I regarded the 2008 financial mess as the beginning of an era of considerable economic difficulty, which would be concurrent with a second social security crisis--as baby boomers retired. It was likely that the second social security crisis would continue to adversely affect many people in Chicago and elsewhere. While I had some suggestions on how to handle that second crisis, the level of twisted dishonesty and corruption was so high as to make it difficult or impossible for my suggestions to receive a hearing.  Moral: It may take a while, but a system that’s rigorously unfair will eventually become dysfunctional. UChicago’s desire to gain favor with the federal government is leading it to abandon ethical conduct. And it’s dangerous for our universities to become totally dependent on and subservient to the federal government.         In my view, a person should either work for the federal government or work for a university, but not both, at least not concurrently:  someone who’s been given a fourteen-year appointment at the Federal Reserve doesn’t need to have his chair kept warm for him at UChicago, as is the present practice.         In order to gain favor with government, the university is also compromising scientific integrity. The loss of scientific objectivity is one of the danger signs for any modern society, as the history of Stalinist and Nazi regimes shows.       But UChicago’s, Dr. Robert Zimmer, trained as a mathematician, has been an enthusiastic advocate of “informatics.”       Informatics? What’s that? The word, “informatics” comes from a Russian word,  informatika, which seems to have been coined in the days of Joseph Stalin. It is a pretentious word that implies that one knows what one is doing with mathematical certainty, even if one is working outside of pure science in an area where there are actually many imponderables.       To profess knowledge of  “informatics” is to profess that one is nifty and very modern.        But “informatics” has no actual mathematical, scientific or other intellectual content. As a sort of “butterfly word,” it has translated beautifully from pretentious Russian into pretentious English.       It seems to have made its way from Moscow into Eastern Europe and then to England during the Cold War.         Many people would like to feel that they have authority and respect. They’d like to dispel any doubts about the probity of what they are being required to do. That’s the psychological function of the word.        It’s a word of authoritarian delusions and illusions. It’s about submission to authority, about not thinking for oneself, about not asking questions, about looking the other way.         Suppose, in a previous incarnation, the reader had been a Soviet bureaucrat unsure about the best way to collectivize agriculture. Not to worry. With informatics, it was a snap. Was there any doubt that the peasantry were much happier after their lives had been  rearranged? If confined to a Moscow office, a bureaucrat might find peasant satisfaction hard to determine. With informatics, one could obtain data on that very subject—data that likely met one’s favorable expectations. To be sure, I’m using my imagination to try to understand how informatics would be applied in a Soviet setting. For how it’s being applied at the University of Chicago, however, I have my own specific recent experiences. Continue statement