Category Archives: Politics

Black culture before 1960

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Helen Dale writes,

It is from [Wilfred] Reilly we learn two-parent black families are substantially less likely to be poor than single-parent white families, and that between 1900 and 1960 African Americans had low crime rates relative to their numbers in the US population. This despite the well-documented presence of genuinely racist cops and judges throughout the period. We discover, too, that between 1900 and 1955, 85 percent of black families had both parents in the home raising their children and black unemployment rates were low. Between 1920 and 1940, American blacks actually had the highest marriage rates of any ethnic group in the US.

My hypothesis is that black culture broke up under the pressures of urbanization, as children of the great Northern Migration rejected the ways of their rural parents.

Et tu, GMU?

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Daniel Klein writes,

GMU’s leadership in classical liberal, conservative, and libertarian perspectives draws many to the university. It is a reason that students from all over the country and the world come to GMU. I should think that the university would wish to build on that leadership and proven excellence.

Perhaps the policies you are planning are not intended to reduce dissent from leftism. But policies are being created, with an apparatus dedicated to enforcing them—an apparatus over which no single person has control. One can imagine how, either out of zealousness or from just wanting to feel relevant, dissent would be greeted. Dissident teaching, course material, and speakers might be encroached upon; policies or technicalities might be used to reduce effectiveness of dissident scholars and teachers; dissidents might be pressed into early retirement; dissident units might be unable to hire and promote as they think best.

Read the whole essay in order to get the background. My sense is that George Mason’s libertarians have already felt the chill in the air under the new university leadership.

Why math education has suffered

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Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman write,

Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn’t even be maintained without international students. In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.

Later,

China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts.

Have another nice day.

Why epistemology has suffered

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Andrew Potter writes,

the need for our beliefs to connect or respond to reality has become increasingly unimportant. We are free to believe literally anything, from the wildest alt-right QAnon political conspiracies to the wackiest Gwyneth Paltrow health-nut fantasies of the contemporary wellness movement. None of it really matters—the lights still come on in your house, your car still runs, the grocery stores remain stocked with food. As nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall puts it, humans have an enormous capacity to hold beliefs not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold.

Society functions best when people of high status are truth-seekers.

Potter’s new book is On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst Year Ever. Have a nice day.

Naked elitism

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In a podcast with Richard Hanania, Marc Andreessen says,

I think there’s a real argument, and this is the most uncomfortable form of argument, there is a real argument that there are just a certain number of super-elite people. There are a certain number of people who are going to be really good scientists and it’s just not going to be that many. It’s some magical combination of intelligence, honesty, industriousness, integrity, the ability to recruit and build a team. In some ways being a top researcher is like being an entrepreneur, you have to actually pull all these different kinds of dilemmas together. And there’s only a certain number of people who can do that.

And then of course, the implication of that from a societal standpoint is that we’ve really got to know who those people are and we’ve really got to give them room to run. We’ve really got to make sure they have room to run and are not driven out. If someone’s truly a member of the elite, are able to generate elite-level results, if you wanted to demotivate them and draw them out of the field, what would you do? You would surround them with mediocrity and drown them in [baloney sandwich].

Sometimes it seems to me that the whole purpose of the woke religion is to keep true elites down.

Anyway, I recommend the whole interview. It comes with a transcript.

Long article on rationality

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In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes,

The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula. But, in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together. For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is not a hit piece. He discusses Julia Galef, Steven Pinker, and Tyler Cowen. He quotes from one of my blog posts.

Afghanistan and Hong Kong

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I looked at what some of the FITS are saying. Subsequently, I saw Richard Hanania’s take.

Why leaving had to go this poorly, and why Biden made the right decision.

I think that the Afghanistan withdrawal would have been a political disaster a few months before an election. But Biden has plenty of time to recover. The short attention span of the media works in his favor.

In fact, by the time this post goes up, Afghanistan may no longer be front-page news, and Internet pundits will have moved on.

I have read takes of all sorts about Afghanistan, and most seem to agree that the mission of turning that country into a liberal state was hopeless. We cannot create a liberal culture where none existed before, and we cannot save a culture that is not liberal.

So what about Hong Kong? Did the British create a liberal culture there, and if so, how? And what might we have tried in order to keep Hong Kong’s liberal culture from being destroyed by an illiberal regime?

To be sure, I never believed that liberal culture would grow in Afghan or Iraqi soil. Instead, I thought in terms of North, Weingast, and Wallis. Those countries were not ready to move beyond what NWW call a limited-access order, with key violent groups dividing up power and resources.

But I would like to hear the 20-20 hindsight pundits on Afghanistan say more about Hong Kong. I feel much more regret about our inability/unwillingness to prevent the conquest of Hong Kong than about “losing” Afghanistan.

I also worry about possible demoralization of our military. President Reagan’s otherwise frivolous invasion of Grenada was somehow necessary and sufficient to restore morale after Vietnam.

A Dual Monarchy?

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Which Hungary?

1. Erik D’Amato writes,

On the ground nationalist conservatism looks more liberal than you might think.

The Hungarian capital has changed a lot since it became a Mecca for global right-wingers—it’s more international and lively than ever. Most striking is the flourishing of the former Jewish quarter, home to Europe’s largest synagogue and now one of its most hopping bar scenes. Just as populist economics do not immediately cause market mayhem, rule by Christian nationalists doesn’t necessarily make everything drab and provincial.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

2. Andrew Sullivan writes,

In almost every respect, it is vitally important to note, the Hungarian government is profoundly anti-conservative. It is deeply corrupt, treating the free market as a joke, with one man directing vast amounts of state funds to his friends and cronies in return for their support. Its free press is under siege, with “nearly 80 percent of the market for political and public affairs news … financed by sources decided by the ruling party.” State advertising is a huge part of media budgets, and Viktor Orbàn ensures it goes to his outlets. Its government monitors the Internet for violations of the moral order, forcing one university to leave the country entirely, while setting up a heavily subsidized complex of pro-Orbàn right-wing institutions to rival the left’s.