Yves here. Some confirmation of this article’s thesis on the value of studying the humanities comes from Google’s study of the differentiating characteristics of its best managers. This list is ranked in order of importance. Note where technical skills fit in.
Be a good coach;
empower your team and don’t micromanage;
express interest in employee’s success and well-being;
be productive and results-oriented;
be a good communicator and listen to your team;
help your employees with career development;
have a clear vision and strategy for the team; and
have key technical skills, so you can help advise the team.
Now admittedly, you have to have technical chops to get hired at Google, but having those undervalued soft skills makes a difference the long run makes, and studying art and literature helps cultivate them. By contrast, studies suggest that studying economics reduces empathy.
Having said all of that, it’s still distressing to see that the rationale for education is mercenary, and not about being a better citizen and having broad-based cultural knowledge.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst, Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking
Economist Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, and his colleague, literary critic and Slavic studies scholar Saul Morson, argue that—contrary to popular belief—studying the humanities is the key to not getting outsourced.
Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, is an economist. Gary Saul Morson, his colleague, does close readings of Tolstoy. Together they teach a course on what economists can learn from the humanities and have co-authored a book, Cents and Sensibility, on the same theme. In the following conversation, they offer insights on how students can get ahead in the job market, what universities are for, why economists should read great novels, and more.
Lynn Parramore: You argue that economists need to know what makes human beings tick and they need to understand ethics, culture and narrative. Why do you feel so strongly about this?
Morton Schapiro: Economists do a good job applying our theories and tools to subjects that are normally associated with other fields, such as the cycle of poverty, individual behavior, and so on. But there’s evidence in citations and surveys that economists approach other fields in a more imperialistic way than they probably should. Saul points out that there’s an idea that other fields have the great questions and economists have the all the answers. Economics brings a lot to these other fields, but these other fields could bring a lot more to economics. One that’s far-flung from what economists usually think of as a basis for useful knowledge is literature.
Saul Morson: Some things can only be explained by stories, like great novels. Ethical questions can be endlessly complex, which is a central theme of great authors like George Eliot. The realistic model of people you get in literature is a lot closer to what people really are like than what you often find in economics.
By the very nature of needing to mathematicize their theories, economists can’t account for some things. You can’t mathematicize culture. A lot of theories covertly smuggle in certain cultural assumptions, like the notion that everybody is like an American. But everybody is not. What looks like an economic model turns out to be a cultural model, and cultures really do differ.
LP: Why is studying literature and culture crucial to the undergraduate experience?
Saul Morson: I really believe in the liberal arts education that American colleges specialize in. In most places, education at the advanced level is purely in a single discipline. But in America, you take classes in different fields. Each field is not just different subject matter—it’s a different way of understanding the world.
Literature is particularly important because you identify with people very much unlike yourself, from different cultures, genders, backgrounds. You learn to empathize and get out of the natural narrowness and egoism of thinking everybody is like yourself. You get constant practice at it. There’s no way to read Tolstoy without extending empathy on page after page with one character or another. You learn to turn your critical intelligence on your own favorite assumptions. That’s what higher education needs to include.
LP: We often hear people say that schools should be run more like businesses. What’s your view?
Morton Schapiro: It’s very tempting to use economic theory and modeling to make something more like a business. But what might work in the for-profit sector isn’t necessarily the right thing to do in the not-for-profit sector.
Take enrollment management, for example. This developed over the last 20 to 25 years in response to calls for efficiency. One of the most basic tools is a practice called “yield protection,” where you look at your spring applicant pool and predict the probability that applicants will come if admitted. It’s fine to use it as way to figure out the proper size of the class or to get an early reading on your financial aid budget. But say you’re a highly qualified student and you’re only predicted to have a ten percent chance of coming. The school may reject you or put you on the waitlist because you didn’t show interest in the school by going on the tour or buying a sweatshirt at the bookstore.
LP: Schools might like to admit a small number from the applicant pool to appear more selective, right? They want to stay competitive in the marketplace by showing a low admission rate.
Morton Schapiro: Yes. But rejecting a highly qualified student based on yield protection raises ethical questions. Is it fair? Is it transparent? Ethical questions particularly arise if you allocate your financial aid discounts this way. There’s evidence that some schools do. The economic perspective loses sight of the ethical concerns.
LP: As state subsidies to public education have decreased, the burden of costs has been shifting to students. If you were taking on debt, wouldn’t studying the humanities be a risky prospect for your future?
Morton Schapiro: Human capital skills really pay off in the labor force. If you’re worried about artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, outsourcing to cheaper providers in Hyderabad or other places, you’d better be able to understand people.
I’m a labor economist and I talk about forecasting what human capital skills are going to pay off in ten years. Narrow technical training is becoming rapidly less valued in the marketplace. Understanding people, being culturally sensitive—those are the things that are going to keep you employed. Having only narrow technical skills is just a recipe to be outsourced.
I’m optimistic about the advantages to studying the humanities in the labor force, but I’m not as optimistic that we’re always going to teach the humanities in a way that inspires people. When you look at the number of humanities degrees as a percentage, it continues to fall. I think it’s going to level off and increase—maybe that’s because I have a blind confidence in humanists’ ability to provide the human capital sensitivity skills we’re talking about. Saul is less optimistic that humanists are going to approach these topics in the best way.
Saul Morson: Appreciating great literature and understanding other people can seem so old fashioned. People say, no, we’ve got to replace it with something hard and scientific. Some say there’s no such thing as great literature. These ways of thinking haven’t completely taken over, but people who teach it the way I do are in a minority and defensive. Anything that sounds scientific or technically advanced, like “digital humanities” or “sociobiological humanities” is in vogue.
LP: What are some of the dangers of producing a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates who don’t have much exposure to the humanities?
Saul Morson: When people study technology, you don’t want them just memorizing things. You want them to have a sense of play and creativity. Things that art and poetry bring. Remember, they’re designing things for people. So what’s their view of humans? Even to do applied science, you need a sense of who people are and a sense of creativity.
LP: Undergraduates interested in economics may argue that they have to focus on math if they want to get into a good graduate program or land a good job. How does studying literature help them?
Morton Schapiro: You could differentiate your application a little bit by having other skills. Somebody says, well, I want to work in China. Ok, read Chinese literature, history, art, music, and language. That makes you a little different. You become a more thoughtful economist if you don’t have this very narrow view that economics in only about things you can mathematicize and model.
In the class we teach, Saul and I have 71 students. Half are econ majors and half are typically humanists or qualitative social science majors. We’re trying to argue that for the latter group, the rigor and tools of economics can really help you understand the world. To the former group, the econ/math folks, we say, ok, your field can take you to 80 percent of the solution to a problem. But 80 percent of the solution is the wrong solution!
Think about what happened when we put sanctions a number of years ago on Russia and made it more expensive for them to import foreign goods. Whenever you do that to Iran or North Korea, usually the food prices go up. They try to figure out cheap substitutes, they do workarounds.
That’s not what Putin did. He doubled down and said, ok, we’ll make the goods from Western Europe even more expensive. Economists were like, what? But that would be no surprise if you read Russian literature. The idea that a state exists in order to make people happy, which people in the West take for granted — it’s beyond weird to Russians. People come and go, but Russia remains. Russia is what matters. You offend the national dignity of the Russians, then that becomes the issue, not the price of the good.
LP: Let’s look at some other real world problems. What about the undermatching problem, where top students from low-income schools usually don’t end up at the top universities? How does literature help makes sense of this?
Morton Schapiro: Economists might ask if it’s about price. But no, if top students are really low income, they can go to Penn or Columbia often for little money, even for free. There’s something else going on, but economics won’t tell you what it is.
Saul Morson: Great novels tell you that people don’t enjoy feeling culturally out of place. That’s no surprise if you’ve read Great Expectations or a Henry James novel, where a person from the provinces comes to the capital and is looked down upon. It’s an old and a standard novelistic theme. People of a different social class don’t just have less money: they have a different culture.
Morton Schapiro: Once you realize this, you do things like keeping the dorms open during a break because the less affluent kids aren’t going down to Cancun or can’t even go home. You provide access to clothing in a way that doesn’t embarrass the student. During the application process, you don’t send a counselor who went to Hotchkiss to an inner city school. You send a kid with a similar kind of background who can talk honestly about what it’s like. It’s not enough to tell students that going to a highly selective school opens up tremendous financial and social opportunities. We have to create structures to make them feel like they belong.
LP: I’m sure you’re familiar with the database created by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez and others which tracks upward mobility at American colleges and universities and illustrates how uncommon it is becoming for low-income students to attend top schools. Northwestern students have an average family income of around $170,000, which is pretty high. What’s being done to make it more accessible to less affluent students?
Morton Schapiro: I would say two things. If you go back to that database to see the percentage of students who enrolled in Northwestern who were born in 1980 and who moved from the bottom quintile to the top by 2013, it’s actually 55 percent. That’s pretty notable. We were 18th of the 65 schools in income mobility from the bottom to the top. But as you pointed out correctly, the chances of getting in to any of these schools if you’re from the bottom 20 percent are low (Raj puts the family income at below $21,000 there, which is pretty small).
This year’s entering class at Northwestern is 19 percent Pell eligible and next year I expect us to cross the 20 percent, which is going in the right direction [Federal Pell Grants are usually awarded to students whose families make less than $30,000 annually]. If you look at the highly selective private universities, we’re second only to Princeton in that area. We’ve invested heavily in trying to do that. I’m not saying that we’re this great force to equalize American income distribution — not with only eight thousand undergrads — but these undergrads are very different than those we enrolled when I got here 9 years ago.
To get this right, you’d better have very generous financial aid packages. You have to send your admissions counselors to the right schools. Part of it is that we get a lot of publicity that we’re trying to change. Part of it is about really improving the experience of less affluent students when they get here. We’re being a lot more proactive in anticipating their needs. When we send Pell kids back to the their own schools or similar ones, they can now say, hey, it’s not perfect but it’s getting better so you should think of coming here. You don’t have to be one of the two out of three students who undermatch after doing brilliantly in high school.
LP: Some economists who have recently made an impact—Thomas Piketty comes to mind—seem to be embracing the idea that literature has important things to teach them. Are you noticing a trend?
Morton Schapiro: I don’t know if that explains why Piketty sold a million and a half in hard cover, but yes, we have noted that. Take Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize winner. He talks about “narrative economics.” That’s less about learning from Chekov than trying to incorporate stories into understanding human behavior. It’s the idea that you can get some ability to forecast how people are going to behave when you listen to their own stories about what they’re feeling.
In economics, you don’t really ask people. People reveal their underlying desires by their reaction to changes in income and prices. Shiller says no, that’s not enough. Sometimes there’s hysteria over something out there, like cryptocurrency. You can learn about things that really move markets by looking at what people read and listening to what they say. They’re not the first, but it’s notable that people with the position and prestige of Shiller or George Akerlof are talking about this. It’s going mainstream. Whether it’s great novels or peoples’ stories, it’s a movement away from traditional narrowly based neoclassical economics.
42 comments
Comments are closed.
Can someone please provide the link for the YouTube that was on here the other day about Obama, liberals and American Exceptionalism. It was presented by Indian Marxists. And I cannot find it for the life of me.
Is that the one you mean?
https://mobile.twitter.com/MElmaazi/status/964276532947582977/video/1
I love it!
This is awesome. I like that they bring up Obama’s Nobel Prize in context with the 7 !?!? wars waged during his 2 terms. Really 7 wars?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNAlnQ4hvLtRt4S_v9reP3mJ47xm-Eddy
For those who would like a bigger helping of Tariq Ali (as I do). He’s got a show on Telesur. He’s a good interviewer. I really like the format and the guests he interviews.
The title of the full interview is “Global Empire – Age of Anger” in the playlist linked above.
I was taught Social History as a module within business studies in the late seventies, which opened up a whole new world for me – I very much doubt that subject features these days.
Tolstoy’s last & largely overlooked novel ” Resurrection ” is the one I would recommend. His most political novel which I believe that as an insider he gets to the core of the why of a system, particularly in terms of the need for a large prison population. Also interesting IMO on the growing resistance which led to the revolution, riven by splits between hardiners & those who almost appear to be hippies with a strong female element.
Also just beautiful.
I see more and more writings on the blind sides of economists, but it’s a willfull blindness.
How much more obvious does it havs to be that there is nothing rational or natural about economic systems?
As time has passed, I feel in constant battle with an economic system that’s trying to engineer and reproduce a very narrow, specific lifestyle.
We experience the iron boot of accounting. You have to get your clay ticket at the Babylonian HR department, go down to the public food storage, and take out your allocation of grain. But those clay tickets aren’t made of rubber. Enter credit (if you are granted it, by the powers that be) and interest on your debt. That way you become a slave to the company store, because once in debt, you can’t pay it off in practical terms (but there are exceptional people with exceptional access to the Babylonian HR department who can). The main question has always been … will you get a clay ticket if you didn’t complete your work quota? And when am I a good enough citizen that I can be granted some rubber checks (aka credit). The System is the iron boot perpetually stepping on your face. We long … like Marx, for the pre-civilization where there was no Babylonian HR department … where you are family, not an HR. We long for our lives living in our parent’s home when all we had to do was go to school.
All very true. This brings to mind the debate over which is more powerful. Love or Domination. It seems love is always loosing out because in order to bring change into this world, it must be approached in an unconditional manner. This proves too easily redirected by the predators. The rational human mind can always reconcile the evil deeds done by others because of the limited acts of love and kindness they display towards their immediate friends and family. The larger, long term picture is ignored. Broad based compassion and empathy are crushed in the process.
Climate change and economic disruption will rewrite the rules of civilization. Fake family values are easily proven false when put under pressure. Systems will emerge where people can rely on one another. It’s the only way to survive, long term.
Sabatoge and personal greed will bring our current system down- eventually.
“We long for our lives living in our parent’s home when all we had to do was go to school.”
My parents are nice enough people and I did well in school, but I don’t long for a return to either. I don’t need the extra rules from the parents and I spent a lot of time deinstitutionalizing myself from aspects of school.
Overall, I agree that the workplace is dispiriting. Marx? Personally, not relating much to that.
Well, maybe Disturbed means we long for communism, not for parental authority.
I can say about the present education system, whether for economists or for anyone else, that it has little to do with success or competence in the workplace. That’s regardless of whether it’s liberal arts, STEM, accounting, or basket-weaving. The most important thing at work is being in the right place at the right time, and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Another very important thing is the ability to look good whether you do good or not. ‘Looking good’ is mostly accidental, depending only partly on performance (simulated or real), but also on being the right race, creed, color, age, sex, nationality, religion, culture, hair style, etc. etc. etc. for the context. The present liberal arts, which are based on the education of British gentlemen of a couple of centuries ago, help with these critical attributes only very peripherally. But one does have to get through the class filter.
looking good depends on a lot of things like projecting confidence as well. This depends somewhat on competence as that builds confidence but it’s also a LOT MORE about basic personality, modesty versus boastfulness like Trump etc.. And remember utterly incompetent people can come off as very confident (that old dunning-kruger effect). And women on average are raised to be more modest than men.
my family home was somewhat abusive and neglectful in various ways. And STILL I long for those days over the capitalist workplace and job market.
Sure it was sometimes brutal and unpredictable at home but at least there was some love and caring behind it all despite that, adulthood is all the brutal and unpredictable without even a drop of caring. School was regimented and institutionalized but at least a person could *understand* what was needed to succeed in school (although some people do struggle with that), but understanding what is needed not to starve or end up homeless in the capitalist world seems near impossible. It mostly seems a matter of pure luck or lack of it.
“…studying economics reduces empathy.”
This explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Along with the required suspension of disbelief for economics matriculation.
Indeed. This bit brought out a chortle (emphasis added):
Economists don’t need to mathematicize their theories; they want to do so because they have physics envy and want to believe that they are scientists in order to add some legitimacy to their theories, however bogus and disconnected from the actual world those theories might be.
Hear hear!
This. Years ago I looked into doing an MA in Economics but the coursework leaned toward ridiculous self-referential mathematization. Physics envy has turned academic econ into a masturbatory joke.
“Be a good coach;
empower your team and don’t micromanage;
express interest in employee’s success and well-being;
be productive and results-oriented;
be a good communicator and listen to your team;
help your employees with career development;
have a clear vision and strategy for the team; and
have key technical skills, so you can help advise the team.”
Reminds me of the question: “But what do you actually do?”
It matters more where you apply that list of skills. And having them really doesn’t address the value, legitimacy, or purpose of what is being done.
TBH, my theory on why the humanity students make better managers is not so much because they learn the above skills (I’ve met plenty of them, especially among the faculty, who lacked just about any of them except the communicator), but because they lack the technical skills.
So those who end up being good managers have to do it using something else. By contrast, the technical people who raise up from the ranks way too often can’t give up the problem solving bit and thus micro-managing and being in sort of a technical competition with their team members (which precludes 2, 3 and 5 at least).
They also tend not to understand that a technical response to a problem that requires a policy response rarely qualifies as any response at all.
I work in IT and I see this all the time. Too-clever technical solutions for every situation, managers with stellar resumes but robot personalities, with a disregard for customers and working relationships. Then they wonder why things don’t work according to their micromanaged plans.
Education for the purpose of broad-based cultural knowledge has always been the preserve of the elites.
Schooling to produce compliant workers has always been the aim of industrial-age education.
Nobody in power has an interest in workers (or voters) who are able to read critically and argue cogently.
Read The underground history of American education.
I second this book recommendation.
That’s why I’d like to distinguish education and schooling (however you define them). The way you do, education should be wide, free and available to all. Schooling should be specific, possibly selective (not on specific topic though, more of a general ability) and paid for (directly or indirectly).
Education already is free and available though, it’s called the public library system.
I kind of think it’s technical schooling (aka STEM degrees or whatever) that should be free though. Because noone chooses say having to retrain for a new career because their career was outsourced, made technically obsolete, now requires a degree or an advanced degree etc.. It’s a feature of neoliberal capitalism. So why should the entire risk and expense of this be on the individual laborer when it is what they are forced to do by larger systemic factors? Education is a secondary focus though, not everyone is or ever will be good at schooling, it’s necessities of life and providing the basics for everyone that should be the primary focus.
See this article on adaptability and especially how some societies make it possible:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40522394/screw-emotional-intelligence-heres-the-real-key-to-the-future-of-work
If you are poor, or coming from a working class background, having technical stills will become more important in the future, not less. The only protection against the rentiers will be technical competence concerning life sustaining technologies. It seems we will be living in parallel communities for some time to come. Those that can afford services and technology as currently delivered, and those that increasingly cannot. Those left out will have to rebuild their lives, and that takes technical knowledge.
The fight for right to repair is just one aspect of this trend. Smaller, local farming practices is another. Both are inevitable and will lead to new opportunities.
Underground economies will become more prevalent- once people get over the fear and shock of being left behind and get on with it.
This is similar to the strategies countries are taking toward the US. Self sufficiency and trying, desperately to become more independent.
“Saul Morson: When people study technology, you don’t want them just memorizing things.”
That’s an incredibly reductive and dismissive view of technologists from a PhD Econ who’s probably never had any grease under his manicured fingernails.
Technology is just a set of tools. It takes a creative mind to use those tools effectively to visualize, diagnose and fix a broken device, much less create something new.
Not to dismiss the power of narrative — my favorite plumber would spin colorful, engaging yarns for hours as he wrestled with recalcitrant pipes. How many economists does it take to solder a copper pipe joint?
> Literature is particularly important because you identify with people very much unlike yourself, from different cultures, genders, backgrounds. You learn to empathize and get out of the natural narrowness and egoism of thinking everybody is like yourself. You get constant practice at it. There’s no way to read Tolstoy without extending empathy on page after page with one character or another. You learn to turn your critical intelligence on your own favorite assumptions. That’s what higher education needs to include.
Although I love Tolstoy I’m afraid this is false. There is a way to read Tolstoy without extending empathy on page after page with one character or another. War and Peace is a tale. It has villains. Anatole and Helene are despicable and their downfalls can be gloated at. In the Russian film version they are the only two actors with blonde hair, if I recall correct.
Pierre is virtually the richest man in all of Russia. Also college in 2018 is pretty much a scam for most of the students although that is kind of a different topic. Paying people to tell you what books to read is idiotic.
“Paying people to tell you what to read is idiotic.”
I beg to differ. Reaching for a Literature minor in college, I was told to read several novels with nuclear war and nuclear destruction as the themes. If I continued with my own selections, I would have never read those books. But, looking back, those books made more of an impact on me than all other college courses combined.
I exaggerated a little. Borrowing a hundred thousand dollars to pay people to tell you what to read is idiotic.
The books I can remember from my college: The Way of Zen, Journey to Ixtlan, Beyond Good and Evil, Cosmic Trigger, VALIS, and of course the Holy Bible. Only Beyond Good and Evil was an assignment. I did not get a good mark in that course. :(
Perhaps, but that’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement. A better way of finding out what people are really like might be to go out and experience what they are like. The horizons of our technocrats may be limited not so much by their education as by their limited experience of the real world. Reading more Tolstoy is not necessarily going to help this although it couldn’t hurt. The problem arises when education becomes a means less of acquiring culture than a sense of cultural superiority. Since these days higher education is accompanied by a very high price tag one suspects it may be the latter. After all, as the article says, liberal arts education is the American system and things are not going well.
Art can be realistic and it can also consist of “beautiful lies.” Teaching people to enjoy it may give them richer lives but it won’t necessarily make them better human beings. Surely ethics and a better understanding of others is more often something we get from our parents and above all from lived experience.
In the winter of 2015 I took the class these two co-teach. I really liked it.
But now that I’m a raging leftist, the content of that class and everything they say in this interview reads like trivial advice to rich kids about how to better fit in to the global professional-managerial class and question everything but the economic system around them (you know, the most important thing).
“The economic perspective loses sight of the ethical concerns.” It doesn’t lose sight of the ethical concerns. It’s just that its ethical concerns are the ethics of the powerful.
Morty cites a “Nobel Prize winner.” But, if you consult literature (actually just the internet), there is no official Nobel Prize in Economics, only a prize in Nobel’s name created by Sweden’s central bank to boost neoliberal economists, and push their global counterrevolution against social democracy and developmentalism. You can’t learn that by reading Tolstoy. Try Naomi Klein.
Disgusting how Morty explains a Putin economic policy:
“The idea that a state exists in order to make people happy, which people in the West take for granted — it’s beyond weird to Russians. People come and go, but Russia remains. Russia is what matters. You offend the national dignity of the Russians, then that becomes the issue, not the price of the good.”
This type of argument about “Russian culture” explaining something wrong with the country is classically idiotic and insulting. Steer well clear of whatever model of education offered by someone deluded enough to utter such drivel. Hey Morty, was it “Russian culture” when Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar filled their administrations with Chicago School economists? Was it “Russian culture” when they then dismantled Russian society so they could sell it off to Western investors? Was the ensuing backlash from the Russian people about “offending” their “national dignity?” Or did it have something to do with the mass poverty and chaos they were plunged into? Was it “Russian culture” when the Clinton administration gave Yeltsin 2 billion dollars to help him rip up the Russian constitution and set fire to parliament? Was it “Russian culture” when the Harvard economists Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay flew in to help create the oligarchic model that would quickly enrich them but devastate Russia? I somehow doubt the 72 million Russians thrown into poverty in the 90s, and the millions of Russians who died early deaths in that decade, felt what was happening to them had anything to do with mother Russia. It had to do with their entry into a disastrous form of capitalism, and no amount of poring over Dostoevsky will teach you that.
Saul Morson is right about all the BS in the humanities though.
You read literature in high school if the school isn’t absolutely horrible (it doesn’t even have to be a good school), you can read more in college. But it doesn’t give you a handle on the world, for that you need to read cultural and social criticism. I think I emerged from my utterly non-prestigious education unable to understand the world despite all the fiction I read, and only reading serious political critique made understanding possible. And there is of course much I still don’t know.
Now the leftist critique I could make of the article is “oh great now instead of blaming people’s poverty, unemployment and underemployment, etc. on not getting a STEM degree will we blame it on not reading enough Tolstoy!” Uh, the not getting a STEM degree criticism may have sucked but this is no improvement at all. To paraphrase Bill Clinton I would say to Morton and Saul: It’s the economic system, stupid.
Kioseff: Excellent rebuke!
Thanks for this post. A 2013 NYT essay about the value of the humanities is relevant to this post.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html
adding, from this post:
Morton Schapiro: Human capital skills really pay off in the labor force. If you’re worried about artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, outsourcing to cheaper providers in Hyderabad or other places, you’d better be able to understand people.
and from the NYT essay:
That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.
…
Studying the humanities should be like standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience. Instead, now it feels as though people have retreated to tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, from which they peep out on a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank or the back of a spouting whale.
To torture a Russian lit theme, here goes:
Happy (i.e., functioning) companies are all alike. Unhappy (i.e., failing) companies are different in their own pathological ways.
That educated people have to be reminded to read great literature is troubling. You can read on your own.
Learn a skill and read on your own. A good manager does not stab people in the back. Good managers are born not made. It is the ” know not what ” that decides who is a great general. Although good generals are lucky. Learn a skill read a book.
Doubly so now that most of the classics are available for free as eBooks (Google Project Gutenberg). It’s how I salvaged some value from my Kindle after I stupidly got one before checking how much Amazon would want me to pay for their proprietary eBooks.
I discovered that I really like Dickens (I had some teachers who were not fans, and that put me off reading him for a long time). I enjoyed Plato but found myself lacking in patience with him – as a former mathematician, I am skeptical of the ability of intellectual theories to describe reality without empirical verification, however magnificently constructed they may be. He’s very good for illustrating deductive reasoning though.
Twain might have masqueraded as a children’s writer but he knew how to twist the knife. Some parts of Huckleberry Finn are painful to read, notably Huck deciding that he was irredeemably wicked and damned because he would rather help his friend Jim than do his duty as a good Christian by returning him to his owner.
Craig H, maybe it’s been awhile since you’ve read War and Peace. The epic is underlain by recurrent Christian themes of pity, forgiveness, and providence.
The death of Anatole is depicted sympathetically in the novel. The incident is a milestone in the development of Andrew, as both of them lay wounded after the Battle of Borodino:
In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been amputated he recognized Anatole Kuragin…He now remembered the connexion that existed between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic pity and love for that man overflowed his happy heart…Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself, and wept tender loving tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.
And here are Pierre’s own reflections on the death of Helene:
“When two people quarrel they are always both at fault, and one’s own guilt suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other is no longer alive.”
Even Napoleon is not treated as a villain. The historical significance and moral responsibility of individuals are questions considered and dismissed by Tolstoy in his long discourse on epistemology and historiography at the close of the work.
The Manichean outlook is more prevalent in popular, than in “art” literature, at least in our country.
Good point.
I can go on about War and Peace longer than almost anybody; you may wish to skip this altogether. Before anything else I must inquire: do you not agree that Anatole and Helene are despicable?