I wouldn't even BLOG that. . .

With the cash from some anonymous trust fund that our department has, we infrequently can attract some fairly big-named speakers to campus. And, for better or for worse, the funder prefers Nobel Prize winners.

I suppose I was somewhat starstruck at the possibility of meeting this particular winner, having Time on the Cross during the pursuit of my M.A., and then having studied the Economics of Slavery with one of his colleagues while in my pursuit of becoming a studente en perpetuity. I encouraged all of my students to attend, with the tagline that meeting a nobel prize winner is a unique opportunity, blah blah blah.

So, here I am, The Eternally Ungrateful.

I hated the talk (if you could call it a talk as he literally READ the paper that we were sent prior to his arrival. Of course, I had not personally read the paper prior to his arrival, but that isn't the point.) and thought it was ridiculous. The talk was on economic growth and some of the authors work on what he calls "technophysio evolution", which was interesting enough. But beyond that, I felt like the talk was un-academic, unsupported by any of the current and relevant literature, and, finally, un-inspired.

The ultimate blow to my by then wasted precious several hours was his discussion on relative poverty and concern over material distribution over time.

Those who worry about egalitarian issues tend to think about distribution in terms of material goods such as food, clothing and shelter which used to constitute over 80 percent of the consumption of households. To be poor in the decades before World War I was to be deprived of these tangible essentials of life and to be vulnerable to diseases and early death. In that age, things that you could see, count, weigh, or otherwise directly measure constituted the overwhelming output of an economy.

True enough.

The agenda for egalitarian policies that has dominated reform movements for most of the past century, the modernist agenda, was based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual or immaterial assets. These are the critical assets in the struggle for self-realization.

His term for this sort of poverty was spiritual estrangement.

Okay, granted, I'd rather be poor in 2005 than poor in 1905, but tell that homeless guy on the corner of 46th and Nicolet with his sign announcing to the world that he's hungry and out of work, that he should be worried about the Socratarian "Good life" rather than his next meal.

This argument drives me nuts and I get it all the time from students. They like to wash their hands of gender issues in the work place by saying that the gender wage gap is "getting better." With the implication that it will suddenly vanish in the near future, discrimination with it.

Tell that to the gal sitting next to you at the factory earning $0.23 less per hour (at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year and 40 years later, that's $18,400 my friend. And that's not counting raises, promotions, fringe benefits, or the loss that women experience from time off to have kids).

My copy of Time on the Cross (used from a library sale) remains unsigned by the author.