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I've been saying for years that ideas and words don't measure these things. Until we have action--people in the streets--anecdotes about disaffection with capitalism are just that.... I'm also not (and never have been) that impressed with the political or other capacities of college students as a group... That said, I want to object to the glum generalizations this article presents...though it's very flattering to those of us produced by more "empathetic" days. The article on which this piece is based is online at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/skonrath/files/empathy_decline.pdf This presentation is not forthcoming with how it gathered data. They are probably doing surveys of some sort. It is evident that they did not do the research on the earlier years themselves and, therefore, probably did not do it the same way or ask the same questions. There's certainly no indication that they did so the same way. For example, are they doing this in groups, which will change how some of them answer. Even so, the meaning of words do shift over time and it's hard to say what people mean in their responses without knowing what they were actually asked. And this begs the question of whether students felt some social pressures earlier to answer the questions as if they experienced more empathy than they did. In fact, I note that the sampling in this case is based on having 63% of the sampling women. Going back some decades, women were expected to express more empathy than men. The survey, if that's what it was, probably measures the decline of this expectation more than anything else. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
