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Opinion mongering: a brief typology

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the mac

The concept of intellectual prostitution is based on the idea that a person’s purportedly honest opinions shouldn’t be for sale. Here’s a classic statement from John Swinton, a leading journalist of the original Gilded Age, made when someone proposed a toast to the glories of America’s “independent press:”

There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

Since in these broad-minded times the practice of prostitution in the literal sense has become controversial, I propose that the metaphor “intellectual prostitution” be replaced with the phrase “opinion mongering.”

Opinion mongering is selling one’s purported opinions in exchange for something else. The pure opinion monger comes in two basic forms: the liar, and the bullshitter, to employ Harry Frankfurt’s well-known distinction. The liar claims to believe something when in fact what he actually believes something else. The bullshitter doesn’t care whether what he’s claiming is true or not, so he’s indifferent to the truth rather than actively attempting to subvert it (Frankfurt claims, with some plausibility, that the bullshitter may ultimately be more dangerous to the pursuit of truth than the liar, since the liar has to care enough about the truth to try subvert it in the first place).

That seems straightforward enough, but as always reality is more complicated than our definitions of it.

At the extremes, whether or not one is engaging in opinion mongering is unambiguous. For example, suppose a scientist approaches a corporate entity and offers to produce “research” that will advance the entity’s economic interests, in exchange for money. Note that in this case the scientist hasn’t done the “research” yet, but is promising in advance that the corporation will find his conclusions to its liking. This is because they won’t actually be his honest conclusions, since he won’t be doing honest research: he’ll be conducting what merely looks like research in order to produce a predetermined result.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the researcher who does work that leads him to conclude that views which he has held and which he would very much like to continue to hold are wrong, and who presents this conclusion straightforwardly, because his commitment to truth is stronger than his desire to avoid admitting that he was wrong.

But between these clear cut cases, there are many intermediate states. Here are a few:

(1) The person who believes he is giving his honest opinion, but whose opinion is distorted by self-interest.

(2) The person who withholds or distorts his honest opinion for other than self-interested reasons.

(3) The person who withholds or distorts his honest opinion as a matter of temporary role morality.

Let’s consider some examples in regard to a subject familiar to readers of this blog: arguments about the economics of attending law school.

What is one to make, for example, of claims that low default rates on federal educational loans provide good evidence that even graduates of expensive low-ranked law schools with poor initial employment outcomes are actually doing well? Here is part of Michael Simkovic’s response to Noam Scheiber’s recent story on the struggles of recent law school graduates, followed by Scheiber’s reply to that response:

Simkovic:

The story states: “Such is the atavistic rage among those who went to law school seeking the upper-middle-class status and security often enjoyed by earlier generations, only to find themselves on a financial treadmill and convinced their schools misled them . . .”

This implies that things were better financially for “earlier generations” of law graduates than they are for recent graduates. That’s incorrect. (error #3).

Student loan default rates for law school graduates were lower in recent years than in the 1990s. Lawyer and law graduate earnings and earnings premiums have also increased over the long term after adjusting for inflation and controlling for race and sex.

Scheiber:

Student default rates have been lower in recent years than in other decades because the rules on federal student debt have changed. Thanks to income-based repayment–particularly the 2012 Pay as You Earn Program–there is no reason for anyone to default. All they have to do to avoid default in most cases is pay 10 percent of their monthly discretionary income. It would make no sense to default under these rules.

Now, is it possible that Simkovic is so blinded by self-interest that this very obvious explanation for why default rates among law graduates are lower now didn’t occur to him, even though the debt loads of law graduates are far higher now relative to their earnings? (Contrary to Simkovic’s claims, median lawyer earnings have declined in real terms over the course of the past 20 years if not longer, and graduate debt levels are much higher now in real terms than they were 20 years ago, so Simkovic’s “correction” [sic] of Scheiber is seriously and indeed ludicrously incorrect).

I think it is in fact quite possible. Simkovic may simply be a self-conscious hack, and that’s certainly the most straightforward explanation for the quality of his scholarly arguments. Yet self-interest – and more particularly class interest — is an enormously powerful psychological force, and he may therefore well be delusional rather than self-consciously dishonest. In other words he may be an opinion monger without even knowing it. This is the most convenient variety of the species, from the perspective of those who profit from the supposedly honest views of supposedly disinterested observers. A poet once observed:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.

This sort of psychological distortion can also account for the remarkable fact that Simkovic and his academic camp followers keep touting his study (peer reviewed!) as “proof” that there has been no structural change in the employment situation for law graduates, when the study contains no data on anyone who has graduated in the past eight years, which happens to be precisely the period at issue. Scheiber:

It’s not worth reviewing the controversy about your work on law graduate earnings here, since the criticisms are well-established. But suffice it to say, I think it’s strange to respond to a claim that the economic prospects of people graduating after the recession have fundamentally changed relative to those who graduated before the recession with a study that only includes people who graduated prior to 2009.

Again, Simkovic may merely be a self-conscious hack, dancing to LSAC’s (well-paying) tune for his daily bread, but more subtle explanations for his hackishness remain possible.

For example, what looks like pure opinion mongering may be an example of someone who withholds or distorts his honest opinion for other than self-interested reasons. Consider this conundrum: LGM commenter Unemployed Northeastern has just about convinced me that, under present conditions, attempts to cap GRADPLUS federal loans are likely to do more harm than good, since what’s likely to result is a system in which private loans remain non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and therefore simply fill in the gap when the feds refuse to loan more than $20,500 per year (the current Stafford limit) for someone to attend a terrible law school that has a $75,000 annual cost of attendance. (See his explanation at the bottom of the post).

In other words, while unlimited GRADPLUS loans for law school are very bad, putting limits in place could easily make future law graduates even worse off (although this change would be marginally beneficial to taxpayers in general). If this is right, then a law professor might enthusiastically defend the current loan system in public discourse, while employing a kind of jesuitical mental reservation in regard to making his opinion known that the current system is very bad for students, graduates, and taxpayers. This would not be opinion mongering in its pure form, but rather a lesser of two evils political calculation. (This is why I’ve written very little here or elsewhere about my views regarding Hillary Clinton, even though anything I write on that particular subject would of course have at best an infinitesimal effect on events).

Finally, we have the case of opinion mongering as role morality, with the most obvious case at hand being the lawyer who makes an argument for the benefit of a client. This is a complex topic in its own right, and all I’ll say here is that the most interesting aspects of this issue are implicated by things like Larry Tribe’s advocacy of extremely dubious legal arguments to advance the interests of the world’s largest coal company, to the detriment of the environment.

What’s interesting about this case is that Tribe is not only zealously advocating for the coal company, which the rules of professional conduct require him to do once he has agreed to take the company’s money in exchange for his opinion, but he’s also loudly proclaiming that he is in fact not opinion mongering, since he’s only putting forth his sincerely-held views.

To paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, once you’ve learned to fake that you’ve really got it made.

*Unemployed Northeastern:

With regards to your second point, I base my analysis on recent history.

GradPLUS has only been around since 2006; even before it was introduced, plenty of private law schools, both elite and not-at-all elite, stickered between $50k and $60k-65k with living expenses, at a time when one could only borrow $20.5k year in graduate Stafford loans from the feds (plus maybe a few grand in Perkins loans if you had essentially no wealth).

– Law school tuition has considerably outpaced undergrad tuition for decades; in one of Paul’s entries yesterday, I cited one of the 2011 NYT articles as noting that between 1989 and 2009, undergrad tuition grew 71% but law school tuition grew 317%. GradPLUS was around for three of those twenty years. Nondischargeability of private student loans for four years.

– Ergo, much of the buildup of the cost of law school was built on private loans at a time when they were still dischargeable. Why? Securitization. All private student loans (as well as most loans under the now-defunct FFEL program) are bundled into Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) and sold to institutional investors, pension funds, college endowments (how’s that for some bizarre moral hazard?), etc.

So now private student loans are both nondischargeable and securitized. Where’s the risk? Why wouldn’t a SLM or Nelnet or Access lend private student loans? Keep this in mind: there are federal student lending ceilings for undergrads. Dependents can borrow no more than $31k for a degree, independents $57.5k. That means that each and every story you’ve ever heard, seen, or read about a four-year college graduate from Nonselective University with a general studies degree and $100k, $150k, or $200k in student loans owes that money because a private student lender said, “Yes, this looks like a good idea.” So the notion that they wouldn’t lend for someone to obtain a professional graduate degree just doesn’t hold mustard. Also, they lent students $100k or more to attend fourth-tier law schools in the early 2000’s when the loans were still dischargeable. If anyone can find a story about someone who got into [Terrible, Expensive Law School] in like 2003 but didn’t go because s/he couldn’t get full funding from a private lender, I’d love to hear about it, because I’ve been looking for those stories, and I’ve never seen one.

Also, it’s not as if the law schools themselves own a private student lender or anything. No, wait – they own the private student lender AccessGroup, which – despite being a nonprofit – originated more than $10 billion in SLABS during the 2000’s, if memory serves.

And on a more personal note, I do correspond with some folk who are career financial aid types. They report that the private lenders are salivating to get some market share back from the feds. Given that at least half of our Congress is neoliberal in nature, it’s terrifyingly easy to forsee a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that greatly curtails or even repeals GradPLUS. Look at the tea leaves: Sallie Mae recently spun off all of its non-lending businesses into a separate company called Navient and is now just a private bank again. Access, despite having no real purpose for existing at the moment, sits on hundreds of millions in assets, just waiting. Private SLABS have, for the most part, outperformed the other major ABS classes since the recession. Etc, etc, etc.

Finally, because these loans are securitized, it means the securitization lobby has a vested interest in keeping them nondischargeable, so expect a real war to ensue if Senator Warren or Sherrod Brown ever gets around to formally trying to make the loans dischargeable again.

NOTE: This is a commonly confused notion, so let me be clear. The private loans I have talked about in this post have no government guarantees. The “private loans” with government guarantees are loans made under the old FFEL program. If you took out a Stafford Loan before 2010, for example, that’s a FFEL loan. These are the loans that were ended by the Direct Lending program. The short and sweet version is that before Direct Lending, “federal loans” were made under the FFEL program, the money came from banks like Sallie Mae on behalf of the government, and the government guaranteed them. Direct Lending is simply that: federal loans made by the government directly, without the banks as middlemen. Of course, third parties still originate, disburse, track, administer, and collect Direct Loans, but that’s another story.

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