What I Read Today - Tuesday July 3, 2012

From: The New York Times - July 2, 2012

A Choice, Not a Whine


By DAVID BROOKS

Hostility toward the Supreme Court has risen sharply since Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. upheld the Obama health care law. People are apparently angry that the court didn’t rid them of a law they detest. But that’s silly. If Americans want to replace this thing, they should do it themselves.

The case against Obamacare is pretty straightforward. In the first place, the law centralizes power. Representative Tom Price, a Republican of Georgia, counted 159 new federal offices, boards and councils, though nonpartisan researchers have had trouble reaching an exact tally. In the first six months after passage alone, federal officials churned out an awesome 4,103 pages of regulations.

The law also creates the sort of complex structures that inevitably produce unintended consequences. The most commonly discussed perverse result is that millions of Americans will lose their current health insurance.

A report by the House Ways and Means Committee found that 71 of the Fortune 100 companies have an incentive to drop coverage. But nobody really knows what’s going to happen. A Congressional Budget Office study this year estimated that 20 million could lose coverage under the law or perhaps 3 million could gain employer coverage. Or the number could be inside or outside the range.

There are other possible perverse effects. According to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services, over the next 75 years Medicare payment rates for inpatient hospital services would steadily fall from around 67 percent of private insurance payment rates to an implausibly low 39 percent. Doctors would either flee the program in droves or Congress would override the law, exploding the costs.

Another report from the department suggests there could be 84 million Americans on Medicaid, an astounding burden on that already stretched system.

The law threatens to do all this without even fixing the underlying structures that make the American health care system so inefficient. It fails to fix the fee-for-service system that rewards people for the volume of services provided. It fails to fix the employer tax exemption that hides costs and encourages overspending.

Critics of the bill shouldn’t be hating on Chief Justice Roberts. If they can’t make this case to the voters, they really shouldn’t be in public life.

Moreover, there are alternatives. Despite what you’ve read, there is a coherent Republican plan. The best encapsulation of that approach is found in the National Affairs essay, “How to Replace Obamacare,” by James C. Capretta and Robert E. Moffit. (Mitt Romney has a similar plan, which he unveiled a little while ago and now keeps in a secret compartment in subsection C in the third basement of his 12-car garage).

Capretta and Moffit lay out the basic Republican principles: First, patients should have skin in the game. If they are going to request endless tests or elaborate procedures, they should bear a real share of the cost. Instead of relying on the current tax exemption that hides costs, the Republican plans would offer people a tax credit for use to purchase the insurance plan that suits their needs. The tax credit could phase out for the wealthy. Employees of small business who aren’t covered now would see an immediate benefit, which they could take from job to job.

Second, Americans should be strongly encouraged to buy continuous coverage over their adulthood. Then insurance companies would not be permitted to jack up their premiums if a member of their family develops a costly condition.

Third, the Republican approach would encourage experimentation in the states instead of restricting state flexibility.

Fourth, instead of locking Medicaid recipients into a substandard system, the Republicans would welcome them into the same private insurance health markets as their fellow citizens. This would give them greater access to care, while reducing the incentives that encourage them to remain eligible for the program.

Fifth, this approach would replace Medicare’s open-ended cost burden with a defined contribution structure. Beneficiaries could choose from a menu of approved plans. If they wanted a more expensive plan, they could pay for it on top of the fixed premium.

Finally, under this approach, any new spending would be offset with cuts so that health care costs do not continue to devour more and more of the federal budget. This could be done, for example, by gradually raising the retirement age.

Capretta and Moffit have more details. Their plan is flexible, decentralized and compelling.

Republicans say they trust the people. If that’s true, then they won’t waste another futile breath bashing the court for upholding Obamacare. They’ll explicitly tell the country how they would replace it. Democracy is a contest between alternatives, not a deus ex machina stroke from the lords in black robes.

What I Read Today - Monday July 2, 2012

From:  The Arkansas Democrat Gazette

The root of the confusion


By Paul Greenberg

This article was published July 1, 2012 at 5:21 a.m.


LITTLE ROCK — O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason.

-Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2 Not too long ago-Monday, June 18th-we published a syndicated column on the editorial page about sex-selection abortion. That is, a mother’s choosing to abort her baby because it’s the “wrong” sex, say a girl, when she really wanted a boy.

It happens around the world, particularly in Asia. And the one-child policy in still Communist China has only increased the practice. It would be hard to come up with a clearer example of sexual discrimination.

The pro-life faction in Congress has responded by introducing what’s called the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw such abortions.

Our guest columnist, Ken Herman of the Austin American-Statesman down in Texas, seemed of two minds, at least, about this issue. He knew he was against unjust discrimination against women, the way any good liberal or just any fair-minded American would be. But he also seemed to be for a woman’s right to have an abortion. Which left him in a quandary.

So our columnist friend asked Planned Parenthood, that citadel of pro-choice opinion, whether it was for or against sex-selection abortion.

If he was seeking guidance, he got precious little. What he did get in response to his simple question was a load of boilerplate about how Planned Parenthood supported all the right principles when it comes to not discriminating against women.

(“Planned Parenthood opposes racism and sexism in all forms; and we work to advance equity and human rights in the delivery of health care. Planned Parenthood condemns sex selection motivated by gender, and urges leaders to challenge the underlying conditions that lead to these beliefs and practices . . . .”)

Yadda, yadda, yadda. But was Planned Parenthood fir or agin this here Prenatal Nondisrimination Act?

It wouldn’t say, not at first.

But when pressed, it finally came out, like the Obama administration, against the proposed law. In short, Planned Parenthood is against all forms of discrimination on the basis of sex except when it isn’t, and on this issue it isn’t.

Planned Parenthood might be all against such discrimination in principle, but in practice it couldn’t be bothered to save a single baby marked for abortion because of its sex.

Our columnist friend in Austin was left in his self-imposed quandary.

He wound up spending a couple of columns of type deciding not to decide where he himself stood on the issue. He ended up by inviting any readers who disagreed with him to submit their opinions on the matter.

But what was there to disagree with?

Or agree with, for that matter? He never took a clear stand himself.

It’s the besetting sin of American opinion writing. I’ve lost count of the number of editorials I see that don’t editorialize. Instead they weave all around some controversial question-like abortion, for example-without ever taking a clear stand. As if they were afraid of offending. It would be more honest to label such editorials News Analysis, not claim they’re opinion.

Our friend’s big problem, his ethical dilemma, was symptomatic of those who don’t go back to first principles and think the abortion issue through. They don’t make the connection between the right to life and all the others subsidiary to it, like the right to equal treatment under the law.

The right to life must come first or all the others can never take root, much less flourish. As in the Declaration of Independence’s order of certain unalienable rights, among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Note which one is mentioned first. And for good, logical reason.

Yet we condone snuffing out human lives so the rest of us can get on with debating Title IX or Affirmative Action and all the rest of the equal-rights agenda.

Something seems to have gone terribly wrong with the American capacity for reason itself.

All of which brings me to the story of Ruth Pakaluk of Worcester, Mass., diminutive housewife, homemaker, mother of six, beloved by neighbors and friends and all who ever had the good fortune to come into contact with her.

Dead of breast cancer at 41, she left behind a shining memory.

She was one of those people who brightened the life of everyone she came into contact with.

Ruth Pakaluk was also a figure in her state’s pro-life circles, and stated her position with such eloquent, unpretentious, convincing clarity that after a while pro-choice speakers declined to debate her. A Harvard graduate, she must have had some classical education, too, because she tended to express her position on, or rather against, abortion with the irrefutable simplicity of a Socratic syllogism. As she would sum it up in plain English:

“Human rights are rights that pertain to us simply because we are human, not for any reason above and beyond that; the fundamental human right is the right to life, and if that right is denied, then all human rights are in effect denied; the thing growing in the mother’s womb is surely alive (otherwise it would not need to be killed by an abortion), and it is human, thus to deny that it has the right to life is to deny that anyone has any human rights whatsoever.”

Q.E.D.

Those who think of abortion as an oh-so-complicated question pitting many equal, competing rights against one another don’t see-or maybe just don’t want to see-that a society that can abrogate the right to life can abrogate any right. For if we don’t have a right to life, we have no rights whatsoever.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 74 on 07/01/2012

Print Headline: The root of the confusion

What I Read Today - Friday June 15, 2012

From: The New York Times

What Republicans Think

By DAVID BROOKS


Democrats frequently ask me why the Republicans have become so extreme. As they describe the situation, they usually fall back on some sort of illness metaphor. Republicans have a mania. President Obama has said that Republicans have a “fever” that he hopes will break if he is re-elected.

I guess I’d say Republicans don’t have an illness; they have a viewpoint. Let me describe it this way: In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower reconciled Republicans to the 20th-century welfare state. Between Ike and George W. Bush, Republican leaders basically accepted that model. Sure, they wanted to cut taxes and devolve power, but, in practice, they sustained the system, often funding it more lavishly than the Democrats.

But many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval Levin expressed the sentiment perfectly in a definitive essay for The Weekly Standard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:

“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. ... We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism.”

To Republican eyes, the first phase of that collapse is playing out right now in Greece, Spain and Italy — cosseted economies, unmanageable debt, rising unemployment, falling living standards.

America’s economic stagnation is just more gradual. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. economy grew by well over 3 percent a year, on average. But, since then, it has failed to keep pace with changing realities. The average growth was a paltry 1.7 percent annually between 2000 and 2009. It averaged 0.6 percent growth between 2009 and 2011. Wages have failed to keep up with productivity. Family net worth is back at the same level it was at 20 years ago.

In America as in Europe, Republicans argue, the welfare state is failing to provide either security or dynamism. The safety net is so expensive it won’t be there for future generations. Meanwhile, the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and education. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses thrive because they have political connections and small businesses struggle.

The welfare model favors security over risk, comfort over effort, stability over innovation. Money that could go to schools and innovation must now go to pensions and health care. This model, which once offered insurance from the disasters inherent in capitalism, has now become a giant machine for redistributing money from the future to the elderly.

This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. It needs replacing.

Mitt Romney hasn’t put it this way. He wants to keep the focus on President Obama. But this worldview is implied in his (extremely vague) proposals. He would structurally reform the health care system, moving toward a more market-based system. He would simplify the tax code. He would reverse 30 years of education policy, decentralizing power and increasing parental choice. The intention is the same, to create a model that will spark an efficiency explosion, laying the groundwork for an economic revival.

Democrats have had trouble grasping the Republican diagnosis because they don’t have the same sense that the current model is collapsing around them. In his speech in Cleveland on Thursday, President Obama offered an entirely different account of where we are. In the Obama version, the welfare-state model was serving America well until it was distorted a decade ago by a Republican Party intent on serving the rich and shortchanging the middle class.

In his speech, Obama didn’t vow to reform the current governing model but to rebalance it. The rich would pay a little more and everyone else would get a little more. He’d “double down” on clean energy, revive the Grand Bargain from last summer’s budget talks, invest in infrastructure, job training and basic research.

Obama championed targeted subsidies and tax credits. Republicans, meanwhile, envision comprehensive systemic change. The G.O.P. vision is of an entirely different magnitude: replace the tax code, replace the health care system and transform entitlements.

This is what this election is about: Is the 20th-century model obsolete, or does it just need rebalancing? Is Obama oblivious to this historical moment or are Republicans overly radical, risky and impractical?

Republicans and Democrats have different perceptions about how much change is needed. I suspect the likely collapse of the European project will profoundly influence which perception the country buys this November.

What I Read Today - Friday June 8, 2012

From: The New York Times

June 7, 2012


The Moral Diet

By DAVID BROOKS

In the 1970s, the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was an informal affair. It was staffed by about 300 mostly elderly volunteers, and there were cash drawers instead of registers. The problem was that of the shop’s $400,000 in annual revenue, somebody was stealing $150,000.

Dan Weiss, the gift shop manager at the time who is now the president of Lafayette College, investigated. He discovered that there wasn’t one big embezzler. Bunches of people were stealing. Dozens of elderly art lovers were each pilfering a little.

That’s one of the themes of Dan Ariely’s new book “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.” Nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little. Ariely and his colleagues gave thousands of people 20 number problems. When they tackled the problems and handed in the answer sheet, people got an average of four correct responses. When they tackled the problems, shredded their answers sheets and self-reported the scores, they told the researches they got six correct responses. They cheated a little, but not a lot.

That’s because most of us think we are pretty wonderful. We can cheat a little and still keep that “good person” identity. Most people won’t cheat so much that it makes it harder to feel good about themselves.

Ariely, who is one of the most creative social scientists on the planet, invented other tests to illustrate this phenomenon. He put cans of Coke and plates with dollar bills in the kitchens of college dorms. People walked away with the Cokes, but not the dollar bills, which would have felt more like stealing.

He had one blind colleague and one sighted colleague take taxi rides. The drivers cheated the sighted colleague by taking long routes much more often than they cheated the blind one, even though she would have been easier to mislead. They would have felt guilty cheating a blind woman.

Ariely points out that we are driven by morality much more than standard economic models allow. But I was struck by what you might call the Good Person Construct and the moral calculus it implies. For the past several centuries, most Westerners would have identified themselves fundamentally as Depraved Sinners. In this construct, sin is something you fight like a recurring cancer — part of a daily battle against evil.

But these days, people are more likely to believe in their essential goodness. People who live by the Good Person Construct try to balance their virtuous self-image with their selfish desires. They try to manage the moral plusses and minuses and keep their overall record in positive territory. In this construct, moral life is more like dieting: I give myself permission to have a few cookies because I had salads for lunch and dinner. I give myself permission to cheat a little because, when I look at my overall life, I see that I’m still a good person.

The Good Person isn’t shooting for perfection any more than most dieters are following their diet 100 percent. It’s enough to be workably suboptimal, a tolerant, harmless sinner and a generally good guy.

Obviously, though, there’s a measurement problem. You can buy a weight scale to get an objective measure of your diet. But you can’t buy a scale of virtues to put on the bathroom floor. And given our awesome capacities for rationalization and self-deception, most of us are going to measure ourselves leniently: I was honest with that blind passenger because I’m a wonderful person. I cheated the sighted one because she probably has too much money anyway.

The key job in the Good Person Construct is to manage your rationalizations and self-deceptions to keep them from getting egregious. Ariely suggests you reset your moral gauge from time to time. Your moral standards will gradually slip as you become more and more comfortable with your own rationalizations. So step back. Break your patterns and begin anew. This is what Yom Kippur and confessionals are for.

Next time you feel tempted by something, recite the Ten Commandments. A small triggering nudge at the moment of temptation, Ariely argues, is more effective than an epic sermon meant to permanently transform your whole soul.

I’d add that you really shouldn’t shoot for goodness, which is so vague and forgiving. You should shoot for rectitude. We’re mostly unqualified to judge our own moral performances, so attach yourself to some exterior or social standards.

Ariely is doing social science experiments and trying to measure behavior. But I thought his book was an outstanding encapsulation of the good-hearted and easygoing moral climate of the age. A final thought occurred to me. As we go about doing our Good Person moral calculations, it might be worth asking: Is this good enough? Is this life of minor transgressions refreshingly realistic, given our natures, or is it settling for mediocrity?

What I Read Today - Wednesday May 30, 2012

From:  The New York Times

Paul Simon Takes Us Back


By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Of all the raw and compelling voices in Joe Berlinger’s must-see documentary, “Under African Skies,” about the making of Paul Simon’s classic “Graceland” album in South Africa in 1985 — and his reunion with the same African artists 25 years later — my favorite is that of Graceland bass player Bakithi Kumalo. He tells about that day in 1985 when he met Simon in a Johannesburg recording studio:

“I was just working as a mechanic,” says Kumalo, “and one day I got this call from the boss and he said, ‘Hey, Paul Simon is in town, you know, and he’s looking for some musicians.’ And I said, ‘Paul Simon, who is Paul Simon?’ I mean I had no idea. And then the guy tried to explain to me. He’s singing all the songs. You know, like the songs from Simon and Garfunkel. And I’m like, ‘It doesn’t ring a bell.’ And then I take my bass and I go to the studio and so I meet Paul and Roy Halee, the engineer, and they’re like ‘Hey, man, let’s, you know, let’s play some.’ We’d play a chord — Paul would smile ... and then he’ll stop and change it. We didn’t know why is he changing? But he needed another part there that we didn’t know. Then he’ll break and give us different chords, and then we learned different things, and it was like going back to music school.”

Watching this film is, indeed, like going to music school and much more. For many, it will be going back to the first time they really heard the unique harmonies and rhythms of African music — thanks to “Graceland.” For some, it will be going inside the studio of one the most creative musicians of our time, watching him probing and experimenting with the styles, voices and melodies of South African musicians and melding them with chords and lyrics dancing in his own head into songs that we’ve been humming ever since. Who knew she had diamonds on the soles of her shoes?

But what intrigued me was going back to the politics of the mid-1980s, when South African apartheid was at its most vicious, prompting the African National Congress, or A.N.C., to call for a total diplomatic, economic, sports and cultural boycott.

This was before the Internet, globalization, iTunes and YouTube. Simon was drawn into South African music by a cassette tape someone sent him of the Boyoyo Boys. The musician in him insisted on following that sound to its origins, politics be damned. By daring to ignore the cultural boycott to make Graceland, he helped globalize the talents and sounds of a group of South African musicians the old-fashioned way — one concert and album at a time — and, in the process, empowered those artists in ways no liberation movement ever could.

Today, the Boyoyo Boys would have just cut a YouTube video and globalized themselves. But that wasn’t possible back then. Still, did Simon have the right, and was he right, to do what he did?

Interwoven through the film is an encounter, 25 years after the events, between Simon and Dali Tambo, the South African co-founder of Artists Against Apartheid, which imposed the cultural boycott.

“I think he had a great creative idea to mix his music and his rhythms and his ingenuity with some that he had found in South Africa,” Tambo recalls. “But, at that moment in time, it was not helpful. ... We were fighting for our land, for our identity. We had a job to do, and it was a serious job. And we saw Paul Simon coming as a threat ... because it was not sanctioned ... by the liberation movement.”

Simon, a friend of mine, was appalled by apartheid, but he bristled at the notion that, in collaborating with black South African artists on a synthesis that elevated their music and talents onto a world stage, he was hurting their national cause.

“When the artist gets into some sort of disagreement with politics,” Simon asks in the film, “why are the politicians designated to be the ones to tell us, the artists, what to do and we’re supposed to follow — otherwise we’re not good citizens or we’re not good?”

In the end, Simon and Tambo work through it all in the film and affirm that neither meant to hurt the other’s cause. Indeed, the A.N.C. has invited Simon and the Graceland band to perform for its centenary. But the just-released film (which will be shown at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater on Tuesday) leaves no doubt where the South African musicians stood.

Recalling their world tour with Simon after Graceland became a hit, saxophonist Barney Rachabane remarks: “In South Africa, we had no opportunity. We could only play in the townships. We couldn’t play in town in the beautiful nightclubs. You could have dreams, but they [could] never come true. It really destroys you. But Graceland opened my eyes and set a tone of hope in my life.”

Added guitarist, John Selolwane, “I remember when we were on tour and especially in Europe during the winter times. Every time Black Mambazo went on that stage and started singing, I would feel tears coming. I’m like, ‘Here I am. I’m an African boy. I’m in the middle of the snow and ... there are 50,000 people filled up in the stadium,’ and I would be crying. I’m like, ‘Damn, we are really seeing the world.’ ”

From the NY Times - May 22, 2012

How Change Happens

By DAVID BROOKS

Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and transformations.

The process was brutal and involved streamlining and layoffs. But, at the end of it, American businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more efficient.

Now we are apparently going to have a presidential election about whether this reform movement was a good thing. Last week, the Obama administration unveiled an attack ad against Mitt Romney’s old private equity firm, Bain Capital, portraying it as a vampire that sucks the blood from American companies. Then Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. gave one of those cable-TV-type speeches, lambasting Wall Street and saying we had to be a country that makes things again.

The Obama attack ad accused Bain Capital of looting a steel company called GST in the 1990s and then throwing its workers out on the street. The ad itself barely survived a minute of scrutiny. As Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal, the depiction is wildly misleading.

The company was in terminal decline before Bain entered the picture, seeing its work force fall from 4,500 to less than 1,000. It faced closure when Romney and Bain, for some reason, saw hope for it in 1993. Bain acquired it, induced banks to loan it money and poured $100 million into modernization, according to Strassel. Bain held onto the company for eight years, hardly the pattern of a looter. Finally, after all the effort, the company, like many other old-line steel companies, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, two years after Romney had left Bain.

This is the story of a failed rescue, not vampire capitalism.

But the larger argument is about private equity itself, and about the changes private equity firms and other financiers have instigated across society. Over the past several decades, these firms have scoured America looking for underperforming companies. Then they acquire them and try to force them to get better.

As Reihan Salam noted in a fair-minded review of the literature in National Review, in any industry there is an astonishing difference in the productivity levels of leading companies and the lagging companies. Private equity firms like Bain acquire bad companies and often replace management, compel executives to own more stock in their own company and reform company operations.

Most of the time they succeed. Research from around the world clearly confirms that companies that have been acquired by private equity firms are more productive than comparable firms.

This process involves a great deal of churn and creative destruction. It does not, on net, lead to fewer jobs. A giant study by economists from the University of Chicago, Harvard, the University of Maryland and the Census Bureau found that when private equity firms acquire a company, jobs are lost in old operations. Jobs are created in new, promising operations. The overall effect on employment is modest.

Nor is it true that private equity firms generally pile up companies with debt, loot them and then send them to the graveyard. This does happen occasionally (the tax code encourages debt), but banks would not be lending money to private equity-owned companies, decade after decade, if those companies weren’t generally prosperous and creditworthy.

Private equity firms are not lovable, but they forced a renaissance that revived American capitalism. The large questions today are: Will the U.S. continue this process of rigorous creative destruction? More immediately, will the nation take the transformation of the private sector and extend it to the public sector?

While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.

The implicit argument of the Republican campaign is that Mitt Romney has the experience to extend this transformation into government.

The Obama campaign seems to be drifting willy-nilly into the opposite camp, arguing that the pressures brought to bear by the capital markets over the past few decades were not a good thing, offering no comparably sized agenda to reform the public sector.

In a country that desperately wants change, I have no idea why a party would not compete to be the party of change and transformation. For a candidate like Obama, who successfully ran an unconventional campaign that embodied and promised change, I have no idea why he would want to run a campaign this time that regurgitates the exact same ads and repeats the exact same arguments as so many Democratic campaigns from the ancient past.

What I Read Today - Friday May 4, 2012

From: The New York Times

The Campus Tsunami

By DAVID BROOKS

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?

If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?

The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. In the first place, online learning will give millions of students access to the world’s best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and physics from Walter Lewin of M.I.T.

Online learning could extend the influence of American universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from American schools could permeate those institutions.

Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective as classroom learning. It’s easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student’s pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.

The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.

Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies. In an online world, colleges have to think hard about how they are going to take communication, which comes over the Web, and turn it into learning, which is a complex social and emotional process.

How are they going to blend online information with face-to-face discussion, tutoring, debate, coaching, writing and projects? How are they going to build the social capital that leads to vibrant learning communities? Online education could potentially push colleges up the value chain — away from information transmission and up to higher things.

In a blended online world, a local professor could select not only the reading material, but do so from an array of different lecturers, who would provide different perspectives from around the world. The local professor would do more tutoring and conversing and less lecturing. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School notes it will be easier to break academic silos, combining calculus and chemistry lectures or literature and history presentations in a single course.

The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.

My guess is it will be easier to be a terrible university on the wide-open Web, but it will also be possible for the most committed schools and students to be better than ever.