I missed this post by Alex Tabarrok in early June.
I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point.
The post includes graphs showing hockey-stick growth in the use of terms like “diversity and inclusion.”
Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point.
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https://www.nytimes.com › 2011/03/18 › business › media
Mar 17, 2011 – The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan. The New York Times introduced a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 for a four-week subscription in a bet that readers will pay for news they are accustomed to getting free.
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The semantics got reapportioned among the web sites via the pricing mechanism. How about that! It was prescription sign up, as Arnold predicted.
There are only so many tribes, and the search engines want them separated with a minimum of semantics. The search engine and NY Times reached an agreement, the NY Times can have the diversity crowd. There is a huge savings in ad and news distribution. Think of it as a paid trade press for the professional diversifiers.
A blog like this one crosses the semantic boundaries, search engines have a hard time. I run a blog, mostly censored, but I deliberately mix semantics, mostly being sarcastic and applying Reductio ad Absurdum. I do it to deliberately foul the search engines.
If I mix contrasting semantic themes, like New Green Deal and progressivity, show a contrast, then the search engines will sneak in the phrase and cause some consternation among certain tribes, like a troll.
It is all very interesting. When you add pricing, linear travels along the semantic links tell us exactly what kind of articles various groups are looking for.
I am clogging the topic, I know. But I have done some work here, and we can understand what pricing does to the search engines.
When I pay, I prefer a denotation of the theme I am paying for, I want the polluting themse, not paid, nearer the bottom of my search list.
Consider the matched themes: progressive, socialist, left, liberral, etc; of these, the group naturally pics one for semantic simplicity of getting around the stuff they paid for. Progressive becomes a common themes, making leftist somewhat more available for another tribe. In other words, pricing adds the purchase of themes and a denotation, a great simplicity and enforces utility in spreading around fewer theme words to get optimum separation.
Theoretically, if you consider the convolution of two semantic graphs, then a match between two nodes, without pricing, is very application specific, not linear. Add pricing and the node matches can use greater, lesser and equal; and all the math in between.
I would suggest Fox News after 2007 grew heavier to the right and they were the leaders against Obama. Glenn Beck heyday was 2009 – 2010 calling out Obama hating white people on Fox in 2010. (Others on camera did not agree.) Also Hannity removed Colmes in 2008 while it was the years Breitbart popularity really grew.)
(Yes, the nation moved left from 2007 – 2009 as well so some of it was conservative fighting back.)
Does this trend signify a rise in social justice ideology or the NY Times getting better at product-market fit?
Very likely so as the divisions of News sources really got heavy at the time. And the 2009 was the heyday of Fox News and the huge impact of Glenn Beck dominating the Fox News move to the right. Also remember it used to Hannity and Colmes before 2009 as well. Fox News was a lot closer to the center during the prime Bush years of 2001 – 2006 but starting getting strong right when the public turned against Iraq War and the Housing Bust was becoming clearer. Breitbart popularity really grew at the time as well. (So there was a move of the center during the late Bush 2007 to Obama 2010 years.)
And remember Glenn Beck went anti-Obama those years and stated on TV that Obama had a deep rooted hatred of white people in 2010.
I just tried searching the terms on google trends and they all have notable upswings in the early 2010s, though less pronounced than the NYT, and the google trends seem more cyclical in the long run (e.g. apparently ‘whiteness’ was almost as high as a search term in the early 2000s as today, but declined considerably, then resurged in the early 2010s).
I suspect a lot of this is the low traction of The Great Recession which really slowed down young people moving to adulthood. So younger people are longer identifying as political instead of as career or family.
Otherwise, this is also an out-growth of the Obama election. And yes it could be left media but remember the blast of conservative media in early Obama years and Fox News taking a hard right/anti-Obama stance.
That is an interesting point: how much does the state of the economy influence the personality/identity of the cohort entering the workforce at that time?
Easy…I hold one reason why young people are heavier Political Identity is because People 25 -30 are not identifying as much for their careers, as a parent, husband/wife or religion as much similar ages in the past. In my case by 27 I was letting go of harder politics and became a complete Clintonite when I was settled in a career and newly married.
So society needs certain milestones for child to reach adulthood. Say in the 1950s, a young man could graduate High School, spend 2 years in the military and become married to set his adult identity. This has moved a lot since then with young people are not identifying in a career or family formation until 30+.
In general, Identity is important to all successful people as a way of making their way in the world. And I do agree with conservatives that many Progressives have used political identity to replace religious and/or career identity. Note, I do find the conservative religious identity really tiresome because the Jerry Falwell and Jeffress are truly Political Identity. There are plenty Christians evangelicals that vote Democrat. (And we state that Biden is winning Southern African-American identity but not Biden is winning the Democratic Evangelical Southern voters.)
Never has there been such a movement where you can appear to do being so much by doing so little. Nah, that’s probably not it.
As Thomas Sowell says, “Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital”.
The social justice teachings of the professors in the Liberal Arts/Social Sciences reached the point where the deficiency in human capital of grads manifested itself in the dormant economy of 2010-2015. Increasingly, the non-STEM areas of college are being seen as a detriment to students and to prospective employees. Solution is to double down.
That’s also right after the 2010 elections in which Democrats lost their House majority. After 2010 the Obama administration was largely neutered. I suspect that progressives had taken Obama’s election as a sign of imminent, lasting victory and went a bit nuts when his mandate was as transitory as any other president’s.