Andreas Daniel Fogg

Hi. I found myself as an undergraduate sophomore on the West Side of Manhattan, on Morningside Heights (at Columbia College), in the Spring of 1968. And being relatively poorly read, became confused, being pulled in several directions at once. That was a time when anti war and anti university expansion SDS protesters occupied and shut down the campus for about a month. In a sense I have been trying to make sense of what happened there and then, and what could have happened. But it seemed that everyone or most, were too angry to permit very much peaceful thinking or reading or for that matter writing, at that location. So I retreated to a small college north of Chicago, closer to my parents and sisters.I managed to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War with a 1-Y (suitable to be drafted only in the event of a national emergency) classification. In the Mid West I resumed studying sociology from a more qualitative perspective. And with some friendly attention from both a Greek American and an Hungarian American sociology professors (also especially a brilliant social psychologist who had worked with Donald T. Campbell and Thomas Kuhn, and philosophers specializing in Merleau-Ponty and Marx Wartofsky, the philosopher of science),, I discovered that the two remedial writing courses that I took on Morningside Heights suddenly coalesced into a writing ability that I took great pride in. One sociologist specialized in teaching Erving Goffman, and we read Asylums, which is a sort of implied ethnography about total institutions like prisons and mental hospitals also perhaps totalitarian surveillance burdened police states, the data therein is implied because it is indirectly referred to, rather than listed directly. I decided that I wanted to see for myself what conditions in at least one psychiatric hospital were like, and, suffering as i was from a badly broken heart, stemming from a summer romance and the fact that the two mentioned sociologists left campus over the summer), I was probably good material to become a patient in any case.

After six months in McLean Hospital, in Belmont,Massachusetts, i had a job washing dishes in the original branch of Legal Seafoods, and had found a place to stay in a halfway house. My now late father, who was a tacit collaborator in all of this, and with whom I discussed my impressions, was also a professor of sociology, and law, especially criminal and environmental law. So I was and am still in a sense, a professor's kid, which is a little like being a military brat, only with different foci.

I concluded that patients in MacLean were being over sheltered, over medicated and in danger of becomeing de facto vegetables. (Now "they" are threatening to take away the pleasure of driving our own cars. I can see lane changing alarms and anti rear end crash automatic braking, but driverless cars seems to me to be way too much. I am thinking of the possibility of "enemy of the state" covertly programmed accidents.)

Anyway, there is a lot in these (my) books about socio economics, from a perspective somewhat differing from that of most conventional economists. I am much more Keynesian, but also trying, using sociological thinking, to find out how to add to consumer demand when well paying jobs are being eliminated and only much lower paying jobs are available. I am someone with undergraduate and graduate training in sociology, anthropology looking at the political and economic nuts and bolts of our system. So my journals are sort of political appeals for policies which will help the country avoid economic stagnation, immiseration, which means becoming impoverished, hungry and over worked. I tend to favor left wing political economic analyses, not so much their authoritarian solutions. The trouble that liberals have gotten into with much of our US population stems, it seems to me, from efforts to raise disadvantaged groups as groups, over other groups, because they have been discriminated against, instead of promoting deserving members of those groups, who have earned promotions and wage or salary increases but who would ordinarily not be promoted because of their race or ethnicity. In other words the accusation that "you were promoted because you were Black or Brown or Red," is just as derogatory and damning and provacative as the accusation that "you or he is successful because he or you or she is White." We need it seems to me, to get away from identity based promotions to merit plus identity promotions. And since many of the members of these hurting groups, come from disadvantaged or less than totally literate families and backgrounds, their occasional or sometimes frequent competitive lapses need to be seen as resulting from learning disabilities, because they started way back from the starting line. That is so, in many cases rather than due to genetic deficiencies.

And if we refuse to train such qualified and individually interesting persons because of their racial or ethnic characteristics, then our society will become emblematic of a bigoted state of being. We will become international pariahs. So you see where I am coming from. My focus is not merely on the idea that we need to more progressively tax the rich, the banks and the holding companies (the latter whose assets approach the magnitude of the current US GDP), but also upon the reasons why we have been decreasing taxes on those groups continually, and also been electing members of the current Republican party, so much.

In order to fill the better paying new jobs we need to retrain at sophisticated levels, currently under or unemployed persons, who are laboring in low wage positions, if at all. Successfully filling those jobs, and earning their higher salaries, will take hard work, and the government, if it wishes our economy to become more competitive again, will need to spend considerably more than it is doing now. But our President is cutting job retraining funds. I get this bit of data from Steven Brill's brilliant book Tailspin(2018), which I heartily recommend. Often I cite passages of books that i have read and consider to be of considerable relevance and value.

So I try to tie analyses of why especially US society does what it does, with sketches of how things could be done differently, if there was sufficient will. I have self published five books so far. The last one was copyrighted in 2014. I have been writing continuously since then; so there are probably somewhere between 4 or 5 book length manuscripts waiting to be published, should some legitimate publisher or publishers express interest.