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Mondav, January 23, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kanan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
The right of Kansans to protect their privacy received an unfortunate setback last week when a federal judge ruled that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did not have to provide innocent citizens with secret files that KBI snops collected on them.
The citizens, who were guilty of no crimes, nevertheless are listed in KBI "intelligence" reports. Ludicrously, the 73 files include a six-inch one on former Gov. Robert Docking. But Attorney General Curt Schneider, who learned of the files' existence in 1975 and is himself a subject of one file, has sought to have them destroyed.
Court litigation about the files has been pending for two years, Plaintiffs, including the Kansas Civil Liberties Union, have contended that the court cannot be able to examine the KBI reports to discover whether there are grounds to sue the state for invasion of privacy. But U.S.
District Court Judge Earl O'Connor, in upholding Schneider last week, said that judicial machinery for releasing the files did not exist.
O'CONNOR did soften his blow by ordering that the files not be destroyed immediately, pending possible appeal of his decision. But he sidestepped the obvious question of whether the KBI had possessed judicial machinery for collecting the files. He ignored how recently the right of privacy has developed in American jurisprudence. And so the law did not acknowledge the right at all; many farsighted jurists, however, have since created a growing recognition of that basic human privilege.
Progressive judicial decisions are vital in a time of government's proliferating intrusions into affairs that are none of its business. The files should be released.
Pamphlets advertise trivialities
Back when the University of Kangas was young and merry and student numbers had not yet reached 200,000—in short, before my freshman year—the Office of Admissions and Records would send high school seniors letters asking them to come to school far above the golope; in 1986, the seniors would find lists, called "Marks of Excellence," telling about the distinctions KU had earned throughout its existence.
I got one with every letter KU sent me. Some of the information is impressive, such as the large number of Rhodes Scholars educated here. Other gems on those taxpayer-infunded lists are not true. I may maybe, but not to me. I could take or leave the facts that:
- KU had a chemistry department that had published 900 scientific articles in 23 years in recognized national or international journals. Mercy have time to teach students?
- KU HAD THE nation's top undergraduate chemistry
program, which graduated, for its size, the highest number of enrichment chemists in the past 35 years.
- KU had a tumor registry at the Med Center that maintained records of almost 22,000 cancer cases in the future for the "schoolmaster"
- When I wasn't nodding at nodules or dreaming of imminent eminence I was making up my mind to enroll at KU. But she was flounced by "Marks of Excellence" lists. The lists have been replaced by pamphlets titled "Firsts at the University of Kansas" these wonderful ones offer the knowledge that KU was:
- First with a four-year electrical engineering course west of the Mississippi River.
- First to have a basketball coach win 700 games. It could be argued that we cheated because one of our former professors, James Naismith, invented the game.
- FIRST AMONG state universities to receive a bequest of $100,000 from an individual donor.
- First to show that "the controls for certain bodily characteristics in some insects are located in a particular chromosome of the insect." To which the usual response is, "What?"
- First to graduate two persons who later became astronauts. They will have to revise next year's edition to include another KU graduate, Steve Hawley, who was named last week to the space shuttle program.
The items mentioned are only a sample of the more in consequential items to be found in their programs, and are prestigious achievements. But what does the fact that one of KU's graduates struck it rich and gave the University a large budget for educational programs? How does the memory of the great basketball coach Phog Allen aid our chemistry department, or did eminent thought might be?
Finally, how much does that brag sheet influence highschool seniors to come to KU? Our electrical engineering program may have been the first to offer one and it may not be the best. The pamphlet is KU's contribution to the national emphasis.
THE UNIVERSITY'S literature should take a more balanced approach. We inform prospective students that KU will offer a 100-hour monoplane in 1910 for the first monoplane built west of New York.
KU students in past years enjoyed national fads such as stuffing people into telephone booths. In that spirit, KU today offers classes in the most styles of architecture squeezed onto a single campus.
- Among the winter recreational programs offered at KU is the Great American Hill Climb, held irregularly during January, February and sometimes March.
- The physics department at the University has constructed the first frictional outdoor walkway tiles outside Fraser Hall.
- The most-awaited holiday throughout Kansas is the weeklong spring break, celebrated
before spring, before Easter,
before anything.
- The University of Kansas is the only school in the Great Plains to offer the combination of 24,000 students, a $59,000 chancellor and a two-bit library.
Perhaps those tidbits or *w-formation* would induce more students to flock to Mount Sinai, where they record and possibly achieve more firsts. Most likely they would not. But in the end the seniors themselves, their instructors, of Kansas are paying for the pamphlets. And it would be interesting to find out which greatest book the record for the greatest amount of brochures on hand.
Still, the qualified approach to tooting one's own horn might work for me individually. I could probably safely state on my job application that I am the finest student KU has produced who lives within 48 miles of me and drinks cola and has been to Shoshiom, Wyoming. I hate to think, though, what impression that would leave with any prospective employer.
Family farmers nearing extinction
In recent months American farmers have loudly expressed the need for help in coping with the increasing stress of higher debts and lower market prices. Some of those farmers, the small family farmers, not only are suffering financial difficulties but also on the brain. Their need for assistance is mutual. Their most acute and immediate.
Beginning with the agrarian ideals set forth by Thomas Jefferson, American society historically has been supported by the contests that made America into World War II. more than 30 million people have left rural America for the cities. Economic struggle is getting the best of the farmer, and this fact can only contribute to urban problems, such as unemployment.
the average income of families living on farms in the United States is about $10,000 a year, roughly $3,000 less than the figure for urban families.
BUT EVEN this figure is misleading because the small farmer is making one-half of his income off the farm. Agrarianism requires farmers to support themselves entirely by farming.
Steven Stingley
Editorial writer
On the other end of the spectrum, large and corporate farms are increasing in number. There are 2.7 million farms in this country. The number of farms with sales of more than $1 billion in 1974, 1980 to 115,000 in 1974. In 1960, these farms accounted for less than 1 percent of all farms, but more than 17 percent of the value of farm products sold. By 1974, the larger percentage of farm products sold were farms, but they produced about 47 percent of the total volume of farm products sold.
Some experts have estimated that 10 percent of the farmers produce about 90 tons per hectare.
This leaves the small farm, the marginal farm, in a precarious position. For such a state as Kansas, which is dotted with small communities getting smaller, the demise of the family farm is much more than an economic consideration.
A NUMBER of recent studies have shown the differences between rural communities in which there are a lot of small farms and communities in which there are a few large farms. In every case, the social and economic well-being of the community is better when the farming is carried on by the small family farmers.
The family farmer spends his money locally and is more apt to care about the community's schools, parks and people. Though large farms may be more economically efficient, and even that is disputable, there must be more than economics taken into consideration when looking at the farmer's plight.
but economics seems to be the basis for any form of survival in an industrial complex, whether it be business or culture. That is why the farmer must be supported by federal measures to assure reasonable market prices for farm products.
No sound economic policy can be based on a romantic notion of the small farmer and its agrarian vigor, but it is vital that the farmer work hard to grow from the large, corporate farm monster.
Schizophrenia characterizes employment attitude
By LESTER THUROW
CAMBHIDGE, Mass. — The United States is a schizophrenic society when it comes to providing employment for everyone willing and able to work. If one were to listen to our July 4 parade, you would be reminded the United States was the ultimate "work ethic" society.
Yet if one were to look at our actions, the United States consistently runs an economy with the highest unemployment rates in the industrialized world and has a large amount of billion a year on income transfer payments. Nowhere is our schizophrenia more acute than with respect to the young. They are told to work hard. Yet we have been unable to find which they are going to suffer most of the unemployment.
Almost 50 percent of our seven million unemployed people are from 16 to 24 years old. Among teenagers, the official unemployment rates in the third quarter were 11%, whites, 21 percent for Hispanics and 40 percent for blacks.
But black and Hispanic labor force participation rates are far below those for whites. If we assume that they would participate equally in a world of equally available jobs, Hispanic teen-age unemployment increases to 38 percent in addition to 55 percent. In addition, 250,000 white youth who report that they want to work and would be looking for work if they thought that it was
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available are not counted as unemployed.
CURRENT ECONOMIC strategies will make the schizophrenic aspects of the problems even worse. Welfare is to be enlarged and reformed, but unemployment rates are to be left high The rate has been above 6 percent since late 1974, peaked at 9 percent in 1975, now 7 percent and is not even scheduled to drop below 6 percent under official plans until 1980. Given current economic policies, it also is not likely that these modest plans will be effective for the next year are such that the unemployment rate is not likely to fall significantly.
High unemployment is being planned because it is seen as necessary to reduce the rate of inflation. The unemployed are to be the nation's inflation fighters. Yet the effectiveness of unemployment as a way of fighting the questionable proposition with little or no supporting empirical evidence.
After the economic shocks of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil-prize increase, the grain-prize exploitation increased. The dollar devaluation had passed through the economy, the U.S. inflation rate quickly rose to 7.2% in early 1975 and has consistently stayed there ever since. Unemployment rates that range from 9 to 7 percent have done nothing unlikely to do so in the future.
AMONG THOSE with the temibility to be inflation forecasters, the optimists see inflation as a consequence in inflation. A somewhat larger group of pessimists sees inflation accelerating because of the proposed taxes on energy, gasoline and other fuels; curency tax increases, a higher minimum wage and the end to a period of falling agriculture prices. No one sees the light at the end of the inflationary tun
placing a cost-of-living escalator in all wages and prices by law so no one can be hurt by inflation—is that the inflation rates fiscal and monetary policies if the economy is fully indexed.
If one asks why enormous idie resources are not pushing down the rate of inflation, the answer is not hard to find. It lies in the fact that there is no classic argument against officially indexing the economy—
If inflation is 6 percent this year, for example, it will stay at 6 percent next year because every wage and price will go up by 6 percent next year because of this year's increase in the cost-of-living economy. With a fully indexed economy, only external events—such as a reduction in the price of or promotion inter- between markets—or basic wage settlements below the rate of growth of productivity, which is 3 percent, can reduce inflation.
ALTHOUGH THE U.S. economy is not legally indexed, it has gradually become highly indexed as a result of de jure and de facto escalators by government and private industry. It employs 30 percent in which conventional monetary and fiscal policies can produce unemployment but cannot reduce inflation.
To fight the current inflation by deliberately creating or tolerating idle resources is simply to conduct a war that costs too much. Costs if one rememberes that each percentage point of unemployment represents about $60 billion in lost output annually, the current war on inflation requires this cost in a world of high unemployment, the affirmative-action, training and equal-opportunity programs cannot work to help equalize minority and female earnings. There simply are not enough jobs which people can be employed.
THE YOUNG and economic minorities are hurt by unemployment even more than a simple lost-wages calculation would indicate. Most job skills are not acquired in formal education, but a formal process of on-the-job training from one worker to another. With such a training process, a lack of jobs means a lack of any opportunity to acquire lifetime working skills. In practice this means that employers then unemployment gradually become less skilled in relation to the groups that are employed.
Although almost no one predicts that the current 7 percent unemployment will lower the rate of inflation, many argue that to lower unemployment would be to make inflation worse. This argument flows from the uneven structure of unemployment. If one looks at the distribution of unemployment, it ranges from three percent from the third rate previously mentioned to 11 percent for adult adults, 6 percent for adult white women and only 3.7 percent for white males 25 to 55 years old.
IN ANY EXPANSION of the economy, we run out of these
white males while other groups still suffer high unemployment. Inflation breaks out in the wages of these white males—a heavily unannounced group that provides about 40 percent of all working hours—and spreads the whole of the economy.
The solution to this problem, however, is not to keep unemployment rates permanently above 5 to 5.5 percent, but to find some technique for reducing these enormous unemployment differentials. If this country could reduce its fiscal and fiscal policies could be used to lower the national unemployment rate without creating
Because, short of genocide, there is no policy for altering relative labor supplies, the policy options all lie on the demand side. One can either issue a set of commands ordering firms to change their hiring practices or one can adopt a system of wage subsidies dependent upon how much time they alter their hiring practices. Realistically, the only option is the wage subsidy.
labor shortages and more inflation.
A WAGE SUBSIDY is like a reduction in the minimum wage without the disadvantages that come with it. Small employers respond to a lower net
wage in either case. But with a
wage subsidy, all employers,
not just those who hire at the
minimum wage, have an incen-
tious cost to them; more
workers from economic minorities such as the young.
The across-the-board incentive to hire is especially important because most of the country's large employers have minimum wages that are above the legal minimum wage. Wage subsidies also undercut the profit the program is really being run for the benefit of low-wage, non-union employees who provide little or no training and few lifetime career opportunities.
From the employees' side there is the obvious advantage that take-home wages do not go down. This is consistent with progress toward economic parity between majority and minority groups and allows the wage subsidy also maintains work incentives. A simple cut in wages with a lower minimum wage decreases work incentives. Regardless of whether economists like it, the minimum wage exceeds the average for individuals who work ought to be able to earn a reasonable income.
A wage subsidy does not violate that social consensus and has the added advantage of spreading the costs of that goal across the population. It is often on those who are made unemployed when minimum wages rise. It also is an offset to the blazes toward capital-intensive techniques of production that are intended to reduce government tax credit and payroll tax financing for Social Security.
end up dispensing large sums of money for investment or employment that would have occurred without the investment tax credit is a favorite conservative economic policy. A wage subsidy is considered a dangerous radical move from sound economic practice.
INTERESTINGLY, almost all the objections to a wage subsidy are equally applicable to the investment tax credit. Both
The current strategy, if there is one, for reducing unemployment differentiales revolves around the creation of public-service jobs. Although there is a role for public-service employment in improving the background characteristics of students who are not a good substitute for regular jobs. They do not provide the lifetime career opportunities and satisfiable skills they are created by regular jobs.<sup>bs</sup>
PUBLIC-SERVICE employment at the minimum wage does little to help achieve income parity. Under the plan, people are not allowed to hold a job for more than one year. What do they do then? If we are to make more than a token improvement in the employment situation, the power would be standing private employment and not in public jobs. But to expand private employment, unemployment must be restructured.
That means some system of wage subsidies is essential. And young people are a good place to work because they form a group that includes all racial and sexual groups. This is not to say that wage subsidies are the only way to be expensive and messy. There simply isn't anything else.
Lester Thurow is professor o. economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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