Summer 2005

What follows are the full texts of the Faculty Address and the Candidate Remarks delivered at the 2005 Doctoral Convocation ceremony (Biomedical Sciences & Affiliated Professional Schools) by Irwin Garfinkel, the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in the Faculty of Social Work, and by Arnibam Mukhopadhyay, PhD in Business.

Faculty Address, Professor Irwin Garfinkel, the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in the Faculty of Social Work.
Note: Professor Garfinkel also received the annual Faculty Mentoring Award for excellence in the mentoring of PhD students. The award was presented by Kira von Ostenfeld, Chair of the Graduate Student Advisory Council.

Thank you Ms. Ostenfeld. This award means a lot to me. I have been asked to make a few remarks and have three things to say. First, I want to thank the eight students who nominated me for this award: Marah Curtis, Qin Gao, Sandra Garcia, Amanda Geller, Lauren Hirsch-Nicholas, Brendan Kelly, Lenna Nepomnyaschy, and Marilyn Sinkewicz. It is easy to be a good mentor when you have such a splendid group of students.

Second, to those of you who are just getting your PhDs I say welcome to the club. Getting paid to think, to write, and to teach is a wonderful privilege and a very satisfying gig.

Third, as a professor, I cannot pass up this opportunity to teach you two things about Social Security. First, though President Bush has been using the bully pulpit to cry wolf, there is no crisis in social security. Second, social security is not a safety net.

Between 1965 and 1972, the US Congress increased Old Age Insurance (OAI) benefits 5 times, doubling its real value and then indexed benefits of future retirees to future increases in the average earnings of American workers. After retirement, benefits are indexed to increases in the cost of living. The large increase in benefits and indexation reduced poverty rates of the elderly from one in three to one in ten.

Indexation to earnings promises future retirees that their standard of living will keep pace with the increases in the average standard of living of the working age population.

Because old people live longer and retire earlier, young people have fewer children, and the Baby Boom generation will soon retire--either social security taxes must be increased, or benefits must be reduced or both at some point in the future. Currently, we collect more in social security taxes than is paid out in benefits, but the Social Security Administration estimates that 40 years from now the current surplus of revenues will be exhausted and that OAI revenues will equal only about 3⁄4 of promised benefits.

But there is no crisis. Small increases in taxes or small decreases in benefits can easily solve the problem. If retirement benefits 40 years from are only 3⁄4 as high as currently promised they will be much higher in real terms than current social security benefits. This is so because we as a Nation will be much wealthier 40 years from now than we are now. The entire shortfall in social security revenues could be funded by only 1/3 of the Bush tax cuts. Similarly, Senator Lindsay Graham's proposal to raise the cap on OAI taxes from $90,000 to $180,000, or an increase in the payroll tax rate of only 1.9% would eliminate the funding shortfall. The President’s own progressive indexing proposal would eliminate 3⁄4 of the financing shortfall.

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist is doing an outstanding job of debunking the crisis myth. But Krugman, like President Bush mislabels Social Security as a safety net. When Bush and Krugman agree and both get it wrong, even this congenital optimist fears the country may be in trouble.

The United States of America, like all capitalist nations, has safety nets. Capitalism is exceedingly productive because it puts businesses and therefore citizens at risk of failure in the market. Capitalism is thus akin to a high wire act and has been accompanied everywhere by public safety nets--programs for the poor. All of the American colonies had Poor laws, modeled on the British Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which required local governments to aid the poor.

Safety nets relieve abject poverty, prevent malnourishment, increase fairness, quell discontent and thereby increase productivity. But they increase productivity minimally because they invest in only the poorest citizens. Because they aid only the poor, safety nets do nothing to prevent poverty. As the circus imagery implies, safety nets, are also uncomfortable and, for those who are weak economically, difficult to escape from. If you cannot earn much more than the welfare benefit level, it is hard to escape welfare and to improve your condition because welfare programs take away benefits as soon as your income increases.

In contrast, floors, like universal elementary and secondary public education and social security, provide benefits to all citizens. As a consequence, floors prevent poverty, reduce dependence on safety nets and increase the productivity and economic security of all citizens. Platforms, like employer provided health insurance and pensions and some elements of social security, neither confine benefits to the poor nor provide equal benefits to all citizens, but rather provide greater benefits to those who have greater earnings. Like floors, platforms also reduce poverty and dependence on safety nets. As they grew wealthier, therefore, industrialized, all capitalist nations also created floors and platforms.

Old age insurance combines a floor with platforms. Coverage is (near) universal. Benefits put a floor under the income of all the aged, but also provide greater benefits ( or platforms) to those who have earned more in the market.

Labeling all social welfare programs as safety nets obfuscates all of the essential differences between these programs and devalues the programs which are floors and platforms.


Candidate Remarks, delivered by Anirban Mukhopadhyay, who received his PhD in Business

" Ripples"

President Bollinger, Provost Brinkley, Distinguished Faculty, my fellow Columbia graduates, friends,

Thank you all for being here today. And congratulations to the many of you, those who thought they’d never make it. Hey, it looks like we did, after all. Not a bad achievement, is it? I mean, think -- of all those endless days and nights; the data that took months to come and then didn't work out; the painful paragraphs written and rewritten, then re-rewritten only to be trashed; think of those maniacal moments spent hovering somewhere between suicide and homicide -- seeking solace at the bottom of a beer glass at the West End. Those were the days!

I was immensely honored when I received the invitation to speak today. But, honestly, my first reaction was sheer, numbing panic. Then I thought -- wait on, you're a Columbia PhD, you can talk your way through this. But then it struck me that most of the others present would also be Columbia PhDs. So that idea didn't go too far. Then I thought, okay -- let's fall back on Plan B, something that's worked in the past, flippancy. But that didn't sound so good either. That was when I -- finally -- started thinking a little like I've been taught here. Systematically. What is the occasion? Commencement. A beginning. This is where, symbolically, the rest of our lives are starting. So maybe I can fall back on some of the research that I started right here at Columbia, on things people do when there is a new beginning. I’m talking about New Year's resolutions.

So let me first propose a resolution that's based on a haiku written by one of my favorite poets, Robert Hunter. This is the refrain from the lyric, Ripple. It goes:

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

Many meanings may be read into this beautiful lyric. What I'd like to say is -- let us try to make a difference, a small difference, at each and every point of our lives. As Mahatma Gandhi suggested, "Be the change you want to see in the world." We're graduating today. We all dream of being the splash. Making the waves that everyone will notice and remember. But, I submit, we will have done our jobs if we can only be the ripple. Constantly, and in all circumstances. Be the change we want to see.

We will all be entering new walks of life now. Many of us stay in academia, with our roles vastly redefined. Yet, what we can do, every one of us, is propagate the good things that we experienced here at Columbia. We have all had a variety of experiences -- let us take what we need, and leave the rest. Open doors, open minds; friendly, welcoming faces; co-operation, collaboration, tolerance; clear-headed, intellectual ways of thinking and dialogue; late nights of hard, hard work towards a desired goal. These, supposedly small things, have universal applicability, and universal value. Let us remember these, and practice and propagate them.

Conversely, let us try not to propagate some other things we may have experienced. Such as asking a candidate to leave the room after they have presented their dissertation proposal, and then shutting the door behind them and laughing maniacally. A little less of that might be good.

Let us listen, think, do. Criticize -- constructively.

One may ask -- what place is there for ripples, in the turbulent maelstrom that passes for a world today? Almost everyone graduating here today was in New York on September 11, 2001. The apocalyptic memories that we have from that day may never leave us. And we, who were here, may rightly wonder -- in a world that contains a 9/11, and the swirling cesspools of negativity that predated and have sprung from it, what place can a ripple have in such a world? Is it even meaningful to speak of ripples?

Clearly there are no easy answers.

When I was a child, my father, himself an academic, had a poster in his office. The poster read, "Are you here with the solution, or are you part of the problem?" It's a funny sound bite, but it carries a message. Are you here with the solution, or are you part of the problem? Which would you rather be, and why? And when? Personally, I believe right now is a good time for each of us to think in terms of identifying our place -- be it in the solution or in a new problem. For often a solution brings with it a new problem -- think of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, if you will. But really -- would you rather be the voice or in the wilderness? Is there any value to being part of the old problem? Whatever be our field, whatever the domain, we have to try to contribute to the solution; to still the waters, down to a ripple.

My research on self-control and New Years resolutions tells me that success at one's goals is often driven by expectancies of success. That is, people who expect to succeed, for various reasons, tend to be more successful. And expectancies really are nothing but manifestations of optimism, positivity, hope.

So there we have two things that can help us be the ripple. Hope, and help. Hope is what we give others, to see them through to Time 2. Help is what we give them, often so they can hope, and then they give back to us. The concept of help has been so trivialized in the Orwellian world that we live in. The person who stands behind the counter at a restaurant and asks, "May I help you?" isn't really helping you at all. They're just doing their job. The person who is helping is the person who goes out of their way -- does that little extra -- exercises the option when they didn't have to.

That, friends, is what we have to do. We must give hope, and we must help. We must be the ripples. And it is not easy-- indeed, as Hunter himself says in the last stanza of the lyric:

You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home

With those wise words, my friends, I bid thee farewell. Let us all go forth and be optimistic. Let us not forget to hope, and to help. To be the ripples in still water, and to be the change we want to see.

And before we leave, a last word to my ex-doctoral student brethren: Folks, they say there's free food outside. And this time, it's not GSAC pizza. Cheers, and thank you!