] can ever be said to be at home in the world, [he or she] is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for. — Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring

But Mayeroff would accept that caring for ideas and institutions is important, too, as well as caring for people. Maybe, despite what I said above about Nassau Hall, I'm still a sucker for that old "Orange and Black"? Or maybe a similar color preference is because someone who cared about me gave me an orange and black "Whizzer" top as a child, by chance, which became a favorite toy? Or maybe, I have grown from being "good little automaton droid" or a "Captain Amazing wannabee" or even a "mean jerk" :-( into a (reformed) "Mr. Furious" and I now just see the people under whatever colors? Or at least, try to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Men
As I'd suggest, through struggle and pain and also love, maybe we all can?

I'd suggest, the quest for "excellence" (whether in mathematics or even, say, ethics :-) done apart from service to other human values (even just curiosity), and done through competition with others, is a big part of the current Princeton mythology. It's part of that whole "smarter shark" thing, too. :-) Perhaps things like joy in service to others, or work/life balance might be better things for PU to promote more than academic or athletic excellence (however important those may be in the right context)? Similarly, considering people as "resources" to be used (or even used up) perhaps sets a bad tone for a campus. How about simply relating to people as "people"?

A person who exemplified some of that spirit of joy in service and who understood work/life balance IMHO was Yvonne Mccready(?), the director of the PUCC Computer Clinic it the early 1980s. As one of her computer clinicians for a time, I learned ready habits about the joy of helping others which have served me well throughout my career and elsewhere. And she and others there like Blair Dewey set good examples of work/life balance and a humorous approach to life. Thanks, Yvonne. Thanks Blair. That's the kind of thing all a college's students might learn more easily at say, Berea, than Princeton. And as I think of it, that time working at the PUCC "Clinic" may have been the most valuable of my entire PU experience (and not just in a monetary sense).

I also took some good courses on the history of science like with Michael Mahoney who tried to have us read "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner. Although, as I said, I was too dumb to read it at the time. By the way, nothing I say here should be considered to in any way represent any of his opinions. I'm sure he could write a much better essay than this. And better in many ways -- shorter, faster, more current to campus culture I only speculate on, perhaps unfairly. And if people, even him, write long rebuttals of this showing point by point where I went wrong, I welcome them. But, realistically, even if he wanted to, and even with tenure, could he write something similar socially, while living in the PU physical community (assuming anything I write here makes sense :-)? And as is suggested here:
"Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology"
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~lipoff/miscellaneous/exams.html
it is very hard for a person to introspect about a culture they are deeply enmeshed in. I make some more comments on the limits of that essay in a previously linked post, also here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/b9778f8a493f5c85
(to begin with, it ignores the many types of intelligence like musical, kinesthetic, narrative, compassionate, 3D visualization, spiritual, existential, ethical, etc.)

Of course, when I made a comment in a paper about the new residential college system and the related harm to the Princeton Inn community and the physical character of that space, he soundly trounced it (rightly, no doubt). So, he may do the same to this essay. :-) I'm sure there are endless good things people are doing at PU. Michael Mahoney could point to, say:
"The University Center for Human Values"
http://www.princeton.edu/~uchv/
or other similar aspects of PU's extensive curriculum offerings and research areas. Still, they just don't show up in this Google search on "post-scarcity" focused on the Princeton web site:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.princeton.edu+%22post-scarcity%22
"Your search - site:www.princeton.edu "post-scarcity" - did not match any documents."
By comparison, there is a lot of talk about "scarcity":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.princeton.edu+%22scarcity%22
"Results 1 - 10 of about 795 from www.princeton.edu for "scarcity". (0.02 seconds)"
Still, this is a somewhat hopeful sign, on a search on "abundance":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.princeton.edu+abundance
"Results 1 - 10 of about 969 from www.princeton.edu for abundance. (0.25 seconds)"
even though the top match there mentions "parasite abundance". :-) Maybe someday there will be some web pages at PU displayed by that "post-scarcity" Google search. Maybe even a result for this essay? :-)

And maybe that "The University Center for Human Values" linked there could be relocated from Louis Marx Hall to, say, the "tree house" in new Lewis Library for science, to at least help give those smarter sharks some humane ethics to go with their laser-guided nuclear munitions? Since those sharks are a given at this point anyway. :-) And who am I to say they have no right to be born? But we still need to educate those advanced sharks with "liberal arts" values IMHO. Well, the post-scarcity version of the "liberal arts" anyway. :-) Or maybe instead, perhaps these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Maybe those smarter sharks will turn out to be excellent space propulsion specialists with their nuclear munitions and laser beams. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
And space is really the ideal environment for water breathers like sharks anyway:
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

I learned much also from Professor Jim Beniger. I learned a lot more about PU when the Sociology department denied such an excellent and devoted teacher tenure, saying of his specialty "Communications is a fad". I wish I was making that up, because I felt that situation hurt him deeply, and he was one of the kindest and most insightful people I met at PU. But I did learn more about what the institution values, of course. Maybe Jim did not bring in enough of an abundance of money for tenure at PU? :-( And so did not get tenure despite the abundance he brought to PU in many other areas of excellence?

I also in part abandoned the rewrite as the game was called "addictive" (described as a positive :-) and that bothered me a little (plus it was about violence, even if abstract). So I picked a different path than Phil in some ways, a less directly ambitious one, strangely enough perhaps because of early "trade skill" success such as Berea teaches. I never felt I had to prove anything in economic terms, and I could afford (emotionally) to take academics less than seriously.

Even to the point of essentially (half-way :-) choosing to fail a course and see what happened:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/c74cccad0a4842f9
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/b9778f8a493f5c85
And in the process, unfortunately, I helped turn a peaceful Quaker (and later Nobel laureate) into, in a very limited sense, a bureaucratic villain just following orders in a Princeton-powered system that ignores the importance of failure, ambiguity, and uncertainty in creating certain necessary aspects of a good life, a good education, and good mentoring relationships. It's also a system which likely has an unexamined focus on the grading process which among other things poisons mentoring relationships or playfulness, as it in some sense poisoned my relationship with my own advisor or almost ever other faculty member. :-(

I audited Stephen Cohen's Soviet Politics course, and there were a few faculty around the dorms who were exceptions. I even fortunately interacted with Lynn White a tiny bit in passing, as he was a faculty member hanging out at PIC sometimes.

By the way, one reason I failed that Physics course on labs missed (the Professor was such a nice guy, otherwise I'm sure I'd have gotten a C despite my inability to wrap my mind around special relativity, which seemed like BS to me even if supposedly mathematically consistent :-) was that the administration seemed to keep bouncing the Band around as to when and where it could practice in order to destroy it (and the new time and field ended up conflicting with my physics labs). So, I picked the Band over studying with the Macarthur Fellow and eventual Nobel prize winner. A good choice I think in retrospect, as that time spent with the Band helps me plan for its abolishment (see below. :-)
"Evil Overlord, Incorporated: Planning your Future, One Step at a Time"
http://www.eviloverlord.com/
And I hope the Professor involved might ultimately agree that it was a good choice, since we all know the PU Band has got to go. But see below before you judge me to be a Blue Meanie on that statement. :-)

Really, is this the best thinking about grading the PU community can do these days when computers so easily support narrative feedback on portfolios?
http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/01.html

These proposals are designed to assist the faculty in bringing grade inflation under reasonable control. By adopting them, the faculty will be better able to give students the carefully calibrated assessment they deserve of the quality of their course work and independent work. The proposed grading standard responds to the desire of the department chairs that all departments be asked to meet common expectations. It responds to the desire of students for evenhandedness in grading across the departments. And it positions Princeton to take national leadership in tackling what has seemed an intractable national problem.

What purpose do these (reading-between-the-lines) admittedly arbitrary grades really serve? Why assign arbitrary letter grades at all? What do the grades really prove?

Contrast what PU said in 2004 with this five year earlier essay from 1999 by Alfie Kohn:
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm

Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. A "B" in English says nothing about what a student can do, what she understands, where she needs help. Moreover, the basis for that grade is as subjective as the result is uninformative. A teacher can meticulously record scores for one test or assignment after another, eventually calculating averages down to a hundredth of a percentage point, but that doesn't change the arbitrariness of each of these individual marks. Even the score on a math test is largely a reflection of how the test was written: what skills the teacher decided to assess, what kinds of questions happened to be left out, and how many points each section was "worth." Moreover, research has long been available to confirm what all of us know: any given assignment may well be given two different grades by two equally qualified teachers. It may even be given two different grades by a single teacher who reads it at two different times (for example, see some of the early research reviewed in Kirschenbaum et al., 1971). In short, what grades offer is spurious precision – a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation. ...

Most of us are directly acquainted with at least some of these disturbing consequences of grades, yet we continue to reduce students to letters or numbers on a regular basis. Perhaps we've become inured to these effects and take them for granted. This is the way it's always been, we assume, and the way it has to be. It's rather like people who have spent all their lives in a terribly polluted city and have come to assume that this is just the way air looks – and that it's natural to be coughing all the time.

Oddly, when educators are shown that it doesn't have to be this way, some react with suspicion instead of relief. They want to know why you're making trouble, or they assert that you're exaggerating the negative effects of grades (it's really not so bad – cough, cough), or they dismiss proven alternatives to grading on the grounds that our school could never do what others schools have done.

The practical difficulties of abolishing letter grades are real. But the key question is whether those difficulties are seen as problems to be solved or as excuses for perpetuating the status quo. The logical response to the arguments and data summarized here is to say: "Good Heavens! If even half of this is true, then it's imperative we do whatever we can, as soon as we can, to phase out traditional grading." Yet many people begin and end with the problems of implementation, responding to all this evidence by saying, in effect, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we'll never get rid of grades because . . ."

It is also striking how many educators never get beyond relatively insignificant questions, such as how many tests to give, or how often to send home grade reports, or what grade should be given for a specified level of achievement (e.g., what constitutes "B" work), or what number corresponds to what letter. Some even reserve their outrage for the possibility that too many students are ending up with good grades, a reaction that suggests stinginess with A's is being confused with intellectual rigor. The evidence indicates that the real problem isn't grade inflation; it's grades. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A's, but that too many students have accepted that getting A's is the point of going to school.

And, that's just a tiny excerpt from a *long* essay. :-)

Do people need to be graded on, say, how well they use the internet to learn things, as in "A, B, C, D, F for, say, Fernhout"? :-) Don't we have enough brain power as a society to move beyond what are, in a sense, just another form of ration units for an artificially created scarcity? Can't professors begin to think in narratives, not arbitrary grades? Just as, even in 1973, as with Cybersyn, we had enough computer power to start to move beyond markets?

Some Quaker humor as as interlude: (and I think it applies to grading as well :-)
http://www.kvaekerne.dk/personal/HFH/humorquaker.html

One World War II Quaker conscientious objector had been a professional wrestler. Once when he and some other inmates of the Coshocton CPS camp in Ohio made a trip into town, they were hassled about their pacifism by some local youths, who insisted that only force could change the German's views. In response, the ex-wrestler took off his coat, challenged one of the local boys to a match, and promptly threw the townie across the room. He then asked the youth,
"Now do you believe that force won't change people's views?"
"Heck no!" the local boy hollered back.
"That's exactly my point," said the Quaker, who put on his coat and left.

Resuming our Polemic, and considering an even bigger picture

What exactly is a polemic, anyway? From WordNet:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=polemic

S: (n) polemic (a controversy (especially over a belief or dogma))

Unfortunately, George Miller had to draw from only sources about 100 years old to make WordNet, due to copyright issues and limited time. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemic

Polemics is the practice of disputing or controverting religious, philosophical, or political matters. As such, a polemic text on a topic is often written specifically to dispute or refute a position or theory that is widely viewed to be beyond reproach.

Well, if the RepRapped shoe fits, I'll wear it. :-) This is a "polemic" against the secular mythology (or "secular religion") that shapes the Princeton University community. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_religion

In the terminology of some scholars working in sociology, a political religion is a political ideology with cultural and political power equivalent to those of a religion, and often having many sociological and ideological similarities with religion.

I'm basically saying that PU's secular mythology is getting more and more out-of-date with each passing day. PU's mythology contains ideas like:
* achieving excellence through competition,
* praising financial obesity,
* valuing "work" instead of "play",
* assuming a need for extrinsic rewards (money and grades) instead of intrinsic rewards (just from the experience),
* the need to be exclusive instead of inclusive,
* putting the college years ahead of the early years,
* assuming perpetual war, empire, and the "free" markets the empire defines are the only alternative to chaos, disaster, and sloth, and so on.
All these myths are starting to fall apart in the internet age -- if they ever were true to begin with.

Again, Princeton University should seriously be evaluating the value of its "brand" in the internet age, especially after the Iraq war, IMHO. This is especially true given what PU represents to the public these days with, again, poster boy Donald Rumsfeld '54, which is part of why I didn't put a PU sticker on our current car. See:
"They Thought They Were Free"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident ... collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people [, your university :-(] — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

This essay is my small attempt to help the Princeton community reverse this process of spiritual decline.

Sure there are PU alumni like Marty Johnson '81 who passed on his dreams to make sustainable islands in the sea or space and instead renewed the city of Trenton out of immense practical altruism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_P._Johnson
But it's hard to offset just one Donald Rumsfeld with the Iraq war costs now expected to reach three trillion US dollars or more
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3419840.ece
(ignoring tens of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees). Let's assume one "Marty Johnson" can raise, say, being very generous, $100 million over his life for good ends. It would still take 30,000 Marty Johnsons to equal (financially) just one Donald Rumsfeld. That's almost all the alumni. So, based on that failure to help just that *one* student learn to be less competitive, or to find the courage to stand up for his lower echelon staff (who said it would cost a lot, and hurt a lot, and achieve no important objectives), maybe it's time for Princeton to admit ethical bankruptcy as an institution and as a "brand" and to make amends by dissolving itself in favor of educating hundreds of millions of the poorest kids on the planet instead of starting up again next year? :-) Presumably other universities would accept PU students as transfers, as I was a transfer to PU. Obviously, Yale would not be accepting transfers, because by this line of reasoning, it should be dissolved too, with the money spent on, say, educating another billion children.

There is obviously enough money to both have PU and laptops for all, of course. A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years:
"Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1313223
And TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year:
"Mining the Cognitive Surplus"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258

There is plenty to go around to meet the needs of everyone on the planet. (Even Yalies' *unreasonable* needs, too. :-) See Buckminster Fuller:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/leisure/bucky.html

It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.

From:
http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/qland2.html

The human population on earth has crossed six billion. If we distribute all the exposed land evenly among all mankind, 133 people would have to share one square mile. What that means is that every single person on Earth, man woman and child would have close to five acres of land for his or her use. More precisely, each person would get 209,000 square feet of land, or a square plot of land 457 feet on each side.

So there is a lot to go around, just on Earth, especially as many people like to live in villages or cities, and modern technology makes human habitation possible just about anywhere on the planet -- or even the oceans, or someday, in space.

But we need to change the scarcity myths we live by into "post-scarcity" ones to make it work for everyone. And until then, IMHO, PU is ethically bankrupt when a billion kids get next to no education at all and that could be fixed by dissolving just one elite university. Maybe we could dissolve Harvard as an institution to give them all clean water, too? Just a thought. :-)

Which is better if we *had* to choose as a global society: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (given we'd still have Berkley, Swarthmore, and Dartmouth), or two billion educated kids with clean water and long healthy productive lives? And, maybe, if we are very lucky, also netting us a whole bunch of young George Millers giving us a whole bunch more cognitive revolutions and free tools to bring us to even greater heights of abundance and gift giving?

But fortunately, (some might say, unfortunately :-) in a post-scarcity society, there will be enough wealth to go around, *even* for having places like Princeton University. :-)

Another Proposal, the Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence

To focus on "restorative justice" of action, instead of "punitive justice" of dissolution,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice
how can the punishment of Princeton be made to fit the crime of creating a hyper-competitive Donald Rumsfeld?

As a start, that the Princeton community could at least more than redouble its efforts to promote a post-scarcity mythology globally, rather than still implicitly promoting the myths of scarcity and the value of competition (including through the PhD process) that help justify war. See, also:
"War is a racket"
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

Here is one approach to "reboot" Princeton for a post-scarcity world. This is just an example. No doubt the creative minds on campus can come up with better proposals once they turn their attention to the matter. Should these be followed, it's a lot more likely I might encourage my own child to apply in a dozen years or so. :-)

Or, I might then maybe encourage somebody, like, say, this 18 year old person of my recent internet acquaintance to apply: :-)
http://heybryan.org/

Hey, my name is Bryan, I am 18 years old and living just south of Austin in Buda, Texas, enrolled in the local high school. Will be attending the University of Texas at Austin starting August 2008 (in chemical engineering). You should see my (outdated) roadmap to see my projects, such as free + open source automated manufacturing, in vitro meat, asteroid mining, open source do-it-yourself genetic engineering and 'biohacking' kit, AutoScholar software, synthetic biology research, etc. I also run a blog called Transapient Musings.

Obviously, this is not meant to approve of everything on his site. :-) Or to say that less intense people might not also make great prospectives -- since a healthy society takes all kinds of people. Some others hang out, say, here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/about
Even within one person, it is often the balance of ethics and action that make the difference. But why should someone like "Bryan" choose PU over anyplace else (like University of Texas at Austin)? Yeah, PU's got a lot of labs and resources, but so do lots of other universities. The issue is, does PU have the post-scarcity "spirit" a prospective like Bryan might be looking for? And can it do a convincing job of arguing PU's strengths in the humanities will play an important role in helping someone like Bryan become a boon to humanity and not a bane? Even within the world of "free", there is still yin and yang, light and shadow. What are, say, the ethics of ideas he mentions like "brain augmentation" (Google and email archives? :-) or "transhuman tech" (eyeglasses, hearing aids, pacemakers, prosthetics, cosmetic surgery, and cellphones? :-)? I know he means more than those, of course, but these show our world is already engaged in those trends. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) already approves of the "in vitro" meat idea Bryan is interested in, so maybe not too many ethical issues there? :-)
"Where’s the beef? Try the lab. Researchers attempt to make meat without killing livestock. [PETA offers prize]"
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/05/28/where%e2%80%99s-the-beef-try-the-lab/
Although PU is behind the times even on just that:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22in+vitro+meat%22+site%3Awww.princeton.edu

Your search - "in vitro meat" site:www.princeton.edu - did not match any documents.

Lab grown (shark? :-) meat is one of the biggest upcoming revolutions in our society and PU has nothing to say about it? Bryan does.

What can PU do down the road to help assure any future similar prospective's parents or guardians that PU helps such students sort through all their dreams and ethics to set priorities, and to help them see what makes sense for a humane world and a happy life, and what does not? What sort of skills can PU help someone like that learn to be an even better collaborator on free projects? As happened with Linus Torvalds in Finland, how can PU help ethics and poetry come together with science and engineering in such a young person's life? How can PU become a more compelling alternative than such a person working on his or her own or just collaborating through the internet? In short, how can we make PU the number one choice of both Bryan *and* his parents? :-) (Even if PU is not now? :-( ) Sure Bryan may be off to other things, but there no doubt will be more people like him down the road. Many more as these ideas become more and more mainstream. While every person is unique, based on SourceForge having almost two million registered users making free software and free content, I have no doubt there are tens of thousands of high school seniors who might have related general interests in developing free software. And, there might be similar numbers in the areas of free music and free movies and free hardware and free content. It's often said that every (quasi-)military organization prepares to fight the last war. Is PU busy looking for the next military/political Donald Rumsfeld or market-driven/corporate Jeff Bezos, when it should be looking for the next free-as-in-freedom "Bryan"?

To that end, here is an alternative proposal to the modest one above. It is in some ways perhaps inspired by the book "Ecocity Berkeley" by Richard Register.
http://www.amazon.com/Ecocity-Berkeley-Richard-Register/dp/1556430094
But it approaches reforming Princeton from a "post-scarcity" point-of-view, taking an interest in ecological sustainability now for granted. So, maybe it is like "Ecocity Berkeley" crossed with Murray Bookchin's writings? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin
And beyond, of course.

Rather than move books into a new "Lewis Science Library" (as if even just today's usual prospectives would care about that in the internet age with Google Books and so forth accessible from their dorm desktops or from networked laptops anywhere), the building could be renamed the "Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence".

Bring people like Michael Mahoney and Lynn White together with people like Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman and see what happens.

Use the space to house offices for related faculty and visitors. Some non-profits like the Buckminster Fuller Institute could be encouraged to take up residence for free. Same to with making facilities available to "professional amateurs":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_amateur

The 20th century witnessed the rise of many new professionals in fields such as medicine, science, education and politics. Amateurs and their sometimes ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. This historic shift is now reversing with Pro-Ams: people who pursue amateur activities to professional standards are increasingly an important part of the society and economy of developed nations. Their leisure is not passive but active and participatory. Their contribution involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, and is often built up over a long career involving sacrifices and frustrations.

Put in a big server farm to serve free content. Or collaborate with archive.org on that.
http://www.archive.org

All the books over 20 years old slated to be moved there could be digitized and served to the world, with the originals shipped to an English speaking poor place like New Delhi, India to be given away for free. When Princeton gets sued for this, the alumni lawyers could rally to its defense, either winning in court or changing the copyright laws. Then *all* the books at PU could be digitized, served to the world, and shipped for "disposal" to India, perhaps with notarized copies of original cover pages kept in a vault somewhere as proof of purchase, and the books stamped "intended for disposal; may not be resold, only given away". The URL where the book can be found at princeton.edu should also be stamped onto the inside cover. (Obviously "rare" books might be excepted from being shipped to India, and now there would be a lot more space for more of them.) The space freed in Firestone could be converted to indoor squash courts as well as office and lab space for free projects. When PU gets sued again for making its whole collection available to the public for free, tap into the alumni lawyer network to deal with it, or even tap into the endowment to solve this some way with money which would soon be near worthless anyway as more and more of the economy goes free.

The university could free all the patents and copyrights it controls, as well as make new contracts for faculty, staff, and students, that all published work done using university resources must be freely licensed.

PU could resist RIAA's FUD campaign not by using their licensed content but by becoming, like archive.org, a hub for free music. Encourage alumni of the PU singing groups and students and staff to record new free stuff of their own creation by adding a few recording studios for that purpose. Again, for classic tunes, maybe get alumni lawyers involved in freeing any music over twenty years old, perhaps by getting copyright laws passed to restore the original term of copyright. Similarly, there could be improved support for creating free movies by PU's Triangle Club. WPRB could commit to playing only free music:
http://www.wprb.com/

Project '55 might help alumni raise a billion dollars from tech alumni to saturate the airwaves about the crazieness of the current music copyright policies and the "NET Act" in the internet age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NET_Act&oldid=211780721
Why let the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry tail wag the multi-trillion dollar IT industry dog? Project '55 might help reverse the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that has kept immense amounts of copyrighted material from the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
It might get the USA to end its involvement with the Berne convention or have the Berne convention altered to a maximum twenty year copyright term with notice required. Project '55 might get revenue raising laws passed by Congress to tax all copyrights annually at a 3% of a self-assessed public domain buyout value (where anyone can pay the rightsholder the self-assessed value to buy the copyright into the public domain). See my post:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html

Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.

Princeton University no doubt contains a vast knowledgebase related to getting alumni to volunteer and donate resources, whether through volunteering their time interviewing prospectives, contributing to Annual Giving, or making a few really big donations. Rather than continue to hoard that knowledge and use it for selfish sharkish ends to feed on alumni to support the old Princeton, take that knowledge and generalize it for the world, to encourage a world wide gift economy. That's an example of how Princeton's knowledge in practice is completely different from the theoretical knowledge pushed by the economics department.

Princeton could follow Penn's lead and make a center for "Positive Psychology", so as to improve on this:
"Results 1 - 7 of 7 from www.princeton.edu for "positive psychology"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.princeton.edu++%22positive+psychology%22
The two PU profs (one emiritus) who have pages that mention it could be asked to set one up:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/
http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman/
From:
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The Positive Psychology Center promotes research, training, education, and the dissemination of Positive Psychology. This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

And from:
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/faqs.htm

Is positive psychology an abandoning or rejection of the rest of psychology?
In a word, no. Since World War II, psychology has focused its efforts on psychological problems and how to remedy them. These efforts have reaped large dividends. Great strides have been made in understanding and treating psychological disorders. Effective treatments now exist for more than a dozen disorders that were once seen as intractable. ... One consequence of this focus on psychological problems, however, is that psychology has little to say about what makes life most worth living. Positive psychology proposes to correct this imbalance by focusing on strengths as well as weaknesses, on building the best things in life as well as repairing the worst. It asserts that human goodness and excellence is just as authentic as distress and disorder, that life entails more than the undoing of problems. Psychology's concern with remedying human problems is understandable and should certainly not be abandoned. Human suffering demands scientifically informed solutions. Suffering and well being, however, are both part of the human condition, and psychologists should be concerned with both.

All the university's courses and research could be rethought along post-scarcity lines as to content.

All letter grading could be abolished as well and replaced with portfolios, and so on.

If any students need to work at PU, then *all* students should be required to work the same hours per week. Ideally though, work around campus would be arranged to be done on a voluntary basis and that would be disconnected from money. Let the trash pile up for a few weeks and see how soon students start taking these issues seriously and figuring out novel solutions. :-)

OK, I know that last idea may not sit well with the New Jersey Health Department. So, separate out the foodscraps and compost them first then. :-) Maybe ask this other internet acquaintance of mine and high school senior, "Mike", to help with that:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/fd3a4c07f12eb1c2

Hmm. 80,000 dollars over four years at the University of Colorado paying for a major that I'm not even sure I like could buy 800 lap tops and educate 4000 children. Double that after masters and PhD. I have some thinking to do. I've always wanted to make a living off of plants, own a nursery and grow bonsai, maybe set up some city composting projects and live simply, with time for educating myself on the side. My parents would say that still requires a degree in horticulture with a minor in business, and it probably would, not because the knowledge would be useful (it wouldn't be, it would be mostly theoretical or filler, what I need to know could be learned free online) but because employees, loans, and investors all require having a degree.

A Post-Scarcity Princeton could make Mike's dream come true right now, to learn important trade skills on campus, without a degree -- as a student or not. :-) Maybe a "Mike" (or a "Michelle") might already be at Princeton, working in Prospect Garden,
http://www.princeton.edu/~oktour/virtualtour/Stop15.htm
and secretly laughing (both in joy for themselves and sorrow for others) at all the other young people at PU who are heading for lives on both real treadmills and career treadmills, when he or she gets to be in the sun and rain and work with plants and think about what he or she wants to think about right now? And get paid to do it, too. :-) You can also see that high school seniors are beginning to wise up to the racket that is higher education. Granted, he had some help. :-) And I'm sure, again, that while every individual is unique, that there will be more and more high school seniors who share Mike's sentiments, especially with talk of food shortages in the paper (even if those shortages are mostly from speculation, not a real lack of enough to go around). Or also water shortages. And Mike's heartfelt email shows that all that doom and gloom in the papers is a farce with people like Mike around who are being prevented from learning and doing by the very social systems that claim to be set up to "help" him.

Even Socrates, that executed "corruptor of youth", probably made his living from a trade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

It is unclear how Socrates earned a living. According to Timon of Phlius and later sources, Socrates took over the profession of stonemasonry from his father. There was a tradition in antiquity, not credited by modern scholarship, that Socrates crafted the statues of the Three Graces, which stood near the Acropolis until the second century AD.

Fortunately, nobody these days except someone like Mike is likely to learn the difference between "hemlock trees" and other similarly named things. :-( But before even he learns, should not we have an integrated, life affirming culture for people like him to be part of, rather than him having to second guess social processes that are in many ways working against him, causing him to sacrifice his youth for some undefined future reward by "investors" who likely as not won't care about his dreams anyway? As Mike might be learning, it's hard to cheat an honest person, even just out of his or her youth:
"Honest Business" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Business-Shambhala-Pocket-Editions/dp/1570621799

I purchased this book in 1987 just before starting my business. "Honest Business" affirmed every belief I had about how business should and could be practiced. Even concepts such as a business' responsibility to the community it conducts business in is discussed in depth. "Honest Business" gave me the courage and the steps for conducting business without foresaking my personal principles, morals, and objective. Even today this book is my constant companion; my business bible.

And how many philosophical people like "Socrates" work at PU as janitors, masons, security guards, or running the physical plant? :-)
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Boothby

Mr. Boothby was the curmudgeonly groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco on Earth. He was born about the 2260s. (TNG: "The First Duty") He worked at Starfleet Academy from about 2321 and saw many promising young cadets come and go, often offering up helpful advice and kind words, among them such prominent Starfleet captains as Picard, Janeway, Richardson, and Lopez.

As an undergrad, I learned a lot about a good thankful spirit for life from Anthony "Tony" Cifelli, in charge of the the Princeton Inn Residential College's cleaning and maintenance. Thanks for your cheerfulness, even needing to work three jobs to support your family, Tony. As you were grateful, I am learning to be.

Say, wasn't even Charles Darwin interested is soil and compost and earthworms at the end (as far as writing his last book about that)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
Maybe there is more to an interest in dirt than meets the eye? :-)

For the record, my (unappreciated at the time) staff job at PU in the CE department doing robotics and 3D graphics was the best job I ever had (as "jobs" go) -- again, one can be best in the world at something even as it is going out of style. :-)

Why not make the entire university a laboratory for experiments in abolishing "work" and turning it into "play"? Or maybe even think deeply about re-engineering "work" away altogether via rethinking what truly needs to get done or by automating it if no one likes to do that:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Mike raises another point in his email:

It seems to me like greed is no longer good, but for a bad reason, because kids are spoiled by parents who have everything. Whether that's to our advantage or not is arguable. On one hand they are getting used to the idea of "maybe I really don't need to work when everything is so easily obtained" but on the other they get in the habit of spending their free time on persistent browser based mini games (myself included) and developing excessive social dependencies with cell phones and the dark side of the internet (chat rooms, the corrupted Y! A, social mmos). Whether people can mature to the point where they enjoy improving society and do it on their own free will is the big issue.

I don't have a great answer to that issue of "spoiling". But it could be a good topic for research at PU.

University research could be encouraged along more post-scarcity ends, by establishing related research centers. For example, Princeton could position itself as the world leader in free software for self-driving vehicles. (See, I said I'd solve the traffic problem. These networked cars could coordinate their movements better. :-) Or the world leader in free software for mammalian genetic simulation.

This would all make Princeton and the newly renamed Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence the *unique* destination in the Ivy league for any prospective interested in freedom and transcending a market economy to a gift economy.

Granted, it might be hard to catch up with someone like Paul Jones at UNC Chapel Hill, who has spent decades creating freely accessible collections of free-to-the-user digital materials like SunSITE and Ibiblio.
http://www.ibiblio.org/
But I am sure that he would just love to see Princeton try to compete; seriously, I'm sure he would even help PU be way better than anything he has ever done, and probably he would help mostly for "free". :-)

And don't be timid about this. I'm not talking a little center like the one for ethics smushed away somewhere. I'm talking burning a few billion dollars of the PU endowment to even *begin* such a transformation campus wide and turn such a big ship the flagship of capitalism. (See, I said I'd solve the issue of Congress' interest in mandating spending down the endowment. :-) Conferences. Speakers. Travel expenses. Lawsuits and legal fees. Space for free projects PU students help with. Robotic book scanners. Supercomputers for simulating free products that are easy to build. Raiding the faculty of institutions globally.

And I'm talking burning the money *fast* and burning it *now*. Because that post-scarcity iceberg is on its way, and it may be a lot closer and a lot bigger that one might think, even if it may just look like, at a first glance, that Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, WordNet, and Google might be all there is or will ever be. They won't. Even if I had to do it all myself, and thankfully I'm just small potatoes these days. Like any iceberg, most of the action is invisible, under the water. But that's what faith is for -- pick your best sources of information, think about them the best you can, and then take action, and as new things happen, revise plans and take more action.

And here is another suggestion that may seem totally counter to everything I said -- PU should *double* its tuition, maybe even *triple* it, for those who can easily pay, and otherwise make it free along the current lines for those who cannot pay. Seriously, if PU makes these transformations, or better ones, I predict the admissions department will have trouble keeping up with application processing even with tuition list price spiking $100K or $250K per year. :-) With six million millionaire families in just the USA, there are plenty of people who could afford to pay that as a gift to their child and the world. Maybe now you can see how hard it is to wrap your mind around the issues related to transcending to a post-scarcity society. And this also shows why rethinking the PU brand is so essential. All the Ivy League schools are like luxury cars and cost about a Lexus a year. Does PU want to stay in that market if that form of instruction is going the way of horse cart buggy whip manufacturers? Maybe PU might think about moving into the new industry related to flying through the internet? And then it could charge a whole lot more per plane, especially if money is going out of style.

My family couldn't afford that increased tuition of $250K/year, by the way, :-) but then I've decided to burn any hope of a college fund now to spend time with my kid when it most counts -- the early years. And hope that if I do that, whet my child gets older, it will be possible from that early investment to build a happy life even if without college. But that would be a whole other long essay to explain. :-) Essentially, and I know people will spin these words against what else I say here, but why should I sacrifice my child's "now" for a mythical future twenty years from now that assumes money and a PU degree will still be important? Especially when everything I read suggests building a happy now for a young kid implies building a happy tomorrow for a kid too? (And, yes, my kid already does chores -- I'm talking happiness, not lack of responsibility.) So too might any parent of a prospective ask, do I really want to spend $50K a year on the floundering brand of Princeton ground car when I can spend, say, spend $250K a year on a post-scarcity Yale flying car and see my kid be truly happy now as well as in the likely future? Or spend $30K a year at UNC Chapel Hill (metaphorically a hot-air balloon by comparison to a $250K flying car?) to study with a post-scarcity-leaning Paul Jones if on a budget? :-)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/

Although often mistaken for other unreconstructed relics of the failed social policies of the Sixties, Paul Jones is the Director of ibiblio.org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE, The Public's Library -- a large contributor-run digital library. Besides speaking at several conferences world-wide, Paul teaches on the faculties of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science. ... Paul is a founding board member of the American Open Technology Consortium, a member of the Board of Trustees of Chapel Hill Public Library, and a board member of the Linux Documentation Project. But he is most pleased to have been admitted into the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists and to have been selected in April 2003 as Best Geek in the Research Triangle by the Independent Weekly.

Of course there is one obvious flaw in all this -- how can Princeton continue to be selective if it makes a commitment to be inclusive? That's the kind of question that should be keeping university administrators up at night, kind of like one of the biggest issues Unitarian Universalist congregations wrestle with is how to be tolerant of intolerance? And there likely is no easy answer. Maybe a lottery for applicants? But even that has obvious problems -- are people commited to post-scarcity ideals? Or can they learn them? At what point does PU cease to exist going down the road to inclusiveness as society transforms itself, and is that a bad thing? Hardly anyone bemoans, say, the relative decline of monestaries as seats of learning and research in the Renaissance. And in a sense, that is what I am talking about here -- PU deciding to pull down the flag of global elite capitalism and put up the Jolly Roger of global common Renaissance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

Seriously, I've outlined how the PhD system PU feeds into and draws from for faculty and staff is broken beyond repair, how people with degrees are often turned into prostitutes of one form or another, and how in a sense PU is eating some of its most vulnerable alumni. What parent in their right mind would want their kid to take part in that parade of broken dreams? Even the traditional reasons of, say, going to medical school are breaking down -- what parent (especially with an MD) would advise a career in institutionalized medicine these days? That's another system collapsing in the face of advanced technology and backward social institutions. PU's only saving grace is it is better that almost everyone else doing the same thing (educating young people in how to be part of a global scarcity-oriented capitalist system). But what happens when that thing becomes obsolete, like if flying cars eclipse ground cars? Must PU be the last to accept it?

As fun at PU replaced fear, and peace at PU replaced profit, the burst of creativity at Princeton University might lead to all sorts of new ways to reinvent the university and the world. Imagine if these students could, say, figure out a way to improve 50% on Princeton's already astoundingly efficient energy systems? (See, I said I would address the sustainability/greening issue. :-) That would free up more money for more scholarships. Then more students might do even more. And so on, until Princeton was able to afford to accept all who wanted to come and give them the best residential educational experience in the world (except for Yale, of course, where those copycats might be trying the same thing. :-) Remember:
"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if [a] task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
(See, I said I'd resolve the issue of the changing landscape for financial aid. :-) One can expect that as more universities follow Princeton's lead that they will form some sort of loose network expanding to cover the globe. A bit like this idea I had as a grad student at PU:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/081919dbba30d1f7
(which is an idea I was developing from reading widely the books at Firestone Library and elsewhere on campus).

And, as with the colors on this site, maybe as a symbol of Princeton's "Self Renewal"
"Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society" by John W. Gardner
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Renewal-Individual-Innovative-John-Gardner/dp/039331295X
Princeton University could change its colors from "orange and black" to "orange and green"? "Orange and green" are the colors of the rising sun and the living things on which it shines. And that seems better than continuing to use the colors of the setting sun and the darkness to follow.
"Why are Princeton's colors orange and black?"
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/home/02/0710_orange/hmcap.html
Of everything I propose, naturally, this change would be the hardest of all for the Princeton University community to make, as it has to do with the core of how Princeton explains itself to itself, or its mythology. A lot of songs would have to be rewritten too. :-)
http://www.princeton.edu/~puband/media/lyrics.html
"Going green, going green, it's the best blessed thing I've seen." :-)
And of course, ironically, everyone else in the world will think it is about Princeton finally admitting it is all about the other green stuff, money. :-) So, as with IBM, it might take burning another billion dollars or so of the endowment to let everyone know about its change of heart as a community. Does PU want to commit to a world of "shiny happy people holding hands"? Or does it want to continue to commit to something else? :-(

From John Gardner's 1971 book:

As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications. ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ...

John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. Democracy -- use it or lose it. Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it. Social capital -- use it or lose it?

Some comments on the PU Economics department and related research directions from a post-scarcity perspective

The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition. :-)

OK, that will never happen, so it should be at least "strongly admonished" for past misbehavior. :-(

What misbehavior? Essentially, the PU Economics department has taken part in a global effort to build an economic "psychofrakulator". How does a psychofrakulator work? Consider a paraphrase of something Doc Heller says in the movie Mystery Men:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes

Dr. Heller: It's a psychofrakulator. They used to say it couldn't be built. The equations were so complex that most of the scientists that worked on it wound up in the insane asylum [in Chicago]. ... It creates a cloud of [dollar denomiated] radically-fluctuating free-deviant chaotrons which penetrate the synaptic relays [via television]. It's concatenated with a synchronous transport switch [of values from long term seven generation life-affirming love of caring to short-term immediate profit and immediate gratification suicidal death-affirming love of money] that creates a virtual tributary [back to large corporations]. It's focused onto a biobolic reflector [of the elite controlled mass media] and what happens is that [economic] hallucinations become reality and the [global] brain [and global ecosystem] is literally fried from within.

Or in other words:
"Screwed: What 30 Years of Conservative Economics Feels Like"
http://granby01033.blogspot.com/2008/04/screwed-what-30-years-of-conservative.html
Or:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
And:
"Obituary: Conservative Economic Policy"
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/10/19/obituary_conservative_economic/

Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide. Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy. ...

And any economists who don't want to move to, say, Chicago should be asked to follow this twelve step program: :-)
"Confessions of a Recovering Economist" by Jim Stanford
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=37&ItemID=3996

Good evening. My name is Jim. And I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks, untamed, within me. ...

Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, they've done enough damage with their arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right.

Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Like they say at the AA meetings, this is half the solution. Where economists are concerned, however, it's easier said than done. Getting a substance abuser to face the facts of their addiction is nothing compared to convincing an economist that they're hooked on elegant but useless mathematical models, and authoritative but destructive policy advice. Where economists are concerned, we're talking denial with a capital 'D.'

Step 2: Accept that all your efforts to explain the world have failed. The 'market' is the holiest symbol in all of economics. It's magically automatic and efficient. And supply always equals demand. The whole profession of mainstream, 'neoclassical' economics is dedicated to the study of markets and how they can be perfected. The problem, however, is that in real life these idealized 'markets' don't explain much at all. Powerful non-market forces determine most of what happens in the economy - things like tradition, demographics, class, gender and race, geography, and institutions. Indeed, what we call the 'market' is itself a complex, historically constructed social institution - not some autonomous, inanimate forum. Power and position are at least as important to economics, as supply and demand. ...

But I'm mainly using the PU economics department as a stand-in for the problems our world faces and past misdeeds of all economists, which is not really fair, I know; I'm not in any way expert on their current research. A few of the faculty, even twenty years ago, may well have been concerned about some of these issues. The closest I came to the PU economics department was rooming with a PU Economics graduate student for a time during the summer after I left the graduate college and he was one of the most fun people I ever met and he was interested in global issues. We became friends. But, beyond the troubles I saw him have finding an advisor, I saw this clever and witty fellow beaten down over the years as we stayed in touch, even to the point of divorce as he was forced to sacrifice his marriage to a wonderful person for his PhD (though granted, he could have abandoned his degree). To me, that sums up what the PU Economics department has really been about -- numbers and credentials instead of joy and family. The department may well have improved some over the last two decades. Still, at the very least, the PU Economics department faculty should be admonished for not writing the post-scarcity part of this essay instead of me (with my baggage. :-) Obviously, as with Paul Krugman, there are some partial exceptions who maybe should perhaps be admonished double for raising our hopes? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
To my knowledge, none of them look at the actual issue of the nature of work:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.econ.princeton.edu+work+nature
"Results 1 - 10 of about 19 from www.econ.princeton.edu for work nature. (0.12 seconds) [None relevant]"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22why+work%22
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "why work" - did not match any documents."
like Bob Black raises:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+%22bob+black%22
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu "bob black" - did not match any documents."
Again, from Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

OK, maybe Bob Black is less known, but what about E.F. Schumacher and Buddhist Economics?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.econ.princeton.edu+schumacher
"Your search - site:www.econ.princeton.edu schumacher - did not match any documents."
From Schumacher:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

Should the PU economics department wish to stay intact rather than move en masse to another university, the calculus of infinites mentioned at the start of this essay is one new direction for their research and teaching.

But, if PU economists still want to make charts and theories about finite things (they're good at that, obviously, and it is labor that they seem to love to do, see Schumacher :-), then what they need to start looking at and charting are physical concepts like Ray Kurzweil considers here:
"The Law of Accelerating Returns"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html
PU economists could graph historical trends over time like:
* increasing computation delivered per unit mass of silicon,
* the increasing amount of freely licensed software and other content,
* the increasing percentage of human attention devoted to free content,
* the increasing electrical energy captured per unit mass for windmills,
* the increasing incarceration rate per capita in the USA,
* the decreasing amount of time it takes a solar collector to repay the energy used in its manufacture,
* the decreasing ground crew size per space rocket launch,
* the decreasing topsoil depth per capita,
* the decreasing global biodiversity, and so on.
Obviously, they'd also want to look at other things at websites like this for more ideas:
"Redefining Progress: Shifting public policy to achieve a sustainable economy, a healthy environment and a just society"
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm

Like Kurzweil, PU economists could start applying their skills to charting trends in the real basis of prosperity. They need to move beyond charting derived trends that are social constructions like fluctuations in fiat currency. They need to start admitting that as a fiat currency system breaks down with a transition to the emerging post-scarcity economy, dollars are no longer a very good way to measure things (if they ever were). They need to remember that currency is as arbitrary system related to a current economic control system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiat dollars are essentially ration units, and rationing is becoming obsolete as part of the emerging post-scarcity society. For example, personal internet bandwidth use and server disk space are now so cheap as to be effectively "too cheap to matter" except in the most extreme cases for some small number of individuals. So, PU economists need to get back to basics and start charting real physically measurable (or estimateable) things. And then they need to think about the interrelations of those real things. Essentially, they can still use a lot of their old skills at analysis, but rather than apply them to one thing, money, they need to apply them to thousands of individual measurements of aspects of life-support and production. And the challenge will be in seeing how to make predictions about systems where these thousands of factors are difficult to interchange for each other (for example, topsoil depth versus sewing machine production).

The historic focus of PU economists on charting changes in social constructions (fiat dollars) instead of changes in technological capacity that is one cause of PU economists failing to predict a post-scarcity society. It is no surprise it took someone like Ray Kurzweil to be able to handle both the mathematical content and the technological content to provide his analysis of the timing of a post-scarcity transition (or even broader singularity). However, just because Kurzweil is good at seeing the trends leading up to a singularity in our society, does not mean that he can see beyond it (and he admits this). So it is important to understand that the policy proposals Kurzweil suggests come out of his own longstanding conservative/libertarian financial perspective as a self-made technology millionaire. The exact shape of a future society in terms of what core priorities and values it reflects is still up in the air, and may well be very different then the propertarian approach Kurzweil assumes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarianism
as opposed to, say, libertarian socialism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialists
or something else much broader as a gift economy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
or something much narrower as an internet mediated central planning like Chile's Cybersyn pioneered in the 1970s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn
There could be a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between PU economists with their charting skills for historical trends and PU engineers with their technical knowledge of what physical characteristics of systems are important to production.

In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).

Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)

At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.

One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.

One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.

The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics
So, I'd suggest, should the PU Economics Department faculty be kept on, the department should be renamed the "Princeton University Cybernetics Department" with there being an "historical economics" subsection all the current economics faculty are assigned to, and one faculty member each from the PU Department of Religion, the PU Department of History, and the PU department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering be put in as an acting team triumvirate leadership of the larger department. :-) As economics faculty broaden their research, then they could move into other new Cybernetics department sections. See also:
"The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society" by Norbert Wiener
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208

What is more pressing in understanding a post-scarcity economy is seeing what real physical limits exist currently and how they could change over time. This requires examining physical production from first principles, since only when one understands the physical limits of a system does a discussion of various control systems and their strengths and weaknesses make sense.

The essentials to producing anything in general are:
* Human time (or other decision making time)
* Energy
* Raw Materials
* Tooling
* Transportation
Plus there is maybe the effort involved in cleaning up environmental or social damage. In classical economics there is also "rent" for access to money or land or copyrights or patents and so on, but for the sake of a physical analysis we can ignore that because rent is an arbitrary social construction related to rationing, and so is a higher level concept.

On replacing human time with computers and automation in a couple decades, see, for background:
"Kurzweil says, by the 2020s we'll be ... building machines as smart as ourselves."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/04/1213237
And to see what is happening right now:
"Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/2014225

What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?

It's amazing to me how quickly sci-fi supposedly set in the 24th century is becoming reality:
"Star Trek TNG: The Game (episode)"
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/The_Game

Wesley and Robin investigate the [video game] device in sickbay, [using a computer simulation of the human visual system and other brain systems] and determine that it has a psychotropically addictive side-effect, and that it stimulates increased serotonin production. Most worryingly, it also stimulates the brain's higher reasoning area.

And it doesn't take human level AI or vision to do the kind of things ants can do -- gather materials and process them chemically. So we will see big changes before human AI, even if human level AI for some reason was impossible or undesirable.

Looking at things from this perspective, how can everything become free as computer costs decrease? Well, if you use robotics and automation, the human time goes away as a necessity. If human-equivalent time is free, then there is no human time cost to the other items as well. So, say for energy, with free labor, you only need the other categories to make more energy producing equipment, at which point you have all the free energy you want. So, with free labor and free energy, to get free raw materials all you need is tooling and transportation. And with free labor, energy, and raw materials, you get tooling if you you have transportation, But with free labor, energy, raw materials, and tooling, then you have the ingredients for free transportation. And with free everything else, the robots and computers are free too. Ultimately, there are only two costs to anything -- labor and rent (ignoring the destruction of environmental capital). Since rent is societally determined, if labor is free (via computer driven robots) then everything can be free eventually. Granted, there are *physical* limits involving how fast you can do something with the robots or 3D printers on hand. Those physical time limits and their interdependencies are well worth studying by a new breed of post-scarcity economists. But in practice, if you look at nature, the long term limits are more like incident sunlight and our planet has tens of thousands times more incident sunlight then our current society would need if it was all electric. Most materials can be recycled and so do no pose limits. So as computing replaces labor, everything can eventually be "free", as long as physical capital is produced faster than it wears out or is consumed. No doubt many of the mathematical techniques economists have developed for thinking about imaginary things like fiat dollar return on investment may have some applicability to more complex models considering energy return on an investment of energy, or computational return on an investment of mass, or the sustainable yield of consumer product mass from a productive physical system with a certain target growth rate of mass and energy converted into robots given tooling wear, and so on. Here is a paper prototype of such an analysis system which considers tool wear in relation to expanding industrial capacity:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

Collateral damage

Princeton University (judging only from PAW) is way behind the curve on this process of post-scarcity self-renewal. As soon as more and more prospectives start thinking along the lines I've outlined, PU will get more and more behind. In that sense, this essay itself is part of the iceberg as it points out how the PU brand is failing due to these forces. On the other hand, this essay might be seen as betraying the cause of global abundance by bringing it to PU's attention for possible counter-revolutionary action (although I would not write this essay if I did not think it was too late for PU to do much to stop abundance for all, even it if tried harder than it has in the past, except via global warfare, which this essay tries to help provide the insight to prevent or minimize.)

Still, in either case, somehow I do identify with this metaphorical Dutch boy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker

In the original tale, The Hero of Haarlem, a nameless Dutch boy saves his country by putting his finger in a leaking dike and stays there all night, in spite of the cold until the adults of the village found him and made the necessary repairs.

But I'd suggest the "adults" are not coming, and so it is up to us to invent creative alternatives to manage potentially destructive forces other than damming them back, even if that change should be ideally peaceful and incremental, not all at once and deadly as when a dam breaks.
"Clearinghouse for Dam Removal Information"
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/WRCA/damremoval/
So, I'm really twisting that Dutch boy metaphor, even as I still identify with the brave individual keeping his lonely vigil throught a freezing night (in some versions he freezes to death).

But, obviously, a better metaphor for a sustainable life is the one my child is currently excited about -- the firefighter who works as part of a well-trained team again and again to help rescue people and safeguard property from the destructive force (fire) we use to cook our meals or warm our homes. The suprise is never that out-of-control blazes happen, it is more that they don't happen more often, in part due to things like safety standards and fire-prevention education:
"National Fire Protection Association"
http://www.nfpa.org/
Or:
"Take the mystery out of fire play by teaching children that fire is a tool, not a toy."
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/citizens/parents/curious.shtm
But it's a complex topic:
"5 dangerous things you should let your kids do (#1 -- Play with fire)"
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/07/5-dangerous-things-y.html

I think the commonality in the Dutch boy story and firefighters that without creative community, all these short term individual efforts are in vain (even this essay). Still, there is a sense that the internet enables virtual communities, but they are still not as healthy or life-affirming as face-to-face healthy ones, which PU has the potential to become (or at least, become a better one than it is already for some of the individuals, becoming instead a community where some people's success there doesn't imply others' failure). Consider:
"Polarization in the Political System"
http://www.cyberessays.com/Politics/18.htm

... What is it about politics and power that seem to always put them at odds with good government? ... As the United States becomes more extreme in its beliefs in general, group polarization and competition, which requires a mutual exclusivity of goal attainment, will lead to more "showdown" situations in which the goal of good government gives way to political posturing and power-mongering. ... If both victory and extremism are necessary to retain power within the group, and if, as Alfie Kohn (1986) stated in his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, competition is "mutually exclusive goal attainment" (one side must lose in order for the other to win), then compromise and cooperation are impossible (p. 136). ... I do not think these examples are aberrations or flukes, but are, instead, indicative of structural defects in our political system. If we are not aware of the dangers of extremism and competition, we may, in the end, be destroyed by them.

That entire site is in a sense a representation of the entire competitive college problem and maybe its solution, by the way, as on the main page it says:

Cyber Essays is your one-stop source for free, high-quality term papers, essays, and reports on all subjects. ... Cyber Essays is a completely free service that relies on students to submit their own papers in order to keep this site expanding; so please consider submitting your good papers to us as you enjoy this site.

And I am truly sorry for any "collateral damage" this essay risks in the PU community or even on my own household.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage
You can't reconstruct the mythology of 50,000 of the richest and most powerful people on the planet without expecting at least a little petty blowback. :-( Or worse. :-( Or at least, this limited being I am can not. But as I said at the start, I'm inspired by the brave sacrifices our young men and women are making overseas, in their youthful idealism to make the world a better place. Even if I feel the Iraq war is one of the stupidist and most harmful things the USA has ever done. :-( And even if their elders should have done everything possible (and more) to help keep these young people and others on all sides from "jumping" or just "landing" into mostly needless suffering. :-( "Bring them on"? What kind of a thing is that for a humane and ethical and compasionate and spiritual president to say? At least about other people's deaths?

Despite every life-affirming thing I tried to write, I can accept that in the end, how one chooses to live and die may be a private choice, as painful as it may be sometimes to the rest of us. And who am I to ignore the example of Jesus?
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/
One thunderbolt at the end to scare the Romans and Jesus would have lived a long life, little doubt -- but it would have gone against what he stood for. And there are many other such examples from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism
And really millions of examples if you look at all the well lived lives out there. There are literally millions of volunteer firefighters who risk their lives to save others, as just one category. But there is a *huge* difference between killing for a cause (even killing just yourself) versus being willing to die for a cause that is in service to life and community.

Also, there is obviously more complexity to the topic of suicide -- physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, trade-offs of pain management versus longevity in hospice care, withdrawal of life-support for comatose vegetative-state patients, and other related topics all have many books written about just them (even the ethics of personal decisions in the face of progressive organic dementia). These are all difficult topics, and they are beyond the scope of what I focus on here which is more people in the prime of life with potentially manageable difficulties, whether the difficulties are biological (hardware) or philosophical (software) or social (network), or as is usually the case, a mix of all three aspects. I'd suggest unless an experienced health care provider has specifically told you you face one of those other situations (or even if one has), a good community can help you build a more meaningful life for yourself whether you are suicidal or not. And if your community is not a supportive one, there is life-affirming meaning to be found in finding one or helping build one for yourself and others.

There are also hard decisions society makes in the face of current perceived scarcities, like for example how the USA spends about half its medical care budget on medical interventions in the last year or two of life for a subset of the population with health care access, while many others including the working poor and their children go without any medical care. Those conflicts hopefully will lessen as post-scarcity society continues to emerge.

And personally life-threatening risk taking is an even more complex topic. For example, even just in order to bear children, a woman must face at least three self-inflicted life-threatening risks -- dating, sex, and childbirth, any one of which can prove deadly from psychopathology, AIDS, or complications. So, even in the act of bringing new life into the world, women face the risk of immediate death. But, it is obviously a risk many women have been willing to take or we would all not be here. Are all women by definition a little suicidal just to contemplate having kids? :-) And to a lesser extent are men suicidal who want kids as well, although with other risks substituted for labor complications? But what is the physical alternative? No more babies? And what is the conceptual alternative to this use of "suicidal" to define a large proportion of the population who are knowingly running huge life-threatening risks (which is a typical aspect of human behavior in late teens and early twenties)? Consider:
"The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking"
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Adolescent-Risk-Taking-Cynthia-Lightfoot/dp/1572302321

"What Cynthia Lightfoot has done in this groundbreaking book is first to ask adolescents why they take risks and then to listen thoughtfully to their answers. She refuses to see teenagers as accidents waiting to happen, as people who, under the influence of peers and hormones, lose all recourse to reason. She looks deeper and finds that teenagers do have their reasons: They know well that in this culture, our heroes are expected to take risks, risks that, if they survive, garner them wisdom, love, and fame (and a story to tell). By a thorough analysis of both her data and our own unspoken assumptions--about development, heroic narratives, and risk as play, Dr. Lightfoot shows us how adolescents creatively and dangerously set out to become the heroes of their own lives. The unique and important insight of this book is to remind us that such risks are taken for a positive purpose: It is only through testing the limits that adolescents discover their own." --Brian D. Cox, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Hofstra University

An alternative to seeing suicide as an anomaly is perhaps to see at least shades of gray in what it means to be self-destructive, accepting that life is change (often within a larger more stable framework), and that all change entails risk. What is in an extreme case called "suicide" (completing an action with a intended result of death)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide
is really just one end of a continuous spectrum of self-changing and world-changing behavior involving risk management. Suicide is just one possible outcome of decisions about risk and reward and just one possible outcome of decisions about desirable benefits and undesired costs involving a community of involved people.

Or, looked at another way, given that suicide is in some sense a decision (even if often made by an unhealthy mind), it just one more possible outcome of all the things, say, the PU Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering studies. :-)
http://orfe.princeton.edu/

Our researchers develop the tools used to make better decisions, improve the performance of complex systems, and manage resources efficiently.

As as side note, Operations Research style logic has optimized the deployment of the USA's nuclear arsenal for Mutually Assured Destruction (a suicide pact), as well as helped design a global economy that denies food to poor people in other countries who can't pay for it (in some sense, murder). The outcomes of optimization depend heavily on what you choose to optimize and what factors you choose to consider -- but those issues are usually considered beyond the scope of such research. Again, the smarter shark splashes a bit in its pool? :-)

Nonetheless, good decision making is something people need to do every day. A firefighter deciding to go into a burning building searching for and rescuing survivors is in some sense optimizing something and making a decision about managing resources -- in some sense weighing perhaps the chance of personal survival and the future ability to help others versus the chance of helping someone right now. And there is a lot of uncertainty involved. (In practice, some decision making may have happened much earlier as well, in deciding to be a firefighter or to accept a certain style of training with certain priorities.) Soldiers face similar decisions, both before enlisting and afterwards.

Similarly, someone thinking about leaping off an Ivory Tower physically would weigh (at the very least irrationally) in decision making the costs of the leap versus the benefits in the face of uncertainty. Is there an afterlife, and if so, what are the consequences? Is there instead karma and rebirth? Will the act really hurt self or others and is that good or bad? How much pain is one in and what are the future prospects for it to get better? Are there alternatives or hope or help?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=suicide+prevention&btnG=Search
What is the probability of success or consequences of failure? Will things for self and/or others get better in some sense given the trouble of getting there, compared to the alternatives, like just going to bed early or reading another web page? And so on. So, the irony of suicide is it involves a self-harmful action that is done based on a decision made in service of the positive end of improving one's situation somehow. Naturally, there are many alternatives for making one's life better, including people to talk to, some linked here:
"If you are suicidal, read this first"
http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/

You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible.

I actually don't agree 100% with how they phrase on that page whether suicide is a choice (since I feel even to seek out coping strategies or pain reduction strategies is all part of making choices), but it is still a great site and it tries to accomplish a lot in a few words (unlike me :-), so I link to it anyway. Granted, under various health conditions (including resulting from extreme chronic pain), the brain (and so mind) may not work as well at decision making as it usually does when in good physical health.
"Can Diet [and regular exercise etc.] Help Stop Depression and Violence?"
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/60874/
And also granted, anything involving murder, even of one's self, might be expected to be usually intertwined with strong emotions, often centered around anger.
"Google search on Anger Management"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anger+management
By contrast, a firefighter probably isn't angry with a fire, and their larger goals to save life are in a sense the opposite of murder.

Also on anger management, Mr. Fred Rogers says, "Did you know that when you are mad, you don't have to hurt yourself or anybody else?"
Also:
http://www.fci.org/viewproject.asp?ID=%7BA498033C-0D8D-4A9F-9CF3-87CD9C6DF99E%7D

The What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel? training workshop explores anger, where it comes from, and how young children can gradually learn the self-control necessary to manage their anger and channel it into productive activity. It also suggests ways to intervene when children act out or lose control.

And:
http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/08/10/rogers/print.html

For three decades, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" has been an oasis of peace and calm, familiarity and safety in a kid-unfriendly world. ... And Rogers' epic "What Do You Do?" offers a list of anger management tools for all ages: ...

Part of the lyrics:
"What Do You Do With the Mad that You Feel?"
http://pbskids.org/rogers/songlist/song7.html

... It's great to be able to stop
When you've planned a thing that's wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:
I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish.
I can stop, stop, stop any time. ...

While "rescuing" and "leaping" are actions on the same conceptual landscape of life and death, they are of course of different characters. As is said here:
http://firechief.com/health-safety/ar/firefighting_not_without_warning/

Suicide. The very mention of the word creates uneasiness, fear and bewilderment for most individuals. The stigma and tragedy associated with suicide makes it one of those life events that we hope never happens to us, so we avoid learning about it and preparing for its occurrence. Unfortunately, most fire departments also avoid the topic. We hate to think about even the possibility that one of our own might decide to take his or her life. Such a thought contradicts the very essence of what it takes to be a firefighter: courage, resilience, self-sacrifice, confidence and the ability to handle the most difficult situations.

Though even that life-affirming statement raises the complex issue of "self-sacrifice". It is doubly sad when suicide-prevention support funds are cut in relation to these brave and self-sacrificing people:
"Disturbing legacy of [9/11] rescues: Suicide ... [Counseling funds cut]"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-09-22-legacy-usat_x.htm
"The director of the National Institute of Mental Health says that more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may die from suicide than from combat."
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=78f6ef54-a282-454b-a8f7-1c4db913cdc7

People make life and death decisions all the time for others. Doctors. Firechiefs. Presidents. Even people named in health care proxies (as I was for my mother with dementia in a nursing home). Parents do it for their children every day in split-second decisions related to aspirations and a need to grow versus abilities and risks (like in allowing them to climb a certain tree or not). One can at best hope people make those decisions in an informed compassionate manner, for others or themselves. If the study of decision making like in Operations Research can provide insights into helping people make such decisions in even more informed and more compassionate ways, I am all for it. Still, as I point out elsewhere, our assumptions, desires, and choice of reasoning tools (all, in a sense, what defines our "faith") have a big effect on the results our reasoning tools supply us when we finally operate them on top of all that faith.

Evolutionarily speaking, even the concept of sex is intentionally suicidal at one level. In terms of genetics, sexual recombination is a way to maximize genetic diversity across a population and to allow that population to engage in continual genetic self-renewal and thus stay healthy as a population. The alternative is identical cloning, where clones can only have at most as much genetic diversity as the original. But, sexually reproducing populations in the face of limited resources also imply the eventual death of the aging individuals, whereas clones can in theory persist identically forever (although in practice are eventually parasitized or suffer replication failure through spontaneous mutation). So, evolution as a process sometimes results in a trade-off of the lifespan of the individual for the health of the population.

The Princeton University community has continually reinvented itself over the years. Each time it lost some things and gained others. What I am discussing here is just the biggest self-renewal challenge PU has ever faced given the societal-wide transformation from scarcity to post-scarcity mythology. And, in that sense, it is deeply a matter of life-and-death, both for PU and society. Self-renewal is itself in a sense somewhat suicidal too -- the old self dies to the new self and in doing so is born again. :-) Usually the process of change is one small part at a time, of course, even if the changes often add up to perhaps produce something with little obvious connection to the past. So, I suggest, fire up those huge endowment powered engines of creative destruction and reconstruction, burn the endowment money that may soon be worthless anyway, and steer alonside the post-scarcity iceberg instead of straight into it. It's a risk, like a man and a woman conceiving and bearing a child. But what is the alternative, given so many people (as PAW suggests) "Jumping From the Ivory Tower" (or just thinking about it)? And as I outline here, there are more and more "jumpers" of one form or another ever since the Goodstein's "Big Crunch" in the 1970s. And there will likely be more and more "jumpers" (physical or career-wise or wannabe) as the nature of education and society changes in the internet age as the $100 laptop OLPC project represents as a data point.

PU is facing the biggest existential crisis possible for an elite institution of privilege, and I'd suggest based on reading PAW that PU as a community is still unawares of the depth of PU's increasing ill health in a changing society. Again, my concern is not for the institution itself, but for the people in it and the people around it who may get hurt if it collapses in an uncontrolled fashion. If it can be responsibly renewed under the same name and using the same buildings instead of being dismantled, that is fine too.

On sexism, feminism, pseudofeminism, dignity, and current parenting issues

The only thing easy about the proposal above is that there is already a new beautiful building that President Tilghman is "hot" for to act as the symbol of all this. The main difference outlined here from what she goes on about on the President's Page in PAW is the name of the building and the mythology behind that name, and then flowing from that mythology, the actions. But in the end, social mythological infrastructure is *much* harder to change than a bit of physical infrastructure in only one place.

Sorry, Professor Tilghman, I could not resist that "hot" wisecrack, and I probably should have. I don't want to even imagine the personal sacrifices you have had to make to care for the mythologically-conflicted institution of Princeton. And if this essay were to discuss the issues women in academia face often (but not always) in more abundance then men, from the glass ceiling, to harrassment, to having someone else essentially take credit for, say, their X-ray crystallography work,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
or to simply having their own unique individual voices be *ignored*, well then this essay would no doubt be twice as long, and then some. :-(
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22women+in+academia%22
"Results 1 - 10 of about 66,700 for "women in academia". (0.09 seconds)"

But here is one general way to address all those discrimination issues:
http://www.dignitarians.org/

The Dignitarian Foundation is an organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the intrinsic right to human dignity - the belief that as a person, one is automatically worthy, honorable, and deserving of respect, regardless of status, station or stage of life. We believe we can and must find alternatives to practices that harm individual dignity, instead of continuing to convey the toxic residue of these indignities down the line, from those with the most power to those with the least. Our mission is to overturn the consensus view that says it is acceptable to treat certain people and groups badly because other people are doing it or because you can get away with it. We invite you to join us in raising awareness within families, schools, workplaces and governments of the enormous personal and public costs arising from everyday insults to dignity. Collectively, we can dissolve unhealthy power imbalances and begin to create societies that not only acknowledge, but also actively celebrate, the inherent dignity in everyone.

A related idea is reducing "Rankism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism

Rankism is a term coined by physicist, educationalist and citizen diplomat Robert W. Fuller. Fuller has defined rankism as: "abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their lower rank in a particular hierarchy"

The deep question is, how can an institution like PU, that has until now fundamentally defined itself by a process of "selecting" people and then "ranking" them, rethink its very existence in a world moving beyond discrimination and rank? This is not to say selectivity or grading is inherently wrong in all cases, but it is so fraught with ethical problems (like conflict of interest as Goodstein outlines) that it should be minimized or softened where possible. While issues like the abuse of rank will no doubt ever go completely away, the less rank there is, the less the potential for abuse. What does formal rank really get anyone in a post-scarcity world? The fundamental thing so much of academia is about now remains deciding who gets the scholarships and grants. If *everyone* in a post-scarcity society gets the equivalent of a scholarship or grant (at least for the basics, enough to think on if frugal) then much of the worst of academic temptations related to the "Big Crunch" might go away as we return in some ways to how science worked socially in an era of exponential expansion before the 1970s.

Alfie Kohn devotes an entire chapter of his "No Contest" book to "Women and Competition". He makes a key point about "pseudo-feminism" which encourages women to emulate the worst aspects of stereotypical competitive male behavior in US culture, as if this would either make their own lives better or make the already hyper-competitive USA a better place. As Alfie Kohn puts it:

... This perspective does not deny the reality of sexism; it asserts that becoming competitive is a spurious and unhelpful response to it. ... The situation is analagous to something that baffles and dismays those committed to social change. Members of the underclass in America often seem less interested in ending a system of privilege than in becoming privileged themselves. They rarely challenge the basic script, preferring to concentrate only on the casting. The economic system that predicates wealth on poverty, power on powerlessness, is implicitly accepted even by those with the greatest incentive to challenge it. This is a tribute to the effectiveness of our society's ideological apparatus, which encourages debate on tiny questions in order to deflect attention from the big ones, and which ... perpetuates a myth of individual responsibility to the exclusion of attention on structural causes. ... Now something similar is happening with women, who are buying into the competitive system rather than challenging it. (Pages 178 - 180)

True feminism (at least as I see it, and presumably Alfie Kohn does) tries to solve the deeper problems our society faces. (This is not intended as a comment about Shirley Tilghman, just the context she finds herself embedded in.)

To make this a physical analogy, consider for example what a "pseudo-feminist" chain saw might look like. :-) It might be the biggest chainsaw one strong woman or even two strong women could conceivably lift (or even beyond that), just to show 'em.
"V8-Engine-Powered Big chainsaw"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXGN1kmlhH4
That is the "Margaret Thatcher" of chainsaws. :-) Maybe the world does need some Margaret Thatchers (male or female) wielding V8-powered chain saws. But I'd suggest, maybe that need isn't a very common one, and even professional loggers are trying new things. :-)
"Logging Hexapod Robot"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBNjdwYdvE
"EFIKA Project #698 - Autonomous Logging Industry Robot"
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2007/12/efika-project-698-autonomous-logging.html

Consider this hand-held alternative which I might term a true "feminist" chain saw:
"Black & Decker Alligator Lopper 4.5-AMP Electric Chain Saw"
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-Alligator-Electric-LP1000/dp/B000BANMUY
"BDK Alligator Lopper Video"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OJWquPsN4
My wife just bought one (she swings the chain saw in our family, "country girl" that she still is at heart :-) although I myself like it too. It's electric, it has multiple built-in safety features, and it is relatively easy to use (a little on the heavy side, but well balanced). Maybe it's not the perfect chain saw for everything (like cutting a big tree trunk), but generally it is a great all-around chainsaw for safely cutting most brush and dead wood near a homestead into burnable lengths. It can let you do 95% of those things very safely, even if you still might need something bigger and more dangerous occasionally for bigger trunks and really huge branches. And there is little reason the design could not be expanded to at least somewhat larger sizes. My wife likes it even though she has used bigger and noisier chainsaws -- in fact, that's exactly why she does like it. :-) Like anything, I'm sure it has its limits and downsides, but it shows some real innovation as a first attempt. That kind of better product for a better world does not get built by just trying to be even more dangerous, and more difficult, and louder, and so on than existing chain saws. It came from looking at the problem of cutting small logs from a new perspective and with different priorities. It makes chain sawing (reasonably) safely accessible to the young or old, female or male, rich or poor, strong or weak. It's an attitude towards design -- whether for a better product or a better world. And it is an attitude both women and men can have. Princeton University could collectively think really hard about how to foster that attitude on campus across all its operations. (For the record, we have no connection to that company except as satisfied customers, and to assuage my male ego, I'll also add that I usually run the snowblower. :-)

And if you want a more serious take on that physical analogy, consider:
"[Pseudo] Feminism Is Mugged by Reality"
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2004/dec04/psrdec04.html

Princeton University, a former male citadel, is now run largely by women, and Ms. Belkin interviewed the president, Shirley Tilghman. Commenting on her current crop of female students, she said that for every one "who looks at an Amy [Gutmann, the Provost] or an Ann-Marie [Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs] and says, 'I want to be like her,' there are three who say, 'I want to be anything but her.'" It turns out that (like child care) the workplace has its drudgery, its long hours, its repetitious duties, its demands that an employee accommodate herself to the schedule of others. Maybe the home is a pleasanter and more fulfilling work environment than the office, after all.

I added "Pseudo" to the title to be clear that IMHO what Phyllis Schlafly rails against is "pseudofeminism" in Alfie Kohn's terminology. And that's one reason these conversations are so hard to have. Phyllis Schlafly (a very educated lawyer and independent woman)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly
is right about the evils of the modern workplace and even the related failure of the schooling system. She can be right about those things even if she may be wrong about some other things, including her seemingly preferring women not having options the same as men (or whatever women agree makes sense). From Wikipedia:

The feminist activist Gloria Steinem and the author Pia de Solenni, among others, have noted what they consider irony in Schlafly's role as an advocate for the full-time mother and wife, while being herself a lawyer, editor of a monthly newsletter, regular speaker at anti-liberal rallies, and political activist. In her review of Schlafly's Feminist Fantasies, de Solenni writes that "Schlafly's discussion reveals a paradox. She was able to have it all: family and career. And she did it by fighting those who said they were trying to get it all for her... Happiness resulted from being a wife and mother and working with her husband to reach their goals."

But to go back to the physical analogy, perhaps PU should not be thinking about metaphorically encouraging more women to swing V8-powered chain saws? :-) Maybe PU should be thinking about why anyone should want to be swinging V8-powered chain saws at all (except as a joke)? And maybe PU should help build a world where no one *aspires* to swing dangerous V8-powered chain saws even if that may make sense occasionally? A woman routinely wielding a V8-powered chain saw is as nonsensical as a man routinely wielding a V8-powered chain saw IMHO.

But even with that change, there are other organizational changes to work that are missed. Consider the original source for that quote from Shirley Tilghman:
"The Opt-Out Revolution"
http://chss.montclair.edu/~landwebj/ww/optout.htm

Tilghman is now a leader. In that role she wonders how to educate women to enter this shades-of-gray world and how to create an environment for her own staff that encourages a balanced life. But Tilghman is also a scientist, and she suspects that policies and committees, while crucially important, cannot change everything. And she wonders whether evolution has done both men and women a disservice.

"My fantasy is a world where there are two kinds of people -- ones who like to stay home and care for children and ones who like to go out and have a career," she says. "In this fantasy, one of these kinds can only marry the other." But the way it seems to work now is that ambitious women seem to be attracted to ambitious men. Then when they have children together, "someone has to become less ambitious." And right now, it tends to be the woman who makes that choice.

Here is an alternative fantasy:
http://www.thirdpath.org/

The ThirdPath Institute is committed to helping people lead meaningful, balanced, intentional lives. We do this by teaching people how to redesign work to create more time for family, community and other life passions. Together we are finding new options. New ways for men and women to approach family, and new and innovative ways to redesign work and create more time for life. Consistently we are seeing that people are deeply motivated to make change when their family's well-being is on the line. Consequently, a significant focus of our work has been parents - both mothers and fathers- who have already tested new ways of reconfiguring both work and family. Long-term our goal is to organize individuals, families and communities to influence larger systemic change - both within organizations and at the public policy level. Together, with other like minded people, we will shape a future where no person is required to choose between work and children, work and an aging parent, work and community involvement, or work and some other life interest. Instead, people will be able to follow a "third path," one that allows them to integrate work with other life priorities.

My wife's fantasy is both she and I take care of our children half-time, and that's roughly what she has. :-) Not exactly, but we try (she still does more); see for similar examples:
"Share and share alike: Equal parenting"
http://www.parentdish.com/2008/06/13/share-and-share-alike-equal-parenting/

Still, as a male, I do feel excluded from the mostly female-oriented get-togethers related to child care (even ignoring the social issues of breastfeeding in our society), and my family suffers for that. I'm not even saying I wanted to attend such get-togethers as *I* would feel uncomfortable too -- but I'm just reminding people, that's the way it is in most societies around young children. Maybe it is possible or desirable to change that, but it is an enormous issue, and yet one implicit in what Professor Tilghman suggests. Were I doing 100% of the child care for my family instead of (ideally approaching) 50%, this would be a very difficult situation for me and my child in our society. Maybe I could navigate it, but it would be exceedingly stressful in practice for young kids, for everyone. It's not as big a deal for older kids in theory, but in practice that builds on social networks built at younger ages. I remember in one psychology class at PU, "Sex Roles and Behavior" the female and pregnant professor explaining to her class her difficulty trying to bend over beyond her maternal instincts and interview (and reject) a male nanny (who seemed weird).

Even in that professor's life, we see a plan for neither parent to be directly there with the kids, and for some other woman to take up the slack.
"Dispatches from the nanny wars: How [Female] Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200403/flanagan
That's one issue glossed over in Professor Tilghman's fantasy (as well as practical issues related to breastfeeding mentioned also later on) -- both of which would require a complete reorganization of the nature of child care *and* "work" in our society. What Shirley Tilghman also leaves unsaid is 60 to 80 hour per week careers including commuting and work at home. That is just a harmful culture for families no matter which parent does it. Her fantasy does not fix that problem either. So, three major unresolved child care issues in her ideal in the USA -- practical exclusion of males from young child care communities, impracticality of healthy extended nursing, and an absent parent. The world President Tilghman is really building for academically ambitious women in actuality revolves more around female Nannies (or excluded males), absent parents, baby formula, early weaning, and a lot of ear infections (to name just one problem of early weaning, which in general leads to higher infant mortality). And if she wants proof of that, she need look no further than PU's parentnet alumni email list. But, to President Tilghman's credit, she did use the word "fantasy". But is that also another word for guiding "mythology"?

Perhaps more to the point is the next part of that article:

Sarah McArthur Amsbary of the Atlanta group leads a much-examined life. Back in college, she says, she gave no thought to melding life and work, but now, ''I think about it almost constantly.''

And what she has concluded, after all this thinking, is that the exodus of professional women from the workplace isn't really about motherhood at all. It is really about work. ''There's a misconception that it's mostly a pull toward motherhood and her precious baby that drives a woman to quit her job, or apparently, her entire career,'' she says. ''Not that the precious baby doesn't magnetize many of us. Mine certainly did. As often as not, though, a woman would have loved to maintain some version of a career, but that job wasn't cutting it anymore. Among women I know, quitting is driven as much from the job-dissatisfaction side as from the pull-to-motherhood side.''

She compares all this to a romance gone sour. ''Timing one's quitting to coincide with a baby is like timing a breakup to coincide with graduation,'' she says. ''It's just a whole lot easier than breaking up in the middle of senior year.''

That is the gift biology gives women, she says. It provides pauses, in the form of pregnancy and childbirth, that men do not have. And as the workplace becomes more stressful and all-consuming, the exit door is more attractive. ''Women get to look around every few years and say, 'Is this still what I want to be doing?''' she says. ''Maybe they have higher standards for job satisfaction because there is always the option of being their child's primary caregiver. When a man gets that dissatisfied with his job, he has to stick it out.''

Maybe pseudofeminists should read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" where in the end there is little difference between the pigs and the humans as owners of the farm? :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
By itself, neither putting women in charge nor women "opting out" of the work force changes very much. That "opt-out revolution" article goes on to suggest if bright women leave the workforce it will change of its own accord, but I suggest, especially with rising unemployment at the moment, that is also a "fantasy" (though not without some small justification in fact). This is to say nothing against alternative social systems like balanced matriarchy, like the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) traditionally have, with women traditionally picking and removing a male leadership (and whom they had known and shaped the character of from birth) and where women essentially held all land in trust for seven generations. But that is a vastly different culture than the USA or PU has right now. The USA took only some of the Haudenosaunee ideas for the US Constitution -- maybe it would have been a good approach to add some other Haudenosaunee ideas in there too? :-)

Generalizing the theme of sexism and racism to general alienation at PU

One can of course make similar arguments as for sexism at PU about other political situations. Consider the current controversy over the senior thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" written by Michelle (LaVaughn Robinson) Obama '85.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Obama
The alienation she discusses (both for some from their cultural roots and for others from the university)
"Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide"
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html
might be analyzed in a similar way. And it is why the current US election, while important in some ways, is unimportant in many others. Woman or man, black or white, as Bob Black suggests, what does it matter what color or creed or gender the bosses have? Again from Bob Black:
"The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

What does Barack Obama have to say about the fundamental nature of forced "work" in our society? To my understanding, nothing.

I could have written Michelle's thesis (ignoring her being a better writer than I :-) on several different topics:
* how those who care about the environment were marginalized at PU (like Becky),
* or those who cared about ending the arms race were marginalized (like Joel),
* or those who cared about becoming parents were marginalized at PU (especially some women),
* or those who cared about ending Apartheid in South Africa were marginalized,
* or those who cared about vegetarianism were marginalized,
* or those who cared about just having fun and doing playful basic science were marginalized.
Essentially, almost everyone who was not pre-professional (doctor, lawyer, mainstream college professor, inherited wealth manager :-) was marginalized or alienated at PU in the 1980s. :-( Even the Puerto Ricans felt that way (I knew some, Hola Anita!. :-) I have little doubt that the experience may have been worse for some minority groups. And US American blacks may have felt left out of even the then "Third World Center" because it was more international in focus?
"Third World Center gets new name to better reflect its mission"
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/02/q2/0415-TWCname.htm

I'm not going to suggest Michelle was wrong about the extreme situation she discusses for US American dark-skinned people at PU, or that people in the USA identified as "black" don't have unique aspects to their circumstances, but I am suggesting in many ways the alienation she wrote about in relation to PU was more one of degree, not of quality. Still, the color of your skin is generally obvious whereas your politics are not, and eventually a difference in quantity of difficulty may become a significant difference in quality of life, so again this is not to say the black experience in the USA is not unique. Nonetheless, it is to suggest that it is in the nature of alienation not to find commonality with others who are alienated. As Sting sings about throwing his message in a bottle out into the ocean and getting a hundred billion bottles back:
"Message In A Bottle"
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/sting+&+police/message+in+a+bottle_20132294.html

Seems I'm not alone at being alone.

The strategy of "divide and conquer" is a common theme in the military, businesses, politics, or even schooling:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/4b.htm

In order to give these vertical relationships strength, the horizontal relationships among teachers — collegiality — must be kept weak. This divide-and-conquer principle is true of any large system. The way it plays itself out in the culture of schooling is to bestow on some few individuals favor, on some few grief, and to approach the large middle with a carrot in one hand, a stick in the other with these dismal examples illuminating the discourse. In simple terms, some are bribed into loyalty, but seldom so securely they become complacent; others sent despairing, but seldom without hope since a crumb might eventually fall their way. Those whose loyalties are purchased function as spies to report staff defiance or as cheerleaders for new initiatives.

Yet, unifying can be a strategy too -- if it is the unification of allegiance to empire. Consider a historical example:
"Hostages and Hostage-Taking in the Roman Empire"
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-02-04.html

For [Joel Allen, in a Yalie PhD thesis :-)], hostages were at the center of Roman thinking about empire: noble or royal males, twelve to forty years old and detained at or near the center of power, could be forged into a new "over class" (jargon borrowed from recent discourse on globalization) to collude with the Roman exercise of power. Hence Humanization of hostages and subsequent humanization of the hostages' native populations was a strategic aim: hostages represented an inexpensive, low-risk method of winning territory or extending Roman influence (p. 224). ... [Joel Allen's] pursuit of the hostage as a "type" renders irrelevant whether an individual is legally a hostage, i.e., delivered by treaty or held as surety to another form of agreement, or voluntarily in Rome for an education. For [Joel Allen], the fact that Roman political superiority fostered a desire to learn Latin and Roman customs constituted a form of compulsion. ...

Ignoring the controversial "hostage" aspect, the general outline described is of a social process of indoctrination in order to function in "mainstream" Roman society.

Noam Chomsky above suggests the major purpose of a place like PU is to socialize ambitious and talented young people a certain way to become part of the elite that Domhoff describes, regardless of where they come from (as they are otherwise, like Michelle, potentially trouble-making). I suggest, following Chomsky, that what Michelle found in her thesis about black students also applies to many people becoming alienated from their roots and taking on a different persona and allegiance through four years at PU. So, in the same way as for racial alienation, PU also contributes to, say, gender alienation, producing people (of any gender) more often interested in abstractions than than hands-on parenting and related issues. If you think through Chomsky's thesis, then the whole point of an institution like Princeton University historically is to alienate people from *any* non-elite roots which might otherwise claim allegiance (gender, race, prior social class, friends, family, children, etc.). Or, it short, the point of PU is to alienate people from themselves and mold them into an elite. This alienation is presumably effected by choice, but what choice made in the late teens related to social power in our society is really completely well informed? PU can presumably easily prey on such kids, especially after they have been weakened ethically and divided socially by over a decade of compulsory K-12 education as Gatto outlines. And for those who realize on campus that they made a bad choice, the only alternative is to leap from that ivory tower one way or another (hopefully in a non-violent way towards themselves or others). The obvious violent leap is from Fine tower, but students can transfer out, they can turn inward, they can join a few non-elite organizations on campus, or they can try to just ignore it. But it is a contest of wills -- and what sort of place is that to spend four years of your youth?

For good or bad, alienation is in some sense the whole point of Princeton University -- even though some like me may decry it now, and others like Michelle were wise enough to see it decades ago. To be clear, I am echoing Gatto's theme of schooling as an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. I'll readily acknowledge PU as I knew it was filled with many wonderful caring people among the faculty, staff, and students.

PU as an internment camp?

When I think back on someone like, say Shinobu "Dink" Asano of the PU psychology department staff related to undergraduate students, I can imagine no finer or more caring a person. Her presence made my life better at PU, both as an undergraduate and also when I was a graduate student. We still chatted a few times and she read one of my grad school papers I gave her ("The Self-Replicating Garden"). She pointed out correctly how alienated it sounded, and that was something I really had not noticed or thought much on (although she used more compassionate words, of course). I hadn't know until just now on using Google that she and her husband had spent time in Japanese-American internment camps in the USA during WWII: [Although I think on this over a year later and think now she did mention that her husband did not like reunions because of putting up the walls but I did not think much on it at the time, as many will not think much on the points here at the time?]
http://www.pacpubserver.com/new/news/9-4-00/rosie.html
That obviously has implications both in seeing alienation first-hand and also seeing the limits of walled gardens (as opposed to, say, networked ones). I made improvements to that idea later in both those ways. Here is a two-author paper (my wife and me) on people networking to build self-replicating gardens:
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
And this includes a mention of the value of networks of space habitats; see the section on Island Biogeography:
"On college and space habitats"
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df
So if my other work or this essay help some people someday, thank Dink.

Which leads me to reflect on something. I am sure she tried her very best to make the PU psychology department a humane place, and I have fond memories of her. Nonetheless, what Gatto suggests applies to K-12 (school mainly as social control, not education), I suggest applies equally well to college as it is currently constructed as an institution. And it applies even more so to graduate school, which is becoming more and more a perceived requirement of any sort of professional career in the USA. I suggest it applies no matter how many nice people there are at PU, as long as its mythology for both undergraduate and graduate education revolves around scarcity, and related themes of elitism (alienation), competition (destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism). I suggest it applies no matter how prettily you architect a place in faux Cambridge-style,
"Images of Cambridge University"
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=1&um=1&hl=en&q=Cambridge+university
I suggest an internment camp is in some sense an internment camp even if it looks like a country club like the "Village" in the Prisoner series,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
if it tries to discipline minds and break wills:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
and even if it extends across the planet in various ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States
http://www.weforum.org/
http://www.prisonplanet.com/

Thinking of Princeton University as an internment camp may seem odd, but let me repeat something referenced earlier from a review of a Yale PhD thesis:

[Joel Allen's] pursuit of the hostage as a "type" renders irrelevant whether an individual is legally a hostage, i.e., delivered by treaty or held as surety to another form of agreement, or voluntarily in Rome for an education. For [Joel Allen], the fact that Roman political superiority fostered a desire to learn Latin and Roman customs constituted a form of compulsion.

College is a social institution almost all young people aspire to in part because most young people are presented no secure or socially-acceptable alternative -- even though alternatives exist and college is unhealthy and inappropriate and produces insecurity in many ways for many families. And even when they are presented alternatives, the social momentum of going to college for anyone tracked for that usually seems irresistible. See for example:
"We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: Revisiting the idea of College"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html

Our culture has more or less bought into the idea that going to college is just one of those things you're "supposed" to do. Increasingly, parents feel they are "required" to finance their children's education even if it means mortgaging themselves to the hilt or working crazy hours. Few ever dare to question this assumption, at least not in public. ... Over and over I read statistics that "prove" that even with a much higher price tag, the long-term benefits of a college education still make it a bargain. But sometimes I wonder whose interest is best served by that "proof": the individual student's or that of the massive higher education industry? Furthermore, I often question whether the "doors of opportunity" which college supposedly unlocks, actually lead to places where people truly want to go. Maybe the "doors of opportunity" are just the passageway into an adulthood of Babbittry. [A narrow-minded, self-satisfied person with an unthinking attachment to middle-class values and materialism.] Could college attendance be a sign of cowardice? Could it be a way to duck from the scary thought of being who we really are inside? Could we do the college thing mainly because that's what's expected of us, or what everyone else is doing, not because it's what we truly should do? ...

So what has college become but another sort of internment camp for many of our youth, although a pleasant-enough seeming one on the surface. And some such camps *are* admittedly better places for personal growth and self-education than others. This is not to suggest, as colleges go, PU is not one of the better ones, even with all its conceptual flaws. If you are going to have prisons, at least they should be well-run ones, right? And they should be full of people like Dink Asano who know how much worse internment camps can get, right?

While not strictly about college, the movie Good Will Hunting is a good example of the dynamics of this system and the absence of alternatives. Like Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Hunting is teased and attacked at an early age for his unique abilities. Hunting is only able to obtain expensive care for his related mental difficulties because an academic (Santa) sees value in that ability to serve him (not him as a person). The trade-off is that, like Rudolf guiding Santa's sleigh to gain acceptance for has difference, Hunting is then asked to apply his talents to the military-industrial complex, either in a job for a defense contractor implementing Mutually Assured Destruction or in a job for a financial services firm implementing market-driven World Hunger. Fortunately, at the end of the movie he picks a different path (although there remain overtones of elitism in his choice -- an academically and professionally successful girlfriend is all that is acceptable to the plot). In the course of the movie, the alienation from his lifelong childhood friend and lifelong neighborhood is completed. It is simply unacceptable to the community for Will Hunting to continue in a life of manual labor which he enjoys, both for the work and the camaraderie, and to continue to use his gift in a self-pleasing hobbyist way -- his gift must be put to use for the capitalist system for it or for Will Hunting to be deemed of value.

I was inspired in that analysis by a book I picked up in the Princeton University Store as an undergrad called "How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic." (Actually it was for a class I was not taking, but I often did that, sorry to anyone inconvenienced. :-) From:
http://www.bbcf.ca/books_1.php

Donald Duck, a powerful symbol of imperialism in Latin America, is the famous product of Walt Disney, a poor man from an abusive family who became a friend of right–wing politicians, a skilled war propagandist, an exploitive employer and one of the richest men in the USA. As comics declined in popularity in the USA, he started exporting his duck version of the American dream to the world, most specifically to Latin America. Donald Duck was a clean–living, parentless, sex–less creature who symbolized American innocence while glorifying capitalism. ... In the preface to the English edition, the authors quote Pinochet as saying the point was "to conquer the minds of Chileans". So this expose of the power and purpose of comic characters was burned along with hundreds of others by the military dictatorship. The Disney comic was retained with its particular USA–created world view. Reading Donald Duck was written in 1971, in the fervour of hope created by Allende's government to, the authors say, critique the popular culture exported so profitably by the USA. They saw it, not as an academic exercise, but a practical need. It was part of cultural context that included printing millions of books, including in indigenous languages, murals, music, writing and theatre that were all part of cultural liberation – and smashed by the fascistic new junta. But memory was not obliterated, words, music and art survived underground and abroad.

For more on reading Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, see:
http://yanub.blogspot.com/2006/12/rudolph-red-nosed-reindeer.html

The newly remastered Rudolph is on. It's gorgeous, and it tells the story of the evils of socially constructed disablism. But, damned, it sure is disturbing. ...

By the way, on paying for expensive face-to-face psychological care Will Hunting required as opposed to pills in regard to managing his uniqueness and related trauma:
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/be_psy.htm

I want a low-stress high-paying job where I can help people. Do you think psychology is the right career for me?
No. Become a plumber. Just about anyone will pay you a small fortune to unclog a stopped-up toilet, but only a few will pay you more than pocket change to unclog a mind stopped up with confusion, self-indulgence, and unconscious hostility.

Ironically, Will Hunting already had manual laboring jobs he was satisfied with, but was being coerced into mental labor. Fortunately, in a post-scarcity gift economy, there will be hopefully be more time for such both mathematical and mental health activities, since guarding occupations diminish (for example, health insurance company workers could retrain as mental health care providers or mathematical hobbyists).

Good Will Hunting has some parallels to the 1954 sci-fi short story "Gomez" by C. M. Kornbluth. A blue collar mathematical prodigy is discovered and brought online in the military-industrial-academic complex to design new weapons and becomes disillusioned with it (faking his loss of abilities to escape revealing the secret of a terrible new post-scarcity weapon implied by his work). The protagonist in Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" also is a mathematician trying to avoid revealing a post-scarcity military secret to scarcity-preoccupied and elite-preoccupied minds. Ted Taylor's real life story related to nuclear energy has some weak parallels to this as well, with him moving from developing atomic bombs to developing nuclear starship drives and reactors for electricity, as well as other life-affirming innovations. One of the fortunate things about being a grad student at PU at the time in the CE&OR department was free work-related long distance calls; I used to use that privilege to talk with people like Ted Taylor (Freeman Dyson gave me his phone number) about how to undo the disastrous M.A.D. and Brittle Power situation we had gotten locked into in part from his earlier work (he had an idea he called "Micropolis" for a one-square-mile mostly self-contained community).
"Theodore Taylor, a Designer of A-Bombs Who Turned Against Them"
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/11/05_fox_theodore-taylor-dies.htm
Of course, along with being discouraged from taking Frank von Hippel's public policy course, calls like that didn't go over too well in the CE&OR department either. :-( It seemed like learning to become a capitalist tool was OK. Even learning to be a capitalist critic was OK. But combining ability and insight into one person was verboten. :-( Still, I can see the sense in that policy from an institutional point of view (and President Tilghman's interdisciplinary proposal on her PAW page similarly leaves that sort of interdisciplinary integration of, say, religious studies and civil engineering, off the table).

There is also this prison for the alienated coming out of PU, people who have been alienated from their past associations and roots, but who reject the PU mainstream future planned for them once they really see it up close:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/e/eagles/desperado_20044565.html

Desperado, oh, you aint gettin no youger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin you home
And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

I'd suggest that after Will Hunting's medical student girlfriend dumps him for not being willing to do enough of the household chores, that would be his fate. He can't go back to his blue collar roots which academia has alienated him from. But he can't fit in to the global society built around exploiting people like himself to hurt others and concentrate wealth (including through the structure of the medical system his girlfriend will slot into in the USA after Stanford, if for no other reason than to repay her student loans in the six figures).
http://www.amsa.org/meded/studentdebt.cfm
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/5349.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/basics/2005-05-16-diet-profile-5_x.htm
So where would that leave our fictional Will Hunting but an alienated "Desperado"? Even if he and his girlfriend manage to work out a compromise over household chores and stick together, he still faces her profitable alienation. Unless, perhaps, he can find or forge an alternative community or an alternative vision to sustain himself among others with similar interests (even given the internet is not as good as a face-to-face community in many ways).
http://sourceforge.net/
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_amateurs
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/87/open_essay.html
Or maybe, like John O. Anderson, he could go back to his job as a janitor as self-employment this time and continue doing math as a hobby:
"The Joys of Janitorhood: REFLECTIONS ON A LOW STATUS CAREER FIELD"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/janitor.html
Even if it occasionally may be a profitable hobby for some: :-)
"Millennium Problems"
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/
(But it would not surprise me to find those prize problems were picked for military or financial applications.)

This is not meant to trivialize the different and more extreme sorts of trauma and alienation Dink Asano experienced during WWII. Being forced out of your home into a camp obviously brings up a different conscious set of emotions than arriving at Princeton as a freshman out of choice. But I nonetheless suggest the two are related on some sort of continuum in more unconscious ways then are obvious at first. Again, from Gatto on how mainstream K-12 schools are prisons (compared to freeschools or homeschooling/unschooling):
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight. In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

A society that accepts and approves of one sort of segregation and indoctrination in an organization with walls and fences, whatever the organization is called or whoever it is intended for, can more easily accept others forms of oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression

Oppression is the act of using power to empower and/or privilege a group at the expense of disempowering, marginalizing, silencing, and subordinating another. Note: Oppression does not need established organizational support; it can be rendered on a much smaller individual scale. It is particularly closely associated with nationalism and derived social systems, wherein identity is built by antagonism to the other. The term itself derives from the idea of being "weighted down."

And I'd suggest this is true whether the institution is surrounded with real barbed wire fences or conceptual fences like just elite ID cards keyed to permissions for all activities.

I can also only speculate on how Dink Asano might have felt every year working on campus when the walls and gates went up at PU for reunions with badges and checkpoints and guards. That always felt weird to me, but now I can see how it is a perfectly appropriate metaphor for how the PU community sees itself and what is acceptable. See also:
"1944: Princeton builds the A-bomb"
http://www.capitalcentury.com/1944.html
"The Official Homepage of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum"
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html
"The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum"
http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/na-bomb/museum/museume01.html
Atomic energy is an example of an almost infinitely abundant post-scarcity power (and it is now responsible for saving millions of lives annually through medical applications like diagnostic X-rays or radiation therapy for cancer treatment); it is scary to think of atomic energy controlled by institutions still oriented around scarcity mythology more than fifty years after its first use. With that said, I prefer solar and wind energy for electrical production, especially as long as our institutions remain scarcity-oriented in outlook:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkwood

Silkwood is a 1983, Academy Award-nominated film which dramatizes the story of Karen Silkwood, who died in a car accident under suspicious circumstances while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where she worked.

The product of all these walls and fences, real or virtual, is bound to be a degree of social alienation in many people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_alienation
I'd suggest for every Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, there are millions of students with either lesser degrees of alienation from our society or simply lesser abilities to act on that alienation for either good or bad ends (including the ability to transcend alienation through community and laughter). See also:
"Why Men Rebel" by Ted R. Gurr
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Men-Rebel-Ted-Gurr/dp/0691021678
"Book Summary of Why Men Rebel by Ted Gurr"
http://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10680/

This is a classic book that explores why people engage in political violence (riots, rebellion, coups, etc.) and how regimes respond. Though written long before the current rash of insurgencies, it has a lot to say about what is happening in the early 21st century. In this book, Gurr examines the psychological frustration-aggression theory which argues that the primary source of the human capacity for violence is the frustration-aggression mechanism. Frustration does not necessarily lead to violence, Gurr says, but when it is sufficiently prolonged and sharply felt, it often does result in anger and eventually violence. Gurr explains this hypothesis with his term "relative deprivation," which is the discrepancy between what people think they deserve, and what they actually think they can get. Gurr's hypothesis, which forms the foundation of the book, is that: "The potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity." ... A number of other variables influence the use of violence as well, for example the culture, the society, and the political environment. The culture must at least accept, if not approve, violent action as a means to an end. Political violence is also more likely if the current leadership and/or the socio-economic/political system is seen as illegitimate. Another factor is whether violence is considered to be a viable remedy to the problem.

Worrying about extreme alienation and extreme security distracts from considering routine alienation and routine security

But do I think a similar violent incident as happend at Virginia Tech is likely at PU? Not especially. The amazing thing, considering everything crazy that goes on at universities for all sorts of reasons, is that such things happen so rarely anywhere. Same with driving accidents. See:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm

Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling? ... It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism.

The reason to pay attention to these issues is really not to prevent another massacre. While murders and suicides cause unique pain, far more deaths by many orders of magnitude will always happen from car accidents or smoking or even, now, TV and internet use due to secondary effects of obesity and physical inactivity. Massacres are more one representative indicator of a collective unconscious, as are all the times they don't happen. The main reason to pay attention to the alienation problem that college creates is simply to alleviate the day-to-day suffering the university system inflicts on its own students and staff and the world around it. That is the same reason companies (like Volvo) still work to make safer and more comfortable cars even when fatalities are already very low for some models, or why some PU professors work to make safer cars that drive themselves so that falling asleep at the wheel is not a safety hazard but a feature.

Volvo is an interesting case because, while excellent at passive safety, they fell behind on active hazard avoidance safety. Now they are spending more time focusing on human factors like driver distraction and handling feel and better electronics to match their excellent crumple zones built of multiple types of Swedish steel. Most road accidents are not fatalities, but it still makes sense to make cars that avoid any accidents and make trips more pleasant. Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is the latest major innovation in that area for cars, and may well save more lives than airbags by cutting the rate for all automobile accidents about in half eventually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Stability_Control
ESC involves a computer braking one or more wheels of the car to make it steer as directed by the driver. But ESC (DSTC in Volvo terms) was not really a Volvo innovation nor was it standard on many Volvo models until very recently. If you as a consumer not understanding either crumple zones or active avoidance naively focused only on coming out better than the person in the other car in accidents (and not mainly preventing them or helping everyone survive in both cars), you might not think in terms of vehicle stability control or crumple zones or low slung collision system activating bumpers. You might instead focus on driving bigger trucks which actually are more dangerous for everyone. This is because even though big trucks could be safer with so much room for crumple zones and great seat belts, in practice, big pick-up trucks are not designed for intrinsic safety for either occupants or those in other cars collided with and so are less safe than a well-designed lighter sedan). With all that weight and room, there is just no excuse for disastrous crash test results like in this video:
"Crash Test Ford F150"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB0araA0T_k
But there that crash test result is as the product of either ignorance or a willful disregard for safety. (Granted, one reason Ford bought Volvo was supposedly to bring its safety knowledge into more Ford products.) It still took even Volvo, long a leader in automotive safety, a long time to come around to focusing on active safety and crash avoidance instead of just passive safety and crash survival. So it does show that even in a safety-minded culture, there can still be even more levels of awareness and a difficulty seeing new concepts.

Yes, a side effect of good design and happier people and smarter support systems is less tragedies. But one should not let that "less tragedies" part become an extreme preoccupation. It is natural at first to focus on the "tragedy" part alone, as Volvo did long ago for car safety, and blame campus massacres or individual suicides on ill individuals seemingly acting at random and focus on responding to such actions while in progress. That's a very convenient and obvious place to start. But if you do that, you are likely to pursue mainly strategies like putting *more* guns on campus rather than think of these things in holistic ways that make life better for everyone. You'll possibly reduce the number of shooting victims per incident, but you'll miss the day-to-day suffering across campus or the globe of which the incident might just be a symptom, and so miss a chance both to help alleviate daily suffering and reduce the number of extreme incidents (including suicides that are only involve one death). And a focus on guns would also miss the chance to see the deeper roots of incidents all the way down into the K-12 schooling process which universities are codependant with. Or, as an alternative, you'll backtrack to ignored warning signs of the tragedy, find anyone with a hint of similar deviance, and make their lives worse by increasing their alienation. But again, I'd suggest this treats the symptom, not the societal disease (one aspect of which is simply lack of access to mental health care in the USA other than cheap pills). As Leslie Farber pointed out in the book previously mentioned, actual completed suicides are far rarer than lives lived where suicidal thoughts are a big issue. It is all those thoughts that add up to the most time spent suffering, the most possibilities for building meaning or community wasted. It is these aspects of alienation, depression, ill health, poor diet, lack of exercise, spiritual trauma, and so on, which are the deep areas where the most general benefit will come from. And to an extent, ratcheting up campus security may actually make things worse in those areas -- more guns, more walls, more intrusiveness, more costs for guns and walls and guards instead of good food, community, and laughter. Maybe you can have both guns and community, but if you can't, I'd suggest go for the approach involving healthy laughter.

The phrase for doing security wrong is "security theater":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
The sad reality is that any seriously violent crazy person has some small chance of finding a way around whatever campus security is implemented. As Gatto points out, cars are lethal weapons -- and there are lots of cars around campus. And if not cars, it could be something else. It is ultimately much cheaper and more effective to conceive of holistic global security for all (as mutual security) than to think more guns here or there really solve anything about security.

For example, around my second month at PU living in the Graduate college (20 years ago), I heard a horrible tale from another grad student of a female grad student who was contaminated with radioactive phosphorus in her work on campus due to poor training (she was given the stuff to use but not given any detailed explaination of safety issues, supposedly), who also walked that stuff around campus including the dorm, graduate dining hall, etc. for two weeks before accidentally setting off an alarm in another lab. And supposedly it was covered up within the labs involved to protect the university's license to handle that stuff (or so the ROTC student said). Potentially, much or all of the work in this entire building might have been shut down just a couple years after opening:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pumap/buildings/63.html
Who was going to stick their neck out when that might be the result?
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/healthsafetyguide/F1.htm
This isn't the sad murder mystery I referred to at the start, even though this incident may have shortened the lives of random people on campus (maybe even me) or damaged the DNA of future children. And with hindsight, I should have done more immediately on hearing that story to either determine it was a baseless rumor or alternatively bring it to the attention of senior administrators or the press or OSHA. I did later bring what I had heard about the radioactive phosphorus incident to the attention of a town council person I was friends with who was by chance reviewing PU's certification for such materials the next year but nothing came of it that I know of. I did not know the actual person involved, and I did not keep in touch with the person who told me about it, and I had left campus in any case, so I had no proof and sadly no big inclination to pursue it. Campus security having more guns would not stop that kind of contamination which that graduate student reportedly suffered and potentially spread to other PU grad students that year (maybe even me) -- contamination suffered in some sense at the hands of the university itself. And more guns wouldn't have made a difference in the people involved (myself too sadly) making a choice not to do more about it. Around that same time someone I knew joked the university had determined working in the basement office I had been in two years earlier was equivalent to smoking about 10 packs of cigarettes a day from radon (since remediated). I remember how working there someone down the hall said their Geiger counter must be malfunctioning when it clicked in the hall. Presumably PU's radioactive monitoring has improved since then; if it hasn't, it should, if only in case of accidents or situations like that. At least for radon it apparently has:
"University to begin radon testing protocol in April"
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S20/63/77S95/index.xml?section=newsreleases
I sure hope the training has improved for new graduate students handling such materials. This is hopeful:
"NEW! How to Use Your Laboratory Survey Meter to Estimate Dose and Activity"
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/radiation/index.html
"Radiation Incidents & Emergencies"
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/radiation/incidents.htm
And to be fair, at SUNY SB later as a grad student, I saw people all the time wheeling carts with glassware with stuff in it in the biosciences building elevator and punching the buttons with their safety gloves with who knows what on them. This cavalier attitude towards those risks in one hazard of being around these sorts of institutions, even when you do not work with those materials yourself. Still there is this issue which is comforting about receiving small doses of some things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Seriously, why is this stuff in the 21st century not all done by robots in sealed workcells?
"New 4-axis cylindrical robot for DNA screening in applications"
http://www.expo21xx.com/automation77/news/2092_robot_robotics_st_robotics/news_default.htm
"Clean Room Applications [with robot work cells]"
http://www.abprecision.co.uk/auto/clean-room-application.php
As with humans and mining, why should any human being ever set foot in a biosciences laboratory (except virtually) these days? Maybe PU can become the world leader in researching that sort of thing for the biosciences?
"The 1980s vision of "lights-out" manufacturing, where robots do all the work, is a dream no more."
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2003/06/01/343371/index.htm

At Fanuc, the bot invasion is already moving beyond the factory floor. In 2001 the company opened an automated kitchen center that preps 2,000 meals for the human rank and file. The bots cook rice, pack lunch boxes, and wash dishes. They even wear rubber gloves.

Anyway, I'd suggest more materials handling robots on campus instead of more guns might do more for real security. And if you think along those lines, about what security really means in a day-to-day context and how you can get it without sacrificing other ideals, other ideas might arise (especially ones about education and research, PU's supposed reason to exist).

A fateful memo about too many books

I regretfully never chatted deeply or at length (hours) with Dink Asano as a graduate student in another department, and no doubt that would have been in part from my avoidance of some of these alienation issues too. I don't know what she might have said about if we had. It was ultimately an assistant (acting?) Dean of the Chapel who suggested I find a better place than PU to look into issues of sustainability, global abundance, social reform, dealing with nuclear age issues, and so on. I had come to her office because I had received a memo from my graduate department, that I had too many books in my office. :-) It also said some untrue or misleading things, for example, suggesting I talked too much on the phone and disturbed my officemates' study (who had not discussed that with me), but it was only a few conversations to people like Ted Taylor as above, and it was the only place I could affordably call them from (hard even to remember those pre-widespread-internet cost issues for communications). Professor Steve Slaby suggested jokingly that I frame the memo, which is in fact what I did. I used to have it up on a wall at home by my personal library as a sort of "diploma" from the PU graduate school. :-) Those were also the days faculty were protesting on behalf of a certain Islamic-related writer in hiding, so the memo was doubly ironic.

One of those "too many books" was my old and worn Bible from my believing days. This is not to say I reject all of those core beliefs or values now that I see the Bible as containing lots of illuminating stories and poetry; it's more a rejection of the dogmatic belief about them all being "true" or even all being "normative" or the Bible being the only acceptable source of such illumination. So, I went and asked that Dean of the Chapel what she thought about that memo, and that one of the too many books I had in my office was my Bible. And she said she didn't think it was an issue about the Bible. :-)

But she did suggest essentially that I leave PU and find a better community with people that cared about life-affirming things. At the time I cynically thought of her as another university functionary, working to keep the university running smoothly by helping eject people like myself with the least fuss. I recently read in Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds about how academia has structural aspects like "cooling off periods" to eject people with minimal blowback as it goes about its mining, and sorting, and polishing operations (to use Goodstein's terminology). But, as I reflect on it, could there be a chance, even in just one interaction, that she cared about me as a person? I'm not enough of a believer to truly mean it when I say, "God works in mysterious ways", or am I? :-) For all I know, maybe that memo mentioning too many books leading to me seeing the Dean of the Chapel saved my life.

Even though I had heard grousing about the university (or even capitalism) here or there, this was the first time a person in a position of some institutional authority at PU had indirectly admitted, yes, Princeton University itself was in some sense suicidal in its capitalist values and elite vision and unsustainable operations, and being around such a place and the people it attracts was bound to be extremely stressful if you were trying to do something life-affirming, and there were other happier communities out there (including at other universities) that were trying to transcend such things. Remember, this was twenty years ago, so, as with the new PU office of sustainability, the institution is slowly changing, though years behind many other places with less financial resources.

The conservative PU defense was alway essentially, "We're life-affirming, but we just believe in living another way."
That always ignores or accepts the risks of M.A.D. because of TINA, and ignores or accepts those who starve because of TINA, and ignores or accepts those dumped by hospitals on the streets (Michael Moore) because TINA. TINA stands for "There in No Alternative". So, perhaps simply calling PU's behavior then "suicidal" is actually charitable; perhaps "intentionally destructive to others and so indirectly destructive to itself out of obsession and lack of compassion and lack of creativity" might be more accurate description of PU at the time?

I used to hang out with an elderly ex-countess interested in solar energy during my graduate school days (who as a commoner married into royalty). She told me the reason her husband's family had so many castles (seventeen?) was that after a few months the local game around a castle would be getting exhausted and the peasants were getting restless at the treatment and demands, and so the family would need to move onto another castle in rotation. I guess that works for an elite as long as the demands are low relative to the regenerative capacity of the ecology and the peasantry, but when demands exceed that regenerative capacity, then the whole system will collapse. To continue on that way when collapse is staring you in the face seems to at least be a case of deep denial.

I'll certainly admit I have my own issues, and I had other issues as a graduate student, and psychologists out there might term all this "projection" by either me or the Dean (what a sad life she must have had in some ways). Still, it was the first time someone at PU had given me advice working from the premise that PU was rotten at the core and irredeemable in a short timescale. Even Professor Steve Slaby had never gone that far. He always seemed more optimistic for reform. But he dealt mainly with undergrads, and it is true the PU undergrad experience is far better than the grad experience, even though both have their problems and for many people the undergrad experience is a precursor to worse graduate experiences elsewhere. Still, I can wonder if there may have been an aspect of Steve, as good a person as he was, that may have seen students a little as pawns. That acting Dean of the Chapel was the only person in the entire institution I ever met who could see the metaphysical and mythological basis that represented the inner soul of the institution and say essentially, "Yes, PU's soul is a horror, where do you go from here?". On reflection though, where did that leave her? :-( Assuming she really cared, my eyes fill with tears at the thought of this self-sacrificing woman bravely living in hell so she could point the way out. From:
"What Dreams May Come" (the novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come

"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.

So, if this essay helps anything with PU's future, thank that (associate, but acting) Dean of the Chapel (whose name eludes me right now, but might be best left unsaid anyway). Freeman Dyson could see aspects of that horror too I expect, at least as far as aspects of the PhD system, but he was not directly of PU.

And so, the person who wrote the memo on too many books which brought me to the Dean of the Chapel should in some sense always remember how helpful that memo was to me. Thanks. :-) And I don't mean to cause that person pain or embarrasment by bringing that memo up. I have long ago forgiven all those people and also in other ways come to see them as even worse victims of "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers" as Gatto says. But it is one more useful datapoint about PU as an institution (both good and bad aspects).

PU and a mainstream alumni network versus the Patch Adams vision of healthy communities

The only thing that can be said in PU's defense as in institution (at least back then) is that PU attempts to provide a mainstream power-oriented high consumption lifestyle in compensation for alienation from one's roots (for those for whom the new persona fits and are also willing to "go all the way"). See, for example:
"Milgram experiment"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

As Mr. Fred Rogers say, tears are one way we have of telling other people we need them. Aren't screams of pain another way, too? :-( We need to be careful what systems of formal authority we create, if any.

Still, consider even the life of the "winners" of the class competition:
"The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids" by Madeline Levine
http://www.amazon.com/Price-Privilege-Advantage-Generation-Disconnected/dp/0060595841

Wandering among suburban estates, sports clubs and prep schools are overlooked children of a perplexed generation. Their lives overflow with abundance and praise, yet ironically, the mask of apparent health and success may hide a gloomy world of emptiness, anxiety and anger. Strangely, argues Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist practicing in Marin County, California, the nation’s latest group of at-risk kids comes from affluent, well-educated families. Despite advantages, these children experience disproportionately high rates of clinical depression, substance abuse, anxiety, eating disorders and self-destructive (even self-mutilating) behaviors, according to various studies. Based on criteria from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Levine says these children "are exhibiting epidemic rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school and accelerating throughout adolescence." One may brush off these youngsters as overindulged products of wealthy, narcissistic parents. But Levine says many of these kids are really ill. They suffer from a weak sense of self, often struggling to fill inner emptiness with objects and praise. Too often they know something is wrong and grope desperately for help yet fail to escape a downward spiral. Could it be, Levine wonders, that privilege, high expectations, competitive pressure and parental overinvolvement yield toxic rather than protective effects? Levine explores such issues as social isolation, the fine line between parental underinvolvement and overindulgence, and the perverse role of money and material goods in creating false promises of fulfillment. Yearning for outward approval, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the delusion that wealth causes happiness. In many cases, a rude awakening occurs only after many years of anxiety and depression.

This combination of institutional mission of alienation along with its human costs may help explain why the PU Alumni network remains so mainstream (and apparently often still unhappy sounding on TigerNet) despite an endless parade of students like Michelle Obama or many others of any background starting PU (even as staff?) hoping for better and likely getting indoctrinated and/or alienated instead (even if they may not see it at the time). And it is a reason why I seriously ask if PU-as-it-is has a role to play in a post-scarcity Dignitarian society. The alternatively-minded people were often there out of some notion that going to PU would help them be more influential in the future, not knowing that PU was intended to break them, and they would end up marginalized even afterwards as the alumni network revolves around mainstream issues. Even mainstream parenting, sadly:
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" by Meredith Small
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/dp/0385483627

In this thoroughly researched and well-referenced book, anthropology professor Small explores ethnopediatrics, an interdisciplinary science that combines anthropology, pediatrics, and child development research in order to examine how child-rearing styles across cultures affect the health and survival of infants. Small describes the different parenting styles of several cultures, including (but not limited to) the nomadic Ache tribe of Paraguay, the agrarian !Kung San society of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, and the American industrialized society. In discussing these societies, she illustrates that although there are numerous ways to care for babies, some cultural norms of care are actually at odds with the way infants have evolved. Thus, parents should expect "trade-offs" when they act in opposition to how babies are designed. Small speculates that the custom of mothers in industrialized nations to wean early or not to breastfeed at all may be responsible for the higher incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, more medical problems and fatalities, and more crying than is commonly noted in babies of more agrarian societies. She urges parents to recognize that although their native culture does have an impact on their parenting, they can adopt aspects of child rearing from other cultures, if they choose.

I see occasional little alternative flickers here and there on Tigernet, and I can hope they eventually grow into something more. Princeton Project 55 is obviously a hopeful sign:
http://www.project55.org/
Still, its approach is mainstream non-profit oriented, also with interwoven elite filtering ideals, and so that project is subject to some of the same tensions Domhoff raises concerns above about the interlocking non-profit and commercial elite. From:
http://www.project55.org/programs/pip/hosts/expectations.html

We have a rigorous screening process to ensure that you are referred excellent candidates. Just as we have high expectations of our Fellows, we also have high expectations of our partner organizations.

Whether Princeton Project 55 continues to rise above that contradiction is still to be seen; we can be hopeful. Consider this alternative future statement (by me) for comparison, inspired by the work of Chris Mercogliano and the Albany Free School:

We have a playful support system to ensure that you are referred candidates empowered to play. Just as we have playful expectations of our Fellowettes, we also have playful expectations of our partner organizations. If a good percentage of all the people involved are not playfully failing, taking reasonable risks, we feel the way forward will be blocked. Naturally, we hope for a few playful big successes here and there too, in terms of protecting people's inner wildness.

Maybe that new statement goes too far (like playfully setting bones the wrong way)? But in any case, something to think about. See also, for example, the ideals for building whole healthy communities here:
"Vision for a Free Hospital Based on Fun and Friendship"
http://www.patchadams.org/campaign/hospital-paper

The original vision had all the principles we have maintained all these years. There would be no charge for the care. Barter was also not an option. In fact, we wanted to eliminate the idea of debt in the medical interaction as a way to begin recreating human community. We didn't want people to think they owed something; we wanted them to think they belonged to something. We could not conceive of a community that did not care for its people. This also meant a refusal to accept third party reimbursement, both to refuse payment and to sever the stranglehold that insurance companies had on how medicine was practiced. We would have nothing to do with malpractice insurance, which forces fear and mistrust into every medical interaction. We espouse the politics of vulnerability and are clearly aware that we can only offer caring and never promise curing. In such a flagrantly imperfect science, we need the right to make mistakes. ...

In spending this amount of time with patients, we found that the vast majority of our adult population does not have a day to day vitality for life (which we would define as good health). The idea that a person was healthy because of normal lab values and clear x-rays had no relationship to who the person was. Good health was much more deeply related to close friendships, meaningful work, a lived spirituality of any kind, an opportunity for loving service and an engaging relationship to nature, the arts, wonder, curiosity, passion and hope. All of these are time-consuming, impractical needs. When we don't meet these needs, the business of high-tech medicine diagnoses mental illness and treats with pills.

This "Patch Adams" vision of holistic community healthcare at this point seems more likely to be reached by a post-scarcity society focusing on supporting healthy communities and a healthy life-affirming culture, rather than by Patch Adams building just one playful rural hospital that struggles against convention in isolation (as worthwhile as that is). Adams' broad and playful vision is what we need in the future for a healthy society, and hopefully it might be reflected more and more by Project 55 and Princeton University someday. Perhaps with a university-wide commitment to Post-Scarcity ideals, Project 55 would in turn make such a commitment too, and working together, achieve Patch Adams' ideals to bring together "free-to-the-user", "community", "health", and, of course, "fun".

And we might then see even more of this attitude toward life and death (from the movie, which has made up parts, so this might be too):
http://novemberofthesoul.blogspot.com/2008/05/robin-williams-triple-feature-patch.html

After [a beloved person's] death, Patch again faces the issue of his own mortality. He peers over a cliff, musing, "Yeah, I could do it. We both know you wouldn't stop me. So answer me please. Tell me what you're doing. Okay, let's look at the logic. You create man. Man suffers enormous amounts of pain. Man dies. Maybe you should have had just a few more brainstorming sessions prior to creation. You rested on the seventh day. Maybe you should've spent that day on compassion."Patch could have returned to his initial despair and thrown himself off the cliff, but instead decided, "You know what? You're not worth it." Despite his incredible hardships, he walked away from the cliff and continued to fight for his passion for humane medicine.

At that cliff, Patch makes a mental leap of faith to reaffirm his core belief in humane service to the community via medicine and humor, instead of a physical leap of faith affirming despair and nothingness. In some sense, that choice of leap is one all people and all institutions make on a regular basis, as they create and recreate meaning in their lives on a continuing basis, as the Mayeroff quote at the start suggests. But there are some people making up some institutions who are more life-affirming than others, and who also help others in other communities to be also more life affirming, in a sense, passing on a gift. The US$20 billion question is, can Princeton University and its alumni community be one of the more life-affirming ones these day? And if it wants to be, then Patch Adams' Gesundheit Institute is a good place to ask for help in envisioning a happier institution, especially given PU graduates so many pre-med students.
http://www.princeton.edu/hpa/premed.html

On campus back in the 1980s, some alternatively-minded people ended up in little marginal groups here or there -- for me it was the Band, the sci-fi society (never a member, but they were many of my friends), and some computery types. OK, I'll admit it, like Doc Heller of the Mystery Men in the nursing home, I was mainly just at PU for the ladies. :-) Maybe that lack of seriousness helped me survive the indoctrination process -- or avoid catching anything or anybody? :-) Sadly, I was too picky and ended up passing by some very fine women. I'm lucky I ended up with as very fine a person as my wife many years later, despite my own mythology.

A digression on racism, class, power, diversity and my first years at college at SUNY SB before transferring to PU

Still, as PU had about a 95% acceptance to med school in the 1980s, there were a *lot* of would-be doctors and so on at PU to be a mainstream peer group for each other. A lot. My black-skinned (as it is at issue here as per Michelle Obama's thesis) PU roommate aspired to be a doctor (and became one) and so in some sense he fit right in. He did gravitate more toward international students as an identity, as he was from Bermuda and had also been an exchange student in Japan. So even while black-skinned in a sense, he represented a very different black perspective at PU. For him, these issues about race politics in the USA were probably far removed from his personal experience (I heard years later his father was finance minister of Bermuda or something like that, not thinking to ask at the time. :-) He was a great guy in any case, although as with most people at PU, I did not appreciate his wonderfulness enough at the time, or all the things he had to teach me from Judo, to Japanese, to this funny comedy sketch in funny voices he wanted me to learn (and I was too embarrassed about). Maybe Michelle did not appreciate him either?

I was a white-skinned boy from the middle class suburbs whose mother sadly ended up fairly prejudiced against dark-skinned people after twenty years working in welfare offices seeing an endless parade of people (many dark skinned) wanting money and often lying about relationships due to the crazy welfare system we have. But even still, I myself could learn something about people of other skin tones. My father never tired of telling the story about when in my naivete I called my future roommate in Bermuda before classes started and I suggested just to be conversational that he must have a good suntan. :-) Long pause --- "I'm black." My father was a person who as a merchant mariner spent decades working with people of all sorts of backgrounds. Knowing nothing about Bermuda except it was vaguely English, it really had never occurred to me that my roommate at Princeton would be dark skinned, even having a dark skinned Puerto Rican friend from high school who went to Brown. (Now, that friend was really smart. You could design your own major at Brown even then. :-) And that was even before this hit the papers:
"1980s prostitution ring at Brown University"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brown+university+prostitution+ring
But that friend was also very specific once when the topic came up that he was Puerto Rican, not "black". Even though, appearance-wise, I hadn't noticed any difference (even though I obviously now understand cultural and historical differences a little better):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_history_in_Puerto_Rico
It turns out this was my early introduction that designations like "black" or "Jewish" or "Native" turn out to be a little slipperier than one might think at first. (One reason my mother survived the Holocaust turned out to be the the Jews and the Nazis defined "Jewishness" differently.)

Still, I'm sure Michelle might suggest my uninformed and unaware interactions with dark skinned people were the kind of thing she was up against and she would have been right. Maybe putting that future Rhodes Scholar and me together our first year was Dean Cecilia Drewery's (in charge of transfer students, and dark skinned) little attempt at broadening someone's horizons? :-) It worked. :-) But, perhaps Michelle would correctly add, only in *some* dimensions as my roommate was perhaps by her definition not "black" despite his skin color, like my Puerto Rican friend (with the nicest father I have ever met) was also not "black" by his own defintiton? And of course, from here we can even wander into the history of warring African tribes and classes, etc.
"Black on Black violence in Africa"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&