Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,
we are engaged in a contest between two understandings of justice, one built on the principle that all human beings are equal—the other on the principle that all “marginalized” identity groups are equal, and all are oppressed by white males.
This is from the Claremont Review of Books, and it may be behind a subscription wall. I am out of alignment with the Claremont folks, but this publication is still very fulfilling.
They are solidly behind President Trump. As Klingenstein puts it,
Nourished in our colleges and universities, multiculturalism is an insane exercise in self-flagellation. It sees America’s past as a series of crimes against humanity: genocide, racism, and all its co-morbidities. Multiculturalism’s worldview is enforced by a ruthless speech code (political correctness) which makes it virtually impossible for anyone in the mainstream of American life to challenge it. Trump, however, is the exception. He has shown that it is possible to stand up to multiculturalism.
My own thoughts.
1. I agree that the leftist intellectual outlook on elite campuses is poisonous. The poison then spreads to less-elite campuses, to schools of education, and to schools of journalism.
2. I disagree that the antidote is Donald Trump.
3. Think of the problem this way: Harvard and the New York Times are infected with bad ideas, such as hostility to capitalism. These bad ideas then spread. Our challenge is to ensure that better ideas have a chance to reach young people.
4. One approach is Samizdat. Soviet dissidents, excluded from mainstream media under Communism, resorted to secret copying to in order to disseminate their ideas. The IDW is our Samizdat.
5. A second approach is internal reform. Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy is an example.
6. A third approach is to try to disrupt higher education. Somehow make it possible for people to bypass the indoctrination centers and still have the same life opportunities.
These still sound like whiney updates to the old John Birch 1961 speeches that the white working man is screwed by the system. This view of multiculturalism is straw man and my kids HS history sounds nothing like this. (OK they did too much McCarthy IMO and details on war battles and not enough fall of Berlin Wall. And nothing on Financial Crisis which is really impactful history to their lives.)
1) In terms of California politics the key demographic voting change the last generation was Asian-Americans mostly because they know the Claremont Institute complaining about Immigrants is not just reserved Hispanic-Americans. (And I knew Asian-American Immigrant families in the 1980s and they loved Reagan.)
2) I always assumed the main reason for left ‘average’ universities is private sector pays better. And 90% of students go to get an college degree for a job and some writing skills.
3) If Trump is not the answer what about Orban?
4) What do you propose to avoid college to induce young people not to go? (Actually attendance is dropping btw.)
When discussing the domino theory with my kid, I told him it was a belief that other nations would slowly fall to communism across the globe and in 1964 after Cuba, it felt true to a lot people which impact the high approval for the Vietnam War. I said however the Domino theory did long run work on either US or Soviet side as it was impossible to win every war or battle with the military. (Or I suggested it was hard to win the ‘Hearts And Minds of the people with a machine gun’)…However, I told that theory worked once:
When Japan started thriving economically in the 1960s and 1970s , other Asian nations notice followed suit including China after 1978. And that was important to winning the Cold War.
Disruption of an industry usually involves new technology. Many observers imagined that the internet and MOOCs would disrupt higher education. However, the higher-education system mostly has absorbed and integrated the new technology, without major disruption.
It’s hard to see what would disrupt higher education. A new book by Jason Brennan & Phil Magness, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education (Oxford U. Press, 2019), analyzes the array of incentives in the system. Brennan & Magness conclude: “You won’t fix what ails universities unless you fix the incentives. Good luck with that.” (p. 278)
A new book by Eric Helland & Alex Tabarrok, Why are the Prices so D*amn High? Health, Education, and the Baumol Effect (Mercatus, 2019), takes a more favorable view of the system. Instead of focussing on ideology or dysfunctions, Helland & Tabarrok keep their eyes firmly on production (with academic personnel as inputs and academic degrees as outputs). They argue that education seems ever more expensive, but is ever more affordable, because productivity has increased vastly in other sectors, thereby changing relative prices (the Baumol effect). However, the authors leave open the possibility that new technologies might bring about massive productivity increases in education. They conclude: “For thousands of years there wasn’t much improvement in goods production, either, but that changed with the Industrial Revolution. We may be on the verge of a service revolution brought on by robots and artificial intelligence. Growth is always uneven.” (p. 73)
Alternatively, one might imagine a policy change that introduces new forms of competition in human-capital formation. For example, youths might receive ‘career-readiness vouchers,’ valid for tuition at universities or for internships, training, or apprenticeships in firms, organizations, small businesses, skilled trades, or the arts. Set the value of the voucher equal to the current average expenditure per student in public education. Firms, organizations, small business, skilled trades, and artists would respond on the supply side. Perhaps Mitch Daniels would like the idea? But who has the incentive and political clout to outmaneuver entrenched interests? Good luck with that.
Political disruptions often are not directly technology related. Think of the end of human slavery was precipitated not by technology change but largely by the US Civil War which was started over the right of state secession.
Immigration is another major disruption of nation states and civilization. Technology has played a role in that, but it’s a largely a social political change of its own.
Yes, people fantasized about the Internet and MOOCs disrupting education and that mostly disappointed.
There are absolutely large and justified political discontents growing towards the higher ed model.
Elsewhere in this thread, I gave my own thoughts about practical ideas to undermine and induce positive, healthy, constructive change in higher ed.
Brennan & Magness conclude: “You won’t fix what ails universities unless you fix the incentives. Good luck with that.”
As Milton Friedman said in many different ways, the best incentive to produce something worthy of the investment is to have personal (or institutional) assets at risk in the process.
Higher ed suffers from the same remoteness of payor to consumer that does the health industry: cost is filtered through a third party. In the first case, the consumer tries to pre-pay to insure treatment; in the other, the consumer borrows initially, and then repays on a delayed basis.
Neither system directly links the consumer payment to the service provided.
Most of higher ed is funded by federal loans (as noted, the difference here is the delay of repayment rather than an immediate medical services bill), and much of higher ed is sitting on huge endowment funds that … do what? It seems like a match made in heaven. So require higher ed to have “skin in the game.”
Let’s dump the federal student loan program and (in order to maintain tax-exempt status) require higher ed to underwrite student tuition loans (or match federal $$ dollar-for-dollar) through its endowment accounts.
You will see attention given immediately to address (a) a higher quality of student enrollment; (b) the practicality of various majors for repayment to sustain and even grow the endowment accouts; (c) introduction of cost containment practices by and of administrative staff and teaching faculty; and (d) improved (or new?) measurement of the value v. benefit of each institution’s production.
Short answer: run it like a business.
Argghhh. “In the first case, the consumer tries to pre-pay THROUGH AN INSURANCE POLICY to insure treatment;
I don’t think you or the Claremont Institute really understand what you’re up against.
“the other on the principle that all “marginalized” identity groups are equal, and all are oppressed by white males.” They say they believe this, but they don’t really believe in anything.
This isn’t a clash of ideologies but of psychologies.
Imagine a set of predators powered by the Dark Triad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad who’ve figured out how to use social media, bullying, group dynamics, and shaming to create opioid type dependence on outrage and conformity that they exploit for their own ends.
That’s what you’re up against.
1. I chuckled at the fact that this is “Kling’s Opine On Klingenstein”
2. Trump may be the exception, but “the exception that proves the rule.” It may not be strictly impossible for anyone to stand up to multiculturalism and prevail (for certain values of ‘stand up’, and ‘prevail’ anyway), but negligibly few are in any position to chance it, which is enough as far as the effective intimidation (i.e., ‘coercion’ / ‘social regulation’) factor goes.
3. It’s somewhat disjoint to see metaphors of poison, contamination, and the spread of dangerous infection leading to a rather anodyne objective of ensure exposure to and awareness of alternative ideas. That’s like watching Typhoid Mary causing outbreaks all over, but because one is squeamish about involuntary quarantine, resolving to make her potential future victims aware of the benefits of proper diet and exercise. Academic economists are fully familiar with all the superior ideas, but that isn’t stopping the field from going down the Road to Sociology.
Dealing with the problem involves the question of where these pernicious ideas come from in the first place. That’s like asking why businesses do what they do, for which the answer is usually ‘profit’. The prospect of power via influence over an audience and putting ideological goals into practice via state power or institutional implementation is the driving force behind the production of poisonous ideas.
This is the power-ideology evolutionary feedback mechanism in our information environment. And taking away the possibility of implementation as a legal matter is like cutting a grapevine at the rootstock. In short order, the whole plant withers and dies, and the Marys will move on to find other Typhoids to spread.
“Indoctrination centers”. I hear this phrase only from older, conservative baby-boomers. Their innocent, god fearing children who rely on their parents for moral guidance go to college and, GASP! They come out with more critical thinking skills than when they entered and have a different worldview than their parents.
Part of this is a function of the fact that the young and energetic can take stances and principals and carry them to extremes because they don’t have many countervailing responsibilities. Students have historically always been at the vanguard of progressive policies and protests ACROSS THE WORLD. Ceteris paribus, its not the U.S. university system that is “brainwashing” the students into a certain worldview. It just so happens that younger people are ideologically bent a certain way due to their position in life. Correlation=\= causation.
What’s absurd is that the people who use the phrase like “indoctrination centers” are really implying that there is some sort of mass conspiracy among all universities and professors to make 18-22 year olds extremely liberal. I suppose these same people believe in the “deep state” nonsense that Trump conveniently uses as a boogeyman and whipping boy.
#6 please!
Higher-ed reform is big. Not just for the political reasons cited here, which are good, but making society dramatically more efficient and subjectively fair and giving people more autonomy over their own lives. If you want trillion dollar bills of efficiency gain just lying on the sidewalk, this is where to look.
One practical route for healthy disruption is open admission. Make it easy for any adult to purchase enrollment in classes that they want to take and end the status quo e-verify rules that prohibit the masses from being recognized as legal students with the right to enroll in classes. This would undermine the exclusive prestige of being admitted to exclusive schools, but would align schools with the purpose of mass education and opportunity, rather than entrenching elite caste privilege.
Move higher-ed tying school to a specific place. Encourage branded curriculum, grading services, and coaching to be offered at many locations on a global scale.
President Trump not the antidote? He appeals to voters as Americans, as in “we’re all in this together.” This would seem to be a pretty good antidote to racial identity politics, which appeals to voters by saying vote for me, I will give you preferences and entitlements at the expense of your fellow citizens.
When he says “all in this together” he very clearly means only a select group of people, his supporters, who are a specific type of American. How is this any better?
Trump has consistently used rhetoric supporting “American workers and American families”.
That rhetoric discriminates against non-Americans and against people who don’t work and/or don’t have families. It also deliberately focuses on nationality as a defining identity feature.
Obama wrote, “I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny…”. There, Obama is saying nationality doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are in the US or Africa, that distinction is blurred. What does matter is racial identity, and black racial identity in particular.
Derrick, you’re either being either ignorant or dishonest here.
Trump says “all Americans”, HE means all US citizens, Reps, Dems, atheists, blacks, homosexuals, Christians, Mike Tyson, Billy Bush — all.
But Trump-haters, maybe like you, claim he doesn’t mean all.
The dishonest idea is a) Trump doesn’t mean what he does say, b) he means something else, tho he doesn’t say that, c) the something else he means but doesn’t say is bad, d) he is bad.
Trump is the most transparent “politician” ever — he says what he means (at the moment), and 60 million can read his tweets.
He’s constantly talking, and meaning, about “all Americans”. Even folk who hate him, tho he’s quite willing to punch back, verbally, against all who attack him.
The idea that Trump is in any way unifying or appealing to people beyond racial identity politics is laughably absurd. And his policies explicitly grant preferences and entitlements to white working class people, at the expense of their fellow citizens, in the form of protectionist trade barriers, and immigration restrictions (let us not forget that many Americans are married to or children of illegal aliens).
Hazel, you claim that Trump’s immigration restrictions “explicitly grant preferences and entitlements to white working class people, at the expense of their fellow citizens”.
Really? Can you cite any Trump speech or Trump Administration policy that explicitly cites helping the white working class and not others? I bet that you can’t do so.
Trump immigration restrictions (really all immigration law in all OECD countries) keeps wage rate for first world laborers from cratering to some global wage rate which for many would mean dramatic declines in living standards. Hazel thinks if a white dude is living on more then a dollar a day, he’s stealing it.
Personally, those white dudes built our country and won our wars, so I’m A-OK with them sharing in the bounty that they built. I have no compunction to share it random strangers that did nothing to build or defend this country.
White people of the past built the US and Europe, not today’s living white people. There is a convention that nation states membership and ownership is passed down as an inheritance in an unbroken chain from parent to child.
We don’t necessarily need to keep that convention. I genuinely agree and have been convinced by many of the arguments for open borders and moving away from nation states and towards free markets…
But I’m also more strongly convinced in the other direction on several major points that I will save for another comment.
People mostly fight and build to pass something on to their decedents. The constitution literally says “to us and our progeny” or something like that.
How many people would storm Normandy beach if their generals pre-battle speech was “your kids will be impoverished and dispossessed by hostile and worthless brown people because you deserve it you white priviledge fucks, no go fight those Nazi racists on our behalf!”
I’m not convinced open borders will do anything but turn the world into a giant slum and possibly destroy the global economy.
It is “for ourselves and our posterity”. That is in the preamble to the Constituion. And yes, the word posterity meant progeny. I believe your interpretation is entirely correct. The US was founded as a white protestant society with membership passed down as an inheritance from parent to child in an unbroken chain. The counter argument is that if open borders is a better model for the world moving forward, we should use the better model regardless of the founding story of the United States.
And yes, you are correct that motivations to sacrifice and serve the nation would vanish if the nation didn’t represent an exclusive tribe of people, and had less meaning. This isn’t entirely bad.
I think you are wrong that open borders would turn the world into a slum. From a free market perspective, it’s a strong positive. We can see some of that in the US and Europe already. Ultimately, no one knows how such a radical change would play out. All kinds of negative things could happen outside the bounds of classical economics and we have no idea how it will play out.
One major criticism, is that the current open borders model expects some demographic groups to shrink their identity and culture and privilege while other groups can keep or expand theirs. That isn’t fair or reasonable. A counter argument is these identity attachments have zero value, but realistically all humans care about their identity and tribe and it causes deep unhappiness when their identity is undermined outside of their control.
My own opinion is that the classical economic view isn’t relevant or accurate for our situation, and that what data we have so far bears that out.
I think the only human existence of any worth living is what has been created very recently in the OECD, and that everything before it was complete Malthusian misery barely worth being alive for. Preserving this world with abundant food, and antibiotics where you don’t see half your kids die before adulthood is the only thing of any value whatsoever. Correct demographics seems to be a pre-requisite for such a society.
Low IQ third world immigrants threaten to make the whole world a Venezuela or worse, while offering very little positive in return. They should stay where they are until the OECD invents genetic engineering, and if it never does so then they should remain where they are forever. They should be grateful that they can still utilize the technological inventions and aid runoff from the OECD to live lives infinitely better then they would if we were still in a Malthusian pre-industrial world, despite being poorer then the OECD.
In the past, it seems that way. For the future, it seems entirely possible that the world becomes a better place…
Imagine a Google run city, it might be a good place to live, if you are able to get a nice job. Or maybe it would flop for a variety of reasons.
I had your world view a few years ago. My advice to that person is focus on your own life and accept you have bssically zero say in the grand isssues of the world.
If genetic engineering is so important, why don’t you pursue that as a career, or at least as a hobby, or as an investment?
BTW, careers in genetic engineering are hard to get into and require that you start young. If you are over 25 and haven’t started down that route, I would temper your expectations, not to discourage, but to help you make a better decision.
You don’t choose when people are grateful or not. People choose that on their own and don’t care what you think about it.
“I had your world view a few years ago. My advice to that person is focus on your own life and accept you have basically zero say in the grand issues of the world.”
What makes you think I believe otherwise?
“If genetic engineering is so important, why don’t you pursue that as a career, or at least as a hobby, or as an investment?
BTW, careers in genetic engineering are hard to get into and require that you start young. If you are over 25 and haven’t started down that route, I would temper your expectations, not to discourage, but to help you make a better decision.”
Aren’t you answering your own question? I’m 36 and have a family. My career basically is what it is at this point, and there is zero chance of some kind of radical change at this point.
“You don’t choose when people are grateful or not. People choose that on their own and don’t care what you think about it.”
Alright. Well I’m not grateful that they are here. I’m not grateful for their diversity. I’m not grateful for the leftism their presence will enable. I’m not grateful for the effects that will likely have on my life and community. All forced propaganda to the contrary, I’m not grateful for what they have to offer.
Niko,
Let’s take your advice to its conclusion. Why care about anything?
“These bad things are going to happen no matter what you do, peasant” is an argument for what exactly?
Rednecks voted off the island.
6. should appear attractive to libertarians who frequently decry occupational licensure.
In Virginia, Vermont, Washington and California, would-be lawyers can prepare for the bar examination without ever attending a law school. “Reading the law” as this process is often referred to, produces attorneys who are every bit as competent as school-trained attorneys, perhaps even more so.
Such apprenticeships should be permitted in more professions particularly teaching, social work, and accounting which currently have college degree requirements, not because of some need to protect the public or assure quality, but rather as a result of education industry and guild rent-seeking. The curriculum in these fields tend to be very weak anyway and the absence of indoctrination would hardly be noticed in practice.
The IDW is fine and its existence is a challenge to establishment conformity. Yet, someone like Russ Roberts week after week is able to interview guests who in very many cases are completely outside the mainstream and have heretical views yet appear to be successful. Getting caught up on econtalk podcasts on a long drive recently, there was a woman who defended trophy hunting in Africa, Alain Bertaud attacking minimal square foot requirements in residential construction, an economist who did not reject the null hypothesis on all kinds of social interventions on behalf of criminals, etc. etc. Apparently his audience includes large numbers of young people. I have seen even committed leftist including a young man in the catholic worker movement get hooked on econtalk. One suspects people enjoy Roberts’ style of not preaching and not ranting and willingness to turn issues around and question his own priors highly rewarding.
So perhaps a #7 might be bringing one’s A game to the table: question assertions, question ones’ priors, stay within the limits of what you know, and respectfually and interestingly engage with others.
Another example is Timothy Taylor, with whom I frequently disagree, but whom I appreciate daily because he goes in depth, evinces a degree of humility, and always seems to try to do a good job of marshalling the available data.
A possible #8 may be refusing to engage in social media. Taking the debates off of highly curated and oppressive platforms like Twitter and Facebook, whose formats foment and favor facile sloganeering, can only improve interactions and thinking generally.
we are engaged in a contest between two understandings of justice, one built on the principle that all human beings are equal—the other on the principle that all “marginalized” identity groups are equal, and all are oppressed by white males.
That is not an accurate description of what is going on. You aren’t going to have an adequate response to the present social justice movement if you continue to indulge in a facile belief that it’s all just based on prejudice against white males.
1. If you look at the rhetoric coming from the alt-right, it is quite clear than many people on the right do NOT believe that “all human beings are equal”. In fact, many of them argue explicitly that Africans are less intelligent, and also that women are biologically less intelligent, on average.
2. If you take the left’s arguments in good faith, they do believe that “all human beings are equal”. What they object to is what they see as various societal mechanisms which unfairly favor white males. Now, if you are unable to grasp how those mechanisms work, then you might see nothing but a diatribe about white men, but what they are really saying is not “white men are evil oppressors”, but “white men have had all these unfair advantages for a really long time”.
it is quite clear than many people on the right do NOT believe that “all human beings are equal”.
Depends on what you mean by “are equal”.
If you take the right’s argument in good faith — and why should not you, for you take the left’s argument in good faith — you may find that they do believe that that all human beings are equal in some sense, and they also possess individual, biological and cultural differences and differences in preferences which might be responsible for at least some of the observable differences in the individual or group outcomes.
Fair enough. However, the right tends to attribute unequal outcomes to systemic bias, and the right attributes them to innate ability. In other words, from a left perspective, the right dismisses inequality by attributing it to innate ability, when it’s actually caused by prejudice or structural racism, thereby putting them into the positions of defenders of structural inequality. While from a right perspective, the left attributes to prejudice or structural racism what is actually attributable to differences in ability.
Personally I think it’s almost certainly a bit of both. The left isn’t wrong that there is still significant structural bias in our system, and the right isn’t wrong that some portion of this is caused by variances in abilities. But to say that the left has this position that everyone else is “oppressed by white males” is just not an accurate characterization of what they mean when they talk about structural racism and privilege. In fact, largely this stuff is supposed to be subconscious byproducts of social norms and interactions. Public choice theory could have a lot to say on this subject – for instance the effects of the different amounts of political power of different ethnic groups and how that affects government policy.
Not to say that some people don’t characterize it that way – because when you think you “know” something, a lot of people have a bad habit of assuming that other people also “know” the same thing, so if there is a disagreement they think the other side is being deliberately obtuse. So you get leftists trying to explain structural racism to right-wing people who just don’t get it, and they assume that the right wing people are just being intentionally obtuse and therefore that they must be part of some sort of conspiracy against non-white-males. (And probably vice versa to an extent.)
Genes are something like 40-80% of the story, with the number creeping up to the higher side based on the evidence ever since that range was used in the bell curve.
Of the remainder, it’s not entirely clear what it is. It doesn’t appear to be “stuff we can easily (or even with Herculean effort) change with public policy or cultural nudges”.
On top of that group differences are even less subject to random chance or meaningful intervention then individual outcomes.
So this is NOT the case if both sides being “sort of right”. One side is clearly MORE right the other, based on MATH.
You aren’t doing much to refute my point that many right-wingers do not argue as if they believed that “all human beings are equal”.
No two people, not even identical twins, are totally equal. That’s a scientific fact. Yet the goal of “equality” is strong, and good.
Differences in IQ/ SAT scores is a simple, clear, strong signal of inequality. Still, all people can be treated as “equal under the law”. Meaning to judge, evaluated, reward & punish people based on their behavior.
But groups, too, have different average behavior. One minority groups has few kids outside of marriage, has a high value on study & graduating from high school, a high value on getting a job, and a strong group push to be honest and avoid crime. Another minority group has the reverse behavior: many kids outside of marriage; low value on education; low value on keeping a job; low group push to be honest/avoid crime.
The second group, based on the avg behavior of the individuals in that group, will have worse outcomes.
Even if both groups are whites, the differences in behavior will result in different outcomes.
Yes, any two individuals or groups of individuals will vary in many characteristics and “outcomes.” The real issue is how should that trivially obvious fact affect the way we treat people both individually and as a matter of public policy.
History is replete with examples of the carnage that results when enough bigots like asdf decide which lives are worthless and which groups need to be improved with “genetic engineering.”
6. A good opportunity to disrupt higher education may present itself in 2021, when having swept the Congress and Presidency, far left extremists begin to implement their plan for free college.
Government will secure heretofore unseen powers to plan and manage education spending putting the current laissez faire attitude to university self-governance and university research up for scrutiny. Why finance 100+ economics PhD programs? BLS estimates the number of economics jobs will only have increased by about 1,300 by 2026 and yet the schools are printing 1,000 doctorates a year. Top down planning will be necessary to bring some rationality to the spending. The US would have no problem at all getting by with two or three “center of excellence” supermart economics PhD programs and more direct control and oversight will allow such efficiencies to be achieved.
Similarly with other fields.
Why does every school need to pay tenured professors to churn out grievance studies? Pick a school and let that one specialize. Let the academics focus outwardly rather than engaging in unrelenting debate with other academics. Pick a couple of dozen of the best and supervise them in one setting. Less fuss. Less muss. Savings.
Turning down the firehose stream of such papers being published might allow some of the work to actually be read.
And why should taxpayers be on the hook for professors who wish to indulge their personal research penchants? A bureaucracy can be created in the Department of Education to coordinate and manage professorial research and direct it towards higher social values.
One can imagine that academics who actually had to compete to keep their status and perquisites might tone down the militancy and concentrate on demonstrably useful work.
Life, lemons, lemonade.