About That Local Economics Professor…

Facebook shows you many curious things and often makes you question everything you thought you knew about the world. On this episode of “The Shit I Read on Facebook,” we’re going to discuss that long winded post about a non-descript economics professor who taught his class a lesson by failing them.

For those who’ve not had the pleasure, here’s a version of the story:

“An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”.. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on)

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Can you think of a reason for not sharing this? Neither could I.”

First, Snopes investigated this nugget back in 2009 and found this to be false. But, things don’t have to be true to gain traction. So, let’s not bother with real or fake. While we’re at it, let’s throw out the ethics implications we could level at this anonymous professor just because that would chew up plenty of words on its own.

If this has come across your feed, I’d bet dollars to donuts the poster insisted they knew wasn’t real but thought was an interesting idea. In a way, these folks aren’t wrong. There is something interesting about this fairytale- how successful the author is at manipulating readers. That takeaway from this fairytale, not the moral the professor was imparting on his “wayward” students, is what’s interesting to me.

The author has painted a picture of dedicated students being handicapped by unmotivated students. This is typically a big sticking point for those folks who find the moral of this story thought-provoking. As Americans, we have been weaned on the idea anyone can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and make a fortune. The described grading method flies in the face of individual achievement and, I’m assuming, chaps some asses.

Apparently, there is a chunk of the population who’ve never been involved in a group project at school, carrying the team for the sake of their own grade. (Hmm…) I’ll digress from that rabbit hole.

This story tantamount to the scene in a Christmas Carol where Scrooge declares that those who would rather die than enter a poorhouse “Should better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

His lesson is not an attack on socialism. This is an attack on the idea that there are those in society that get something for nothing. And those who receive that charity are made lazy by such charity.

If it were anything else, the lesson would be very different. So would the lovely bullet points at the end of the post, making sure the reader smells what the author is cooking. First, the professor in question wouldn’t be using the word socialism as a synonym for communism. An economics professor should know the distinction. I’d question how they got to that position if they didn’t. But I’d also be questioning any professor that performed this experiment for keeps, like the story suggests.

Second, as the lesson’s premise is based on proving “Obama socialism” doesn’t work, I don’t see how a tax hike for the wealthiest tax bracket equates to a class average. I’d imagine the top one percent of the class would be tasked with taking two tests or something like that. Not sure that would be as flashy an instrument as a tanking GPA, though. Programs like SNAP and TANF are the targets here, with President Obama getting a nice side swipe for good measure. 

This story is playing into the darker fears of the American middle class. They’ve dressed up an ugly ass version of Communism in Socialist clothes and hoped no one paid attention. And they succeeded to some degree in that effort since this has been circulating its thought-provoking drivel since 2009. The intermingling of these terms dredges up those Cold War-era fears imbued in us all. We’re Americans and don’t accept socialist, communist ideals.

Except libraries are cool. I don’t have to pay thirty dollars for the new book I want to read, and they have free WiFi. Minimum wage, although not perfect, keeps my employer from paying me peanuts for my work. Mom and Dad have all of their prescriptions covered by Medicare, which is excellent since they’re on a budget. And Social Security too. Their checks keep food on my parents’ table since their employees didn’t have a pension or a 401K.

I’ll give you a second to guess what all of those have in common.

For the most part, those programs do not carry the same stigma as the programs I mentioned earlier. They weren’t saddled with the label “welfare.” As someone felt the need to point out on my feed the other day, “Social Security and Medicare are not entitlements!! We paid for them.” People partaking in library services and those like it are not said to “be on the dole,” which the underperforming students are standing in for in this story.

The students responsible for lowering the class average are saddled with a lot of unnecessary baggage. To begin with, the motivation of a student is not always reflected in grades. I’ve put my nose to the grindstone for tests and barely squeaked by. I’ve winged it, as in forgot I was walking into a test that day, and received As. Testing performance also reflects the efforts of the educator. Given this experiment, I’m going to assume the professor in the story was of the ilk to assign the books they authored. But that’s obviously a guess.

The same is true for the real people this post is attacking. It’s easy for people to sit in their comfortable house with a secure job to look at people using SNAP and say they aren’t trying hard enough. They are lazy. That minimum wage, I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, is far from a living wage. The Federal minimum wage is set at a whopping $7.25 an hour. Each state can set its own minimum wage, of course. Folks living in Georgia who work for employers who are not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act can look forward to a $5.15/hour minimum wage.

That is equal to being paid a Lego Minifigure an hour.

Sorry, let’s stick to dollars since that’s easier for everyone to understand. That’s 206 dollars, assuming forty hours and no time and a half, before taxes a week. The tax dollars going toward SNAP, TANF, etc., as a point of reference. The next rung in that argument is that they need to get a better job—excellent advice. However, that too is not as easy as it sounds. Moving up the ladder usually includes added education. Someone making $5.15 an hour would be hard-pressed to afford when items like food are already in question.

And let’s not forget that Starbucks lattes and McDonald’s Big Macs don’t make themselves. Why are those jobs considered less worthy of a decent wage when the employees provide services for the rest of the community? Ah, right, we don’t like the social/communal factor in this story. And if we didn’t tag these jobs as lesser, Ken and Karen wouldn’t have anyone to blow up at.

The students in the story are also held responsible for the rest of the class’s dwindling interest in performance. In the real world, people accept the added bonus of censure and rebuke from the community by taking assistance. As are their children, despite not having any active role in the situation other than being present. By not having the opportunity to be launched above minimum wage jobs or falling on hard times, not only are you and your family pariahs, you get the extra bonus of being used as an excuse for someone else giving up.

This is an odd turn of events for a story lauding the benefits and importance of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But, again, I suspect the author of this cautionary tale has never been the student dragging a team of peers along through a project. In this scenario, there would be more motivation, not less, to perform given the fact they are all in a dingy that had sprung a leak.

How is it the person’s fault asking for assistance to better their circumstance that someone else decides to squander their own opportunity and effort? That should be a reflection on the higher-performing students. Instead, the story is reinforcing the behavior of looking down upon people needing assistance. The author would have you hating Bob Crachit for his lack of ingenuity and cheering for Tiny Tim to die already to decrease the surplus population. All the while, believing that a pre-spirit visit Scrooge was the model to which we should all aspire.

I’m so glad we’ve moved beyond 1843. Wait, we have. Dickens was trying to use a ghost story to preach charity and kindness. Now, we have people trying to scare others into classist curmudgeons of the worst order.

If the ideas presented in this post are interesting to you, I’d suggest hoofing it over to your local library. Check out some books on the subjects presented here rather than accept them at face value. They’re reinforcing your own security in your socioeconomic standing rather than denouncing Socialism or Communism. This is emotional manipulation dressed up as an educational and inspirational story.