Articles by David Kirby
David is currently Senior Director of Academic Programs at the Institute for Humane Studies, where he manages programs for aspiring academics in the humane and social sciences. He is also an associate policy analyst with the Cato Institute, where he researches libertarian voting preferences. Before joining IHS, David was executive director of America’s Future Foundation. Under David’s leadership, AFF became the premier organization for young conservative and libertarian leaders and expanded to include chapters in five states.
David’s writing has appeared in the National Review Online, Tech Central Station, Human Events, and other publications. His research has been cited in the New York Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, National Review, and National Journal. In his misspent youth, David interned for Senator Ted Kennedy.
David holds an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A college debater, he also has a BA in rhetoric from Bates College. David is a native of Fairfax, VA. In his spare time, he practices Krav Maga, a mixed martial art.
Fewer Young Voters Self-Identify as Democrats
The New York Times reports that fewer young people (ages 18-29) self-identify as Democrats. Based on Pew data, the percentage of young people who identify or lean Democrat has dropped from 62 percent at the peak in July 2008 to 54 percent late last year.
While the bad economy and lack of jobs is no doubt weighing heavily on young people’s minds, this raises a question. If many young people lean Democrat, but when the economy is bad lean Republican, what exactly are they?
In the “Libertarian Vote in Age of Obama,” David Boaz and I presented evidence that many of these young people can fairly be called libertarian–that is socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. True, many young libertarians got swept up in the excitement over the Obama campaign, voting 59 percent for Obama to 36 percent McCain. But, we argued, all the talk of a generational realignment towards Obama and the Democrats was premature.
This generation of young people are particularly prone to disillusionment. And we hypothesized that if the economy stayed bad, many young people, particularly the more libertarian young people, would sour on Obama and jump ship. Perhaps we’re now seeing some evidence that confirms this.
However, I don’t think Republicans are out of the woods yet. Even if young people vote against Democrats in 2010, Republicans will need to provide a credible alternative that addressed the concerns of a more libertarian-leaning generation of potential young voters. This will be a long-term challenge for a Republicans.
A defining idea for academia: jobs
With regulators forcing for-profit-colleges to disclose more data, and the industry facing increased scrutiny, at least you can say that for-profits attempt to train many graduates for jobs. In an article for the Chronicle Review this week, Camille Paglia, argues that traditional four-year colleges should be doing the same:
“Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics…. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings… every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.”
Could “progressive conservative” work in the US?
Thinking about liberalism in Europe, Tim Lee writes:
The [recent] British and German experiences also provide support for the Boaz/Kirby argument about the libertarian vote in the US. The FDP and Lib Dems have historically gotten around 10 percent of the vote, on par with Boaz and Kirby’s estimates of the size of the libertarian vote in the United States. Boaz and Kirby also argued that the political effectiveness of libertarians is maximized when libertarians aren’t too closely tied to either end of the political spectrum. A credible threat to walk away from the Republican Party and support Democrats will give both major parties an incentive to take libertarian voters. That certainly seems to be confirmed by recent developments in the UK, where the Liberal Democrats were able to push their coalition government in a direction more friendly to civil liberties.
It occurs to me that there’s another way libertarians in the US could learn from the British example. In the US, the libertarian movement has been tarnished by the confusion over the word “libertarian,” and its many negative connotations. In Britain, David Cameron described his vision for liberalism as “progressive conservatives.” While libertarians wouldn’t agree with everything on Cameron’s agenda, could this be a better label for the libertarian brand in the US?
KaplanU: Corporate bravado or genuine threat?
Kaplan University recently launched an advertizing campaign that announces in bold terms its aspirations to “use technology to rewrite the rules of higher education.” At an AEI event, KaplanU’s CEO Andrew Rosen argued that if you accept that incentives affect behavior, then you should expect that the quality of for-profit education should outperform non-profits over time. This is the “logical result” of a much clearer set of incentives – for customers, future employers, board members, and shareholders. If students don’t achieve learning outcomes and don’t get jobs, they’ll go somewhere else. For-profits must outperform or go out of business. Where does this logic lead? Rosen predicted that KaplanU will become the “world’s best educator by 2020.”
Is this corporate bravado or a genuine threat to traditional education? There is certainly evidence to support Rosen’s case. For instance, it took Harvard 25 years to recommend curricular reform in 2005. And the ideas sat on the shelf until 2007. Since then, progress has been uneven at best. Harvard’s case is by no means unique.
For those who appreciate that incentives matter, Rosen certainly seems to have a point. But I suspect that this past month’s hearings in the U.S. Congress on regulating for-profits is only a sneak preview of efforts to restrict this logic from playing out.
What are the most libertarian states?
Jason Sorens over at the The Fund for American Studies blog has a series of interesting posts attempting to identify the most libertarian states. Using factors that include Ron Paul’s vote share, the number of Ron Paul donors per state, Libertarian Party vote in the 2008 presidential election, and other variables, he concludes:
The states with the most libertarians are Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Idaho, with Nevada, Indiana, Georgia, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah, California, and Colorado following.
Can some dude without a PhD out teach MIT in math and engineering?
Technology can lower the barriers to entry for many industries. Writers without formal journalism training start blogs, break news, and attract readership that rivals major news organizations. Citizens without formal political training organize Tea Party rallies through the internet, run for office, and even beat establishment candidates in some cases, as election returns showed earlier this week.
But could some dude without a PhD teach college math and engineering? And history and biology? And beat MIT?
Well today, the Chronicle profiles Salman Khan, a 33 year-old former financial analyst, who has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube, teaching math, engineering, history, biology, and other subjects that he finds interesting. His “Khan Academy” gets more views than MIT, famous for its early “open courseware” experiment, according to YouTube’s educational section. Iconoclast technology guru Jason Fried of 37signals has even invested in Khan Academy, arguing:
The next bubble to burst is higher education. It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.
Of course, breathless pronouncements about the power of technology have certainly been overstated before. And among businesses that are slow to change, certainly academia must rank among the slowest. But just how fast could academic entrepreneurs like Khan shake things up? I’d be eager to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Wrong method to identify libertarians
George Mason University economist Dan Klein had an op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ arguing that the Left flunks Econ 101. Using data collected by Zogby, Klein argues that liberals perform worse than conservatives or libertarians on a series of eight questions testing basic economic concepts. The longer paper that inspired the op-ed is here.
Nate Silver criticizes the question wording and survey instrument here. I just wanted to add a quibble with the method Zogby continues to use to identify libertarians. Zogby includes the word “libertarian” as an option in the traditional conservative-moderate-liberal ideology question. Using this method, Zobgy finds that about 7% of respondents are libertarian. And while this is certainly an improvement over the traditional method, it still underestimates libertarians by at least half. David Boaz and I have shown that between 14% and 23% of Americans hold libertarian beliefs. But data shows that there is much confusion about the word libertarian and that the word remains unfamiliar to many people who hold libertarian beliefs.
There is a better method to parse out ideology to identify liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. David Boaz and I have suggested using a three question screen to identify ideology, combining the best question wording from Gallup and the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies. Researchers at TargetPoint and Politico used this method to parse out ideology in survey of Tea Party participants, finding that half were libertarian and half conservative. The questions are:
- I am going to ask you to choose which of two statements I read comes closer to your own opinion. You might agree to some extent with both, but we want to know which one is closer to your own views: The less government, the better; or, There are more things that government should be doing. [ANES]
- We need a strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems; or, The free market can handle these problems without government being involved. [ANES]
- Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view? [Gallup]
Of course, additional polling questions cost money. And three questions cost more than one. So if I had to choose only two, I’d pick 2 and 3.
Still, ideology matters. And pollsters do their clients a disservice if they overlook important trends in ideology that make a difference in reading the electorate. For instance, I suspect that pollsters would have detected the rise of the Tea Party, or at least better understood it’s causes and roots, if they had been using this method earlier.
Non-tenure faculty jobs are not all alike
I had written before about how tenure-track faculty positions at colleges and universities are declining relative to contingent faculty positions such as lecturers or instructors. And while the American Federation of Teachers thinks this is uniformly bad news, things may not be so clear cut.
Last week, Ronald Ehrenberg, an economist at Cornell University, presented a paper at AEI’s conference “Reinventing The American University” that reveals some surprising trends. Ehrenberg compiles data that show you can actually make more money as a lecturer at a research university than as an assistant professor. And associate faculty at for-profit institutions actually feel less like second class citizens than adjuncts at traditional universities.
Will Walmart lower college prices?
In September, Washington Monthly profiled online-education company StraighterLine and its radical pricing of $99/month for college credits. Today, the New York Times reports that Walmart will offer online college credit to its employees through American Public University. Are we witnessing the start of an academic arms race of lower prices?
That could be a good thing for consumers. But it recalls the comedy Idiocracy, where Luke Wilson plays a character who reawakens 500 years from now in a world where intelligence has been debased. His public defender earns his law degree from Costco, adding “luckily my dad was an alumnus and pulled some strings.”
HT Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Tea Parties and future of politics
Don’t miss this AEI panel next Wednesday, June 9 at 2:00 about what the Tea Parties mean for the future of politics with Ross Douthat, Kristen Soltis, and Dave Weigel. Fun fact: Cheryl Miller, the organizer of this event, says
According to my highly unscientific count, they have the youngest average age (28!) of any AEI panel. If we include the moderator, Jonah Goldberg, we’re still at a record-making 31.
Data-mining the novel
Interesting report at the Chronicle about how Google Books is beginning to allow literature scholars to use data-mining techniques on novels:
New insights can be gleaned by shining a spotlight into the “cellars of culture” beneath the small portion of works that are typically studied, [Franco Moretti, a Stanford professor of English and comparative literature] believes. He has pointed out that the 19-century British heyday of Dickens and Austen, for example, saw the publication of perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 novels—the huge majority of which are never studied.
The problem with this “great unread” is that no human can sift through it all. “It just puts out of work most of the tools that we have developed in, what, 150 years of literary theory and criticism,” Mr. Moretti says. “We have to replace them with something else.”
Something else, to him, means methods from linguistics and statistical analysis. His Stanford team takes the Hardys and the Austens, the Thackerays and the Trollopes, and tosses their masterpieces into a database that contains hundreds of lesser novels. Then they cast giant digital nets into that megapot of words, trawling around like intelligence agents hunting for patterns in the chatter of terrorists.
Unsurprisingly, this has sparked a methodological debate in the field:
Novels are deeply specific, [Katie Trumpener, a professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University] argues, and the field has traditionally valued brilliant interpreters who create complex arguments about how that specificity works. When you treat novels as statistics, she says, the results can be misleading, because the reality of what you might include as a novel or what constitutes a genre is more slippery than a crude numerical picture can portray.
Worth a read.
Academic Entreprenuership
As many scholars have observed, the market for tenure-track jobs is declining, relative to contingent faculty positions such as lecturers or instructors. And this trend is not likely to change. Add to this the retirement of the baby boom professors, cost constraints for state higher education budgets, the eroded value of endowments, declining philanthropic support, and new business models by higher education companies –you have a recipe for tumultuous marketplace for faculty jobs over the next decade.
So in this environment, what can grad students and faculty in the early stages of their careers do to pursue a successful career in academia?
One idea emerging is “academic entrepreneurship”–the idea of taking your career into your own hands and discovering your own comparative advantage in this changing marketplace. In a great piece at Inside Higher Ed, “The Entrepreneurial Grad Student,” Christine Kelly offers three things you can do to be entrepreneurial: brand yourself, seek opportunities, and be willing to adapt.
Apologies for the cross-promotion. But for faculty and grad student readers who are interested discussing and exploring this topic, I am moderating a Academic Entrepreneurship group at Kosmos, the online community of classical-liberal scholars. (Kosmos is in beta, so please excuse some part of the website still under construction.)
Can Twitter approximate polls?
At Pollster, Alex Lundry reviews a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon that attempts to use Twitter to approximate public opinion polls. For instance, the researchers used the prevalence of tweets like “Obama’s awesome” and “Obama sucks” to measure President Obama’s job approval rating, a common measure by pollsters. Implication:
This study also highlights a debate the polling community must have sooner or later: can the shortcomings of dirty data be overcome by a mix of sheer volume, sound data preparation/manipulation and savvy analysis? In this new era of IVR, online panels, social media and big data, the answer is increasingly pointing to yes – especially when you consider the advantages of speed, cost and access that these non-traditional data collection methods enjoy.
Young people’s attitudes towards the word “libertarian”
Many bloggers commented on last week’s Pew survey that asked whether respondents had positive or negative feelings towards the word “libertarian.” I was curious how this would break by age, and Pew kindly provided us the crosstabs, below:
Two observations. One, young people have more positive feelings towards the word “libertarian” than older Americans and fewer don’t know the word. That’s good news for libertarian brand. But two, young people seem to have more positive feelings about most words, including “progressive,” “civil liberties,” and “family values.” I wonder if young people really know what any of these words mean, or whether this reflects a certain sunny generational optimism? I’d be interested in your thoughts in the comments.
Washington Post Copies Politico?
In the fast-paced and ever-changing media landscape, the surest strategy for a struggling news oraganization is to… copy your competitors! After last week’s announcement that Newsweek magazine is for sale because it could no long earn a profit, this week the Washington Post Co. launches a new new media project called PostPolitics that looks awefuly similar to… Politico! From a marketing email, PostPolitics is the:
“the ultimate destination for breaking political news, in-depth original reporting and analysis, from the trusted leader in political coverage.”
Now, what’s the difference between this and WashingtonPost.com?
