If I were a state education minister I would endeavour to make it a compulsory part of a high school curriculum for students to have at least one field excursion to see with their own eyes a mine – or for that matter an iron smelter, a big factory or an agribusiness. But ideally a mine. I wouldn’t be able to force adults to go and visit anything, but I would happily encourage anyone out there who has never been anywhere close to a coal or a metal ore mine to put it on their travel and activity “to do” list.
So writes Arthur Chrenkoff in “Why Everyone Should Visit a Mine,” August 6, 2019.
I agree with Mr. Chrenkoff that it would be good if everyone visited some complex place of production that they would otherwise be unfamiliar with. They might get a little whiff of “I, Pencil” and/or start to wonder if markets and businesses are much more complex than they had thought.
And I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for mines, having spent a summer working at an underground nickel mine in northern Manitoba when I was 18. (It was a great coming-of-age experience. I remember my late sister saying, some years ago, that when I came back after that summer that this was the first time she thought of me as a man instead of a boy.)
What I disagree with is making it compulsory.
I’ve noticed that many people who have a good idea jump pretty quickly to a proposal to make it compulsory. That’s what Chrenkoff does and I’ve seen it a lot. When I was the health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, I went to a lot of lunches where a health care expert would give a talk on a health care issue. I remember one time when a speaker said he learned a lot about how disabled people must feel when he had to be in a wheel chair for a week or so. Someone in the audience then spoke up to say she thought it would be a good idea if doctors, as part of their training, were required to be in wheel chairs for a day or two.
Or consider how many people, when they start to understand an academic discipline (I’ve seen it a lot with economics), advocate that everyone be forced to study that discipline.
The authoritarian impulse seems to come easily to many people.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 7 2019 at 7:35am
Leaving aside the question of authoritarian impulse, David’s point is excellent. I may have posted earlier on another topic that I’ve been serving on a non-profit board that provides health insurance to research fellows. I serve on the health insurance committee and have learned more about the problems and costs of running an insurance plan. Real life experience is often times much better than classroom learning in that one is no longer in the abstract world but must confront issues such as reserve percentage, premium adjustment, co-pay and deductible setting, and dealing with the complaints from those in the plan. the main takeaway lesson from the past two years is that this stuff ain’t easy.
Jon Murphy
Aug 7 2019 at 7:50am
Very good stuff. Adam Smith writes in Theory of Moral Sentiments how we each have this desire to direct other humans. Further, a virtue of the commercial society is that it requires us to persuade rather then domineer.
Because of this impulse to domineer, it’s easy to slip from “X is good/enriching” to “X should be mandatory.”. Lord knows, I’ve done it with economics (never advocated it in a public setting but in idle conversation).
RPLong
Aug 7 2019 at 9:27am
Perhaps it’s worth noting that people tend to learn less about something when they’re forced to do it, as opposed to when they do it voluntarily. So the authoritarian impulse is counter-productive in addition to being morally objectionable.
Also: I’ve had many conversations in which I’ve suggested that people might be better off if more of them did X, Y, or Z, or abstained from A, B, or C, and others have often responded as though I’m suggesting a compulsory mandate rather than a voluntary choice. The authoritarian impulse poisons the well of reasonable conversation.
David Henderson
Aug 7 2019 at 12:03pm
Well put, RP. I actually should have made that point.
I made this point to retired General Stanley McChrystal when he advocated national service at a speech at the Naval Postgraduate School in about 2014. To his credit, he didn’t advocate compulsion but his tone suggested that he would like compulsion if he thought he could get it. This 2014 article by him suggests something similar.
Elsewhere in his talk, he discussed how much of a mess the U.S. Army was when he became a second Lieutenant in 1976 and how much it improved in the 1980s. I started following the issue in 1978 and followed it through the early 1990s, and the measures I followed suggested that he was right.
In Q&A, I asked him to consider that maybe the reason the Army was in such bad shape is that it had taken them years to figure out how to adjust to having an all-volunteer military and that they had finally figured it out by the early to mid-1980s. So the U.S. Army that he treasured so much might not be one he would like if we went to compulsory national service. What did he think of that, I asked.
His answer: “Ya, no.” He said more but I don’t recall much more content than was in those two words.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2019 at 11:09am
A brilliant insight. Everyone should have to read this post.
David Henderson
Aug 7 2019 at 12:04pm
🙂
Mark Brophy
Aug 9 2019 at 10:04pm
I think the guy advocating forcing people to visit a mine was joking, too.
Winslow P. Kelpfroth
Aug 7 2019 at 4:22pm
Having almost been one of the last of the draftees, and then staying in the Army and Reserves for the next three decades, I’m not in favor of compulsion, although I might be persuaded to make a few months in a complex business (I worked my way through college in a paper mill) compulsory for newly elected Congresspeople and Senators.
David Seltzer
Aug 7 2019 at 6:24pm
The comments are dancing around the elephant in the room. Uh Oh! A mixed metaphor but so what. The policies of Sanders, Warren, Harris, Spartacus et al, require forced redistribution of wealth and, by extension, restricted liberties. Friedman famously wrote, “None of us has the right to coerce others of us.” And, “One cannot be economically free if they are not politically free.”
BillD
Aug 8 2019 at 2:22pm
The issue I have with DRH’s take is that Chrenkoff is advocating for the mine visit to be a mandatory part of the high school curriculum. School is already full of mandated actions, including field trips. From that perspective I think that a mine visit is a fine requirement. At least as good as the mandate to take standardized tests.
The mandate that I personally would implement if I were king is to make all physically able people who commute in cars on public roads for less than 10 miles round trip ride their bikes to work for 1 month every 5 years. With reasonable exemptions. I find this to be a reasonable requirement to use the common roadways where car and truck drivers impose preventable major costs on each other and vulnerable road users. 🙂
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