Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.
With Wokism in ascendance among the young, it is hard to see how I am going to live to see its recession.
Or, as Greer puts it,
The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days. Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.
Have a nice day.
I wonder when America lost the millennials.
My guess is when the nation allowed housing to become so expensive, largely due to property zoning.
Also, college education priced to the moon, but necessary for a “good job.”
Several decades of declining labor shares of income, globalized labor markets and open borders…a central bank that fought against unemployment rates below 5%.
The end of neighborhood schools through forced bussing.
So, you can work like a dog, but never buy a house or pay off the college loan. Raise a small family?…but that takes two incomes.
Sure, the kids figured it out, the system no longer works. I am surprised they did…I thought you had to be at least 65 to know something had gone downhill….
Start a business? But politicians could just wipe you out at the start of the next flu season.
Eh, what is a culture these days? Compare your youth growing up in St. Louis to your children, Arnold, how many more cultural influences did they have to choose from, between cable TV, the internet, greater travel, etc.? I assume you think the net benefit was substantial since you didn’t go Mosquito Coast on them. 🙂
The internet has vastly grown two old but small cultures to the point where they are starting to dominate the old mass cultures: mobs and hobbies. The mobs are what you despair about but they are fairly fractured, often fighting with each other in online text squabbles that change nothing. Even when they lead to widespread in-person protests and riots, their demanded reforms are usually so stupid that they accomplish the opposite of their goals, as Sailer points out with BLM.
Meanwhile, hobby culture is often ignored, but it has led to hundreds of thousands of communities blooming online. One such culture created the linux kernel, we cannot imagine how much more great stuff is going to come from them next.
How do you square this fact with your opposition to fighting CRT in K-12. Seems to me that kids that grow up marinated in this stuff are going to be an even more lost generation.
Is it time to stop with the Ls?
Meanwhile, in Fairfax where the local Asians managed to rest control of the PTA for the magnet school under attack, the state PTA overturned the local parents and threatened to revoke their charter and seize all their funds (donated by those same parents for their schools kids).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-pta-purge-of-asians-11626128073
These are the people you want to keep giving Ws to.
Yikes.
Food for thought: if this sort of setback happened to the left, they’d organize a protest right outside the homes of the state PTA officials.
Yes, the TJ PTSA battle is worth keeping an eye on.
I’ll note an additional subtlety: there is a non-negligible zero-sum-arms-race component to the admissions test that is worth keeping in check. It is possible to move in that direction in a way that improves overall outcomes and doesn’t compromise academic quality. I’m not optimistic about TJ threading that needle in the short term, but other institutions, possibly in other countries, will rise to take its place. CCNY fell, and that sucked for New York City, but other American universities picked up the slack then.
Test prep doesn’t do anything. I used to work for a test prep company, even they know they are selling snake oil. Blacks harp on test prep because they fact that they are too lazy to do it is suppose to excuse their underperformance.
The Asians would be better off if they scaled back their test prep 90% because they would get basically the same scores. They are over prepared. Ending anti-Asian admissions practices would help in alleviating Asian paranoia and needless overstudying.
I’m sorry but the statement “Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.” sounds good but is false. It is not Millenials who are enacting the absurd changes across America’s institutions, it’s Baby Boomers. Baby Boomers are running universities, government officials, and corporate America. They are implementing these changes. Further, it is largely Baby Boomers who have elected the politicians who are implementing these ideas. I suggest we stop buying clever phrases and look in the mirror. We have permitted this to happen. We have remained silent when progressives have trampled on liberal ideas. The simple reality is that old people abandoned liberal ideas for progressive ideals. Baby Boomers replaced old ideas with new ones. The statement is pure nonsense.
When were the Boomers liberal? When the Civil Rights movement was getting going in the early 60s the oldest Boomers were teenagers and the youngest Boomers weren’t born yet. The early counter culture was the 1945-1950 cohort, but they were a modest sized set of the overall Boomer generation. The last years of the boomers started going to college in the early 80s, these are the people who elected Clinton and Bush and not the minuscule fraction of whose went to Woodstock.
–“With Wokism in ascendance among the young, it is hard to see how I am going to live to see its recession.”–
Arnold, this is one of the reasons why teaching it needs to be banned in both K-12 and higher education. It’s in ascendance among the young in part because that is what they are being taught.
–“The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days. Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.”–
Likely so in aggregate, but some can be reasoned with, and pulled out of their indoctrination. I was in college before things got really bad there, but I don’t think it’s any accident that the only time I ever supported Democrats was the end of my college career and the 3-4 years after. I eventually came to my senses, and so have several others I know. The most pressing problem wokeness poses for me personally is from the Gen X white guys in senior management at my company who are falling over themselves to promote it.
The last gift of the second half of the Baby Boom generation. The writing on the wall was there in the 1980s with the ideas of deconstructionism and post-colonialism taking root in the universities. As a member of the first half of Gen X, I am glad to have missed out on most of it. But my kids won’t be so lucky.
One question is whether the “biological solution” story is consistent with the period of triumph of the Monetarists, Chicago Schoolers, “Freshwaters”, etc.
This one really depends on one’s view of the historical narrative, which lends itself to several plausible interpretations.
One thing we can look at is the timing of the actual funerals. That is, when the high-status Keynesians and Saltwaters actually died.
The problem with a theory that economics in particular progresses with funerals is that there aren’t enough funerals.
When one looks at the actual elite economists, a ton of them live exceptionally long lives, adding some weight to the theory that IQ / g is mostly a manifestation of general ‘health’ and low, health-sapping genetic load across a large number of genes, such that conceptually ‘simple’ CRISPR ‘spell-checking’ could make a version of ‘you’ (more likely your descendants) who is many standard deviations better along many dimensions than the one weighed down by all the little mutated errors.
But the point is, there just aren’t enough funerals of these folks during the critical time period of shifts of ideas. For example, Milton Friedman’s public foil*, Paul Samuelson didn’t pass away until 2009 at age 94, and a lot of those guys lived a really long time. Galbraith in 2006 at 97. Hayek in 1992 at 92. Buchanan at 2013 at 93. Tullock 2014 at 92. Friedman was 2006 at 94. Coase in 2013 at 102. I could go on – it’s really amazing.
Now, the shape of one of the narratives told about the transition in ideas is the Keynesian Phillips Curve era, followed by the humiliation of stagflation, followed by the rise in esteem and prominence of Monetarist ideas, followed by the story of Reagan and Volker getting it under control with tight money, which was supposed to have settled the argument in the public mind, giving the classical Keynesians some time in the wilderness and sending them back to their drawing boards.
William Phillips published his statistical comparison of inflation and unemployment in 1958 and it started to get intellectually popular with the not-quite-yet-fully-‘neo’-Keynesians in the 1960s, after Samuelson and Solow published their “Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy” in the AER in 1960. 61 years later, Solow is still alive at 96! In 1967 and 68, Friedman and others argued it wouldn’t hold in the long term, and later predicted stagflation (though whether this and the rest of the history was a lucky coincidence or prescient is also a matter of interpretation. James Forder has a revisionist intellectual history version of the story, “Phillips Curve-based policy? It’s a myth, it didn’t exist.”)
The point is, if you look at this episode and the general shift in the status of the different individuals and ideas and the educated public’s awareness and esteem for them, it didn’t happen with funerals. All the big players on the other side lived through it, and many continued to live, for another two generations apparently! Instead of dying, many also came to change their tunes, often without ever really admitting their past errors, and spent a lot of time trying to salvage what they could with reformulations of classic Keynesianism.
What happened was a giant embarrassment – big enough that it was too hard to ignore, cover up, or deny – and a sudden loss of faith, trust, and confidence in the competency of the center-left economic establishment’s consensus. As a metaphor, the actual markets were a kind of giant prediction markets about which the Saltwaters had placed a big bet which blew up in their faces.
So, another interpretation of the story is that Friedman et al kept the low embers of oppositional ideas going that, on their own power, whether they were intellectually superior or more correct or not, would not have emerged victorious no matter how much “long culture war” effort was put into them. That is, not without *also* being in a “break glass in case of emergency” capacity and being well-positions to benefit from not letting a crisis go to waste which, if any of dozens of major historical turns had gone a different way, may not have happened in the same ‘right’ way at the ‘right’ time.
Likewise, different ideas need different political coalitions and backing for promotion and implementation, and the affiliation of center-left, Socialism-excusing mainstream macroeconomics with the Democrats was perhaps important in that it created a pent-up demand from the Republicans (also British conservatives) for a way to explain the failure of their opponents that also provided good cover to relax taxes and regulations on business interests which, at the time, had not substantially gone woke and aligned with the left.
If there’s anything to that version of the story, then it means that one needs important extra factors to win long culture wars than just trying as hard as one can to produce and spread better, more accurate ideas, but that lots of funerals isn’t necessarily one of them.
*As a good example of an actual commitment to institutionalized and civil version of the “epistemic adversarialism” I’ve advocated in past comments here – not to mention also showing that the past is a foreign country – in 1967, Newsweek ran opposing columns by both Friedman and Samuelson, side-by-side debating the economic issues of the day. Is an opinion that this was *a good thing* to have happened consistent with all the anti-debate sentiment out there? Were they just being ‘soldiers’ for their tribal, polarized teams? Did the press have control over public opinion and represent a single view of the elites, but at the same time, literally platform for the opposite view on the next page of their own outlets? Whoops, looks like they let down their guard along that front of the culture war. Don’t worry though, they learned not to make that mistake again.
All things must pass?
(1970)
https://youtu.be/rqWwZV8Rntg
That’s totally wrong and very typical of conservative depressive laziness. Wokism isn’t some generational thing. It’s only truly popular with elites and their aspiring-elite toady counterparts. Wokism has only been widespread for a few years! Tons of formerly normal people I know got woke due to the George Floyd video. People changed their minds a couple years ago due to overwhelming media gaslighting and conservatives are ready as always to give up.
The motto of conservatives: “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Help please. Are Millennials the issue or is it Gen Z or both?
Haidt/Lukianoff (channeling Twenge), place the genesis of the problem on Gen Z.
(As an aside: Arnold, just wanted to say that I agree with you. Have a nice day! But, I’m not gonna ever throw in the proverbial towel and I sincerely love the optimism and push back here in the comments. This is exactly what we need!)
***
The preoccupation with safetyism is clearest in the generation that began to enter college around 2013. For many years, sociologists and marketers assumed that the “Millennial generation” encompassed everyone born between (roughly) 1982 and 1998 or 2000. But Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University and an authority on intergenerational differences, has found a surprisingly sharp discontinuity that begins around birth-year 1995. She calls those born in and after 1995 “iGen,” short for “internet Generation.” (Others use the term “Generation Z.”) Twenge shows that iGen suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age—and higher rates of suicide. Something is going on; something has changed the childhood experience of kids born in the late 1990s. Twenge focuses on the rapid growth of social media in the years after the iPhone was introduced, in 2007. By 2011 or so, most teens could check in on their social media status every few minutes, and many did.
https://www.thecoddling.com/chapter-1-antifragility
A recent article on crypto claimed that if Bitcoin goes to $100K, then half the world’s billionaires will be crypto-billionaires. Whether or not this is precisely accurate, as governments inflate currencies, the largely young libertarian-leaning crypto world is becoming remarkably wealthy. These people are often living on largely invisible peer-to-peer encrypted networks; they gave up on mainstream social media long ago. CNN and NYT? Forget it. They don’t bother with U.S. policy debates.
Read Balaji Srnivasan to keep up with the future. Pronomos Capital, co-founded by Balaji with Patri Friedman, is investing in Startup City projects around the world. As the crypto-libertarian generation increasingly is of age to raise children, nearly 100% of their children will be raised outside of establishment institutions. Many of these people are expats or digital nomads. The movement is increasingly international, with the brightest, tech savvy, and increasingly wealthy people from around the world simply leaving legacy institutions behind. Competitive governance is here.
The grievance study majors reigning over the rotting corpse of government institutions in the 21st century will find those institutions bankrupt within a decade or so. This world will not be glamorous or fashionable. Young people won’t be attracted to a life in this world. Already no one really wants to teach in government schools.
Meanwhile, smart, agile, crypto-friendly hubs will attract talent and capital. How much of this will take place within the US, how much outside? If solution-oriented government ever becomes possible, these people would like to maintain a home in the U.S. In the meantime, they’re happy living outside the U.S., or at least maintaining legal residency outside if need be.
James Bennett and Michael Lotus make the case that the underlying Anglo-American fundamentals of U.S. culture are strong enough that over the long haul, the U.S. will be fine. We just need to sit back and watch as the establishment institutions ruin themselves a bit more.
https://www.amazon.com/America-3-0-Rebooting-Prosperity-America%C2%92s/dp/1594036438
As long as one looks big picture, and is willing to accept that the U.S. may need to go through a decade or two of something like Detroit or Venezuela, then one can indeed have a nice day. But the seeds of a more positive future are already alive and well in the crypto community.
Kling: “With Wokism in ascendance among the young, it is hard to see how I am going to live to see its recession.”
Sure you will! Just take the 150 supplements a day that Ray Kurzweil is taking.
Doesn’t wholeness itself contradict Greer’s claim? As other have noted, it’s ascendancy these last few years had almost entirely been through conversion.
*wokeness. Autocorrect.
I’m old enough to remember popular culture lamenting about the 60s boomers ‘selling out’ and going mainstream — there were movies and songs produced to complain about this. Millennials may not return to religion (Europeans haven’t), but they’ll ‘sell out’ and go on to live bourgeois lives anyway. Americans became more conservative politically after the 70s despite more of the pre-boomer conservative cohort dying off. ‘One funeral at a time’ isn’t the only way.
I agree with your overall point; merely getting older and wiser tends to disabuse one of the worst ideas their political tribe holds. That said, I think we have reason to worry about young’uns today, in that a couple of things about getting older that push people to the right are a) getting married and having kids and b) accumulating capital. Millenials aren’t doing either of these at the same rate as previous generations, I believe, which is worrisome.
Is there really something more mainstream than every HR department in America? Is there something more mainstream than the CEO of Coca-Cola?
The Disney corporation is all-in for concentration camps for Muslims in China and lying about Gina Carano. Citibank reports its customers to the FBI for having been in DC on January 6.
The president makes false claims about people not being allowed to drink water on the way to a polling booth and America’s CEOs just repeat the lie.
What it would mean to “sell out” if your principles right now are in perfect alignment with the NBA and pretending that Taiwan doesn’t exist and the Pentagon’s theories about “white rage” and the Pulitzer committee and the racist Harvard admissions department?
Let’s get something on inflation. They say its transitory, but the only thing that is transitory is that 2.4% Owner Equivalent Rent.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-06/soaring-u-s-rents-are-the-sticky-inflation-with-staying-power
Is the 10 year just the fed buying or a real market?
The millenials in my family (oldest to youngest):
Private equity marketing manager
High school teacher
Army sergeant
Physical therapist
Restaurant manager
Legal assistant
None are particularly woke though the restaurant manager is trans sensitive because of a friend.
I am really not seeing the problem. If we go out to the cousins kids, you get more of the same. Professionals, trades, a couple of military, a kid that works for Desantis, of all people. There are a couple hard luck cases – alcoholics etc. Basically same as any generation.
The PE guy may be the most “conservative” but he drives a Tesla and doesnt eat meat. The army guy voted for Biden and he thinks the army has a “nazi problem.” The teacher wants to be a principal so she can make more miney and the PT wants to keep the private insurance money flowing through her clinic. But they all vote D. I dont see any of them naming their pronouns so I think a lot of this hyperventilating is bullcrap.
I guess this means then if nobody I know voted for Trump, those people don’t exist either and all that’s hyperventillating bullcrap as well.
Oh please.