TORIN O’BRIEN
Special to The Leader
If you’re enjoying an afternoon coffee, you might have missed the opportunity to delve deep into the core of what it means to be a student — to spark your argumentative, debateful thought process. A Brown Bag lecture takes place today, at noon, in room S204 of the Williams Center.
Sociology professor Randolph Hohle, psychology professor Joseph McFall and economics professor Robert Kane will be posing questions and theorizing about the future of humanity. They’ll be looking as far ahead as 2051.
The professors’ goal isn’t so much to predict as it is to get students and faculty talking.
“As social scientists, I don’t know if we’re always the best in the prediction game. Those predictions don’t like to hold up for all the pesky black swans, but we’re going to do our best,” said Hohle.
Hohle will be looking specifically at a recent U.N. proposal regarding sustainability and development goals.
“Will nation states have the capacity or even the desire to deal with environmental concerns, inequality, and providing basic infrastructure, yes or no,” he said. “This isn’t a ‘Divergent,’ or ‘A Clockwork Orange’ dystopia we’re looking at here. We want to pose a question and get a reaction. That’s why you’re in school — to question, to think.”
According to Hohle, at the university level, students and faculty find themselves as bystanders in the endless cycle of going to classes, taking tests and getting grades, or going to class, giving tests and grading. An event such as this one gives students and faculty alike the opportunity to make the most of their time at an institute of higher education.
“This is more of a think-tank. This is academia at its purest and most ideal form,” said Hohle.
Kane will be giving his thoughts on technological advances in today’s society, specifically, skill-biased-technical-change.
“All it really means is technological improvements toward skilled workers. Recently we’ve seen the development of technologies that work really well with highly skilled workers, but not so much with unskilled workers,” Kane said. “The computer industry and engineering industry are seeing technological advances like never before, while other majors aren’t getting that technical progress.”
He boiled it down to a matter of inequality and the simple rules of supply and demand.
“It’s the why of the matter. In basic economics, when the supply of something goes up, the price of it should go down,” Kane continued. “But the thing is, we’ve seen this massive spike in the supply of skilled labor, but the wage isn’t going down — it’s going up, relative to unskilled wages.
“One of the reasons behind this is, when you have this bigger supply, it leads to more biased technical progress. If you have a lot of computer programmers, they’re going to develop more things to help the advancement of computer programming, and so forth,” Kane said.
The message that Hohle and Kane want to get to students is to think, argue, and discuss; as Millennials, we’re the ones who will be worrying about these different social issues in forty years. Why not start the worrying early?