Rethinking the Marine Transportation Major
In which I question the utility of maritime academies offering useless business degrees that don’t teach anything…
Last year, while applying to graduate schools, I had the occasion to look at my transcript from Fort Schuyler (SUNY Maritime College) for the first time in a long while. I was reminded of the fact that I was technically a business major, something I often forget. I usually tell people who ask that “I majored in ships,” because it’s simpler than trying to explain the convoluted workings of the maritime academies to outsiders. Nonetheless, Marine Transportation, my major, is in fact a B.S. degree in business. The majority of students who graduate from all seven maritime academies with Deck licenses have this degree, or something similar to it.
As I scanned the voluminous list of classes (oh how I don’t miss taking 22 credits per semester), I realized just how many courses have been totally irrelevant to my professional development since graduating. Most of the classes pertaining to my career as a merchant marine deck officer have obviously been useful, but what about “Lifetime Fitness and Conditioning?” Or how about “Organizational Management?” What the hell even were these things?
What stood out to me the most were all the business classes. “Intro to Business and Economics.” “Essentials of Macroeconomics.” “Essentials of Microeconomics.” “Fundamentals of Marketing.” “International Economics and Finance.” “International Business.” With a few exceptions that I’ll get to in a minute, I could not tell you a single thing that I learned in any of these classes, even if you were to put a gun to my head. This is a shame, because these are really important subjects. I think all people should have a good grasp of economic matters; how else can they possibly be expected to be informed participants in an ostensibly democratic process? I like to think that I’ve acquired at least a decent working knowledge of these areas myself; but this came not from the process of earning a business degree, but rather from reading on my own, a journey mostly undertaken long after Fort Schuyler was relievedly in the rearview mirror.
Why can’t I recall anything about these classes? Every one of them was taught in such a manner that the students were bored out of their (our) minds. Professors – more than a few of whom I suspect were underqualified with respect to their subject matter – were teaching to the tests, and we were preparing ourselves accordingly. Exams were inevitably multiple choice, meaning that even people who paid little attention during the lessons could pull off at least a C with minimal effort. And it goes without saying that cheating at Schuyler was rampant. If any professors had required written or verbal essays asking students to, say, coherently explain how the international financial system functioned, or to articulate some basic principles of marketing, or to compare and contrast competing types of economic systems, it’s doubtful that a single student would have been able to pass.
In this way, the maritime colleges consistently produce legions of graduates who on paper are well-educated but who in practice are essentially vegetables.
***
I mentioned that since graduating I have spent a considerable amount of time teaching myself about economic matters. I also mentioned that despite having absorbed virtually zero useful information from any of my business courses, that there were a few exceptions that I remember vividly. How these two topics relate is instructive.
The one class I can safely say that I took something away from was “Essentials of Macroeconomics.” I remember the professor, a beachball-shaped retired US Navy Captain, who in retrospect seemed not to have a background in the field of economics – at least, I don’t think he had an advanced degree in the subject. What I took away from Captain Brown’s lectures was that there was only one way to successfully run an economy, and that was along the free-market model commonly praised in American mass media. That is, markets should be left alone, unregulated by government. If this simple prescription is followed, so the thinking goes, the results will be material abundance for all. As evidence Captain Brown told us about the economic thinker Adam Smith, who in his 1776 classic The Wealth of Nations described (according to Captain Brown) how a system of deregulated markets will work, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the best possible outcomes for the most people.
The reason I remember this, I think, is because it was repeated over and over again. Everything else in the class followed from this argument, but I cannot for the life of me remember the details. I had gone into these economics classes recognizing that it was an important subject, and was motivated to learn. I was quickly disappointed to discover how dull and uninteresting the material was – or rather, how it was being presented. It quickly became apparent that Captain Brown and most of the other instructors were more interested in having us memorize the correct answers that would enable us to make it through the tests, which is a great way to placate the duller students (and they were in abundance at Fort Schuyler), but is a poor way to educate. One does not come to an appreciation of political economy by way of the scantron.
***
Toward the end of my college career, I became more interested in politics and history, for reasons that I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that I recognized that despite my business education I was essentially an economic illiterate, and I made a concerted attempt to learn about the subject on my own, the same way I learned about everything else I was interested in – I started reading a variety of books from a variety of perspectives, and began to compare them. I started with Henry Hazlett’s classic Economics in One Lesson, which essentially restated everything I had learned up to that point: markets worked wondrously when left to their own devices, government regulation was bad, and the New Deal ruined America.
I was in no position to have an opinion on any of this, since I had never heard or read anything to the contrary. Over time, though, I came to encounter alternative views, and found them to be far more persuasive.
I read former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s book Saving Capitalism, which was the first time I encountered a comprehensible alternative to the prevailing wisdom of the pro-free-market school of economic thought. Reich, echoing famed Austro-Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi, was clear and blunt in his critique of the free-market ideology [emphasis mine]:
Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be the natural and inevitable consequence of impersonal “market forces.” What you’re paid is simply a measure of what you’re worth in the market. If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”
According to this view, whatever we might do to reduce inequality or economic insecurity—to make the economy work for most of us—runs the risk of distorting the market and causing it to be less efficient, or of producing unintended consequences that may end up harming us. Although market imperfections such as pollution or unsafe workplaces, or the need for public goods such as basic research or even aid to the poor, may require the government to intervene on occasion, these instances are exceptions to the general rule that the market knows best.
The prevailing view is so dominant that it is now almost taken for granted. It is taught in almost every course on introductory economics. It has found its way into everyday public discourse. One hears it expressed by politicians on both sides of the aisle.
The question typically left to debate is how much intervention is warranted. Conservatives want a smaller government and less intervention; liberals want a larger and more activist government. This has become the interminable debate, the bone of contention that splits left from right in America and in much of the rest of the capitalist world. One’s response to it typically depends on which you trust most (the least): the government or the “free market.”
But the prevailing view, as well as the debate it has spawned, is utterly false. There can be no “free market” without government. The “free market” does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.
Reich is a rather conventional liberal in his other views, so I quickly moved beyond him, but at the time this was a revelation. Never had I encountered an alternative to the conception of economics as anything other than an interlocking and overlapping system of private markets, where government exists only to enforce the rule of law and property rights. Just as a fish doesn’t know how to conceive of anything other than water until it comes to the surface and experiences air, I and many others were never able to conceive of an alternative to free-market ideology because it was the water in which we were swimming, or rather, it was the air we were breathing.
I italicized Reich’s mention about introductory economics courses for a reason. In Captain Brown’s class, we were never given instruction in alternative economic theories, indeed we were never even made aware of their existence. Of course, the good Captain made the occasional derogatory remark about communism (I specifically remember him amusedly telling a Russian student, whose father had been a Soviet Navy submarine commander, “Tell your father I’m glad we won”), but beyond that never acknowledged that anyone had ever thought differently about how to conceive of an economy.
But once I encountered an alternative, I quickly began to realize how shallow and unrealistic the free-market view was. As I continued to read other economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Yanis Varoufakis, and Ha-Joon Chang, historians like Nancy McLean, and journalists like Jane Mayer, I quickly found out that not only were there a lot of competing economic theories out there (Chang’s book Economics: The User’s Guide was extremely useful here), but that what I had been taught (meaning free-market ideology, referred to as the “neoclassical” or “Austrian” school of economic thought amongst economists) had only come on the scene very recently.
What was more of a revelation was the fact that this neoclassical school of thought did not come to such prominence due to its superior academic merit, but rather as a result of a lot of obscenely wealthy men financing it to the exclusion of all else. McLean explained in her book Democracy in Chains that as public funding for American colleges and universities was systematically eviscerated starting in the late 1970s, big business stepped in to fill the gap, funding existing economics departments as well as creating new ones, alongside a closely-related network of “think-tanks.” But the business community did not do this out of charity. Like all big donors, it expected a return on its investment. Business funding of economic departments came with a catch – they had to hire “approved” scholars who would teach the “correct” interpretation of economic history and thought. In other words, businesses funded the neoclassical ideology that I and countless others would come to learn in school.
Why? Because if the entire country can be made to believe that regulation is inherently bad and private control over all aspects of life is inherently good, no one will require petrochemical plants to properly dispose of their waste, no one will force pharmaceutical companies to charge reasonable prices for drugs, and no one will hinder the advance of the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries as they march us toward climate apocalypse. It makes no difference as to whether the promises of free-market economic ideology are actually true, what matters is that the spread of these ideas is ultimately useful for corporations’ bottom lines.
The business takeover of economics departments is one of the great under-reported stories of our time. It makes a mockery of concerns that nebulous enemies like “cultural Marxism” or “woke leftism” have taken over the university system. To the extent that these terms are even coherent, they describe the excesses of cultural liberalism, nothing more. As historian Thomas Frank memorably put it, “The university campus can only be imagined as a place dominated by leftists if you never consider economics departments or business schools […] it is possible to understand popular culture as the product of liberalism only if you have blinded yourself to the most fundamental of economic realities, namely, that the networks and movie studios and advertising agencies and publishing houses and record labels are, in, fact commercial enterprises.”[i]
American colleges reliably churn out a parade of graduates who, to the extent that they know anything about this stuff at all, are familiar with the free-market faith and nothing more. It’s one thing to come to a belief in the superiority of a system emphasizing deregulated private enterprise after having carefully examined all the other options – ostensibly one of the purposes of a liberal arts education, especially one focused on business. But it’s quite another thing to believe in neoclassical economics because, like me, you have never been alerted to the existence of competing theories, or been given a chance to immerse yourself in them. In this sense most people come to a belief in the superiority of free-market neoliberalism in the same way that they come to religion – they are reared in it from a young age, not taught anything to the contrary, and discouraged, one way or another, from developing an inquisitive mind.
The shame is that, as I learned, most Americans, once upon a time, did know about the alternatives, which is what makes our current moment so infuriating. Frank put it this way: “American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.”[ii] These “mental connections” being things like “private corporations do not always have your best interests in mind” and “democracy requires ordinary people to have at least some control over the economic sphere, not just the political one.” Prior to the 1970s, it was Keynesianism that held sway among economic thinkers, and unlike the free-market ideology, Keynesianism, for all its flaws, actually had a track record of success to recommend it (getting the country out of the Great Depression, the creation of the American middle class), not just the wealth of billionaires.
Maybe things are changing for the better; it’s hard to say. I have written previously about how I attended a rally where, despite the large presence of free-market libertarians, I encountered more than a few people calling for the nationalization of the railroads (this was in the aftermath of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment). And we seem to be experiencing something of a renewal of the labor movement (long overdue), as union victories at companies like Amazon and Starbucks have shown. But whether or not these are isolated incidents, as opposed to the beginnings of a wave, we will have to wait to see.
***
The irony of all this is that businesses and their lackeys in government and media don’t even believe the small government rhetoric they espouse. Corporations absolutely love government “intervention” in the “free market economy” when it suits them. Pharmaceutical companies spend virtually nothing on research and development – it’s all paid for by the government.[iii] Without it, they would not be able to remain profitable; the costs are too expensive and the benefits too uncertain. The oil companies that have set up shop in Iraq and Syria would not be there were it not for the intervention of the American military, the most bureaucratic and violent arm of government that “small government” free-market types never seem to question, or threaten to cut. Same goes for the mining and agriculture monopolies that have invaded Central and South America in the wake of US government-run coups which ousted leaders unfriendly to their interests and installed pliant regimes that opened the doors to foreign investment. And don’t get me started on the financial services industry, which is itself the creation of government policy, and which eagerly looks forward to guaranteed government bailouts whenever it gets in over its head.
Ultimately, as Reich noted,
those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules, initially allowing Wall Street to speculate on a wide assortment of risky but lucrative bets and permitting banks to push mortgages onto people who couldn’t afford them.
If any of this sounds complicated, trust me, it’s not. I have no special insight or access to materials that others don’t. None of the books mentioned here are densely written academic tracts; they’re books aimed at a popular audience that can be found at Barnes and Noble. Literally anyone can understand this stuff if they choose to take an interest in it – and I have a feeling that a lot of people are interested in it, they just get discouraged before they ever start.
This is often by design. Take the Federal Reserve, for instance. Until its creation, the general population of the United States was intensely interested in the issue of the money supply. Working class people with far less formal education than everyone reading this followed the twists and turns of this issue closely, in large part because the value of money affected them and their financial situations, given their status as farmers and workers. In fact, as Christopher Leonard explains in The Lords of Easy Money, it was popular pressure from the citizenry that led to the creation of the Fed in the first place. They were tired of the unpredictable swings of the system caused by the decentralized nature of the US financial system. It was only after popular calls for the creation of a central bank gained traction that Wall Street tycoons hijacked the issue and gave us the Federal Reserve we have today. They understood that they too, as businessmen, could benefit from a more stable business environment (the one thing all businesses want more than profits is stability), especially if they were in control. Indeed, the famous meeting on Jekyll Island that led to the general outline of today’s Fed was designed to steer control of the money supply away from the majority and into the hands of a minority; specifically, the minority of the opulent.
And so we have ended up with a central bank that is sort-of government-run but mostly under private control. What it most certainly is not is under public (democratic) control, that is, under the control of the population. In fact, one of the effects of centralizing control of the money supply in such an opaque system as the American Federal Reserve has been to get ordinary people to stop paying attention to the issue altogether, to the point where most don’t even understand it anymore.
This has been helped along by the way Fed officials, most famously Alan Greenspan, speak about what it is that they’re doing. They use a language (called “Fedspeak”) so dense and obscure and complicated that no ordinary person could possibly hope to decipher it. It leads to the impression, as Leonard notes in his book, that what the Fed is doing is at the level of quantum physics – so bafflingly complicated that mere mortals can’t comprehend it, much less offer their own thoughts on what should be done. But remember, one hundred years ago, working people with less education and living far more difficult lives than any of us, were able to understand issues pertaining to the money supply just fine. There is no reason to suppose that we can’t reclaim that kind of financial literacy. We just have to pay attention, and seek out books and other sources like Leonard’s, which enable us to see through the smokescreens erected by the “Lords of Money.”
This process can and should applied elsewhere. Take the closely related domain of finance. Spend any time reading the Financial Times or the business section of the Wall Street Journal or any other financial outlets, and you’ll be confronted with yet more dizzyingly arcane language seemingly designed to prevent outsiders from discerning what’s going on. Hell, my own financial advisor has claimed that this is the reason wall street insiders speak and write in this way. But once you learn the terms involved and read up a bit on the history of the financial world (far more interesting than it sounds, trust me), you’re on the right track. As an example, there is a book literally titled How to Speak Money that is a sort of glossary for normal people to decipher the world of finance.
And it is seriously important that we do so. My own generation, and certainly the ones that will come after us, are beset by a great deal of economic maladies – student loans, unaffordable homes, declining wages, lack of access to health insurance, lack of jobs that don’t suck, etc. It can all seem so overwhelming sometimes that it’s easier to simply give up trying to understand it and retreat into the numbing electronic fantasies so easily accessible in an age of social media. But that won’t solve anything, and ultimately, it’s far less fulfilling. As political scientist Michael Parenti observed, “it is easier to be entertained than informed, although it is seldom more interesting.”[iv]
Parenti empathized with people choosing to take the easier route. “To say you are not interested in politics,” he wrote, “is like saying you are not interested in your own well-being. Of course, just about everyone is interested in their own well-being, but many people do not see how political forces act directly upon their personal lives.”[v] If your upbringing or K-12 education did not provide you with the ability to discern “how political forces act directly” upon your life, that’s not good, especially if you choose not to, or are unable to afford, further education. However, for those who go on to college, you’d think that this would be a chance to learn this sort of thing. However, as I’ve attempted to explain above, my own experience earning my business degree taught me virtually nothing about any of this. I had to learn it all on my own. That was a fascinating and fulfilling journey, don’t get me wrong, but it would have been nice if the State University of New York had felt like contributing to the effort a little, especially considering that I paid them handsomely to do just that.
Again, I went to a maritime academy, so the courses taught by mariners aimed at making me proficient at my trade were what I and everyone else was focusing on, and they delivered as promised: I have a had a successful and sustainable career sailing on my license. But maritime academies are accredited universities, in my case part of New York’s state university system. You graduate with a bachelor’s degree, not just a mariner’s license. And looking back on it, I have to wonder, what the hell was the purpose of my degree? Those who were engineering or IT or environmental science majors can probably answer that question with some level of confidence. But good luck if you were a Marine Transportation major like me.
[i] Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas, p. 129
[ii] Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas, p. 248
[iii] The Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato does a brilliant job laying all this out in her book The Entrepreneurial State.
[iv] Michael Parenti, America Besieged, p. 9
[v] Michael Parenti, America Besiege, p. 8