Chicagonomics

Accuracy in Academia ^ | April 30, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Chicagonomics

Malcolm A. Kline, April 30, 2010

Sometimes academics make plausible assertions, if you buy their premises, ignore their assumptions, and don’t look for the evidence to back them up. “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every corner of the world,” University of Chicago law school professor Martha C. Nussbaum writes in Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities. “Seen by policy-makers as useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children.”

“Indeed, what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science—the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought—are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making.”

But she is not talking about reading Jane Austen, The Federalist Papers or even the U.S. Constitution. “The goal of a nation, says this model of development, should be economic growth,” she writes of the policies she dislikes. “Never mind about distribution and social equality, never mind about the preconditions of stable democracy, never mind about the quality of race and gender relations, never mind about the improvement of other aspects of a human being’s quality of life that are not well linked to economic growth.”

“(Empirical studies have by now shown that political liberty, health, and education are all poorly correlated with growth.)” Actually, matching up the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom with the Freedom House rankings of nations by human rights shows otherwise....

[achilles2000]

Martha Nussbaum is an affirmative action professorette whose training is in classics and Greek philosophy. She actually comes from a wealthy Philadelphia Mainline family - an uber WASP by background (the “Nussbaum” name is a relic of a long defunct marriage).

For many years she carried on an affair with Cass Sunstein, who is a little younger than she is. Not too long ago Sunstein kicked her to the curb for a much younger Samantha Power, whom Sunstein married.

Nussbaum is a bitter, out-of-touch woman who is scarcely more qualified to discourse on law and economics than your average college graduate.