Fun with statistics, or maybe not

Today, on what’s-making-YHB-cranky, there’s a thing going around Twitter from ex-New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, lamenting the decline of the History Bachelor of Arts degree, citing a New Yorker note from last year by Eric Alterman in which he laments that the drop is connected with something he calls “intellectual inequality”, which is the unequal distribution of resources for understanding our society. Which is a legitimate thing to be concerned about! It is, in fact, true that access to tools and practice for understanding our society deeply and widely is not, and has never been, equally distributed.

It’s also true that the lamentable decline in the BA in history is from around 1% of college-age people in the US to around 0.5% of college-age people.

So, to follow the argument: if another five or six out of every thousand college students majored in History, as they did in the nineteen-seventies, then—what? Twitter would be less awful? Our political system less dysfunctional? Fake news wouldn’t spread on the internet? The police would begin to expect consequences when they kill unarmed people? Intervention in Gaza or Yemen or Mumbai—or restraint from intervening—wouldn’t make everything worse? That handful of people would make the difference between a slide into fascism and the salvation of the democratic experiment?

Don’t get me wrong: I think it would be great if more college students felt they could (and were inclined to) major in History. Or Comparative Literature. Or Religion. Or Philosophy. That would be awesome, because I think that many of those people, when they went on to have jobs as teachers or lawyers or public-relations specialists would indeed have the resources for a deeper and wider understanding of our society, and also have resources for participating in self-government on a local, national and personal level. And also would probably lead interesting interior lives, and have pleasant and interesting conversations with each other, which would generally be an increase in the happiness of the world. This is also true of students simply taking a few courses in those fields, without majoring in them.

But the notion that there has been some deep and powerful social change that is rooted in ten thousand fewer History BAs every year, in a country of three hundred million people, is just wrong. Very wrong. Very, very, very wrong.

My immediate reaction, in fact, was to lament the widespread lack of the necessary statistical, rather than historical tools for understanding our society.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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