Tyler Cowen on living remote; The Zvi on schooling remote; Harvey Mansfield on Trump; Sullivan and Rufo; Hanania's FITs tour; FAIR links on declining rationality
I thought Cowen's "living remote" thing missed the obvious point that there's a vast difference between living in a city and living in a big elite coastal city.
For instance, sure, if you want to move to the middle of nowhere in Indiana, there won't be Israeli dance classes. On the other hand, this does exist in Indianapolis. https://www.israelidanceindy.com
When I moved from NoVA to Indy, the property values were such that I went from having a mortgage to buying my home outright. Traffic is better, I have a huge increase in available time. I'd argue that governance is notably better in Indiana. Schools and school choice seem better. Pretty much everything a person would want to actually live seems better. Basically, moving from a huge metro area to a moderately sized metro area was a huge increase in practical wealth for me.
Randomly too, I've always though it'd be a great tool of economic development to break up the bureaucracy of DC by physically relocating major agencies to cities doing poorly. Like, relocate 75% of the IRS to Detroit.
Nearly everything that supposedly "in the city" is either in my exurban town or within a 15 min drive to the nearest bigger town. If its really specialized then its maybe a 30 min drive away.
Sorry, cities offer nothing but dysfunction and high cost of living. The only thing they have a comparative advantage in is deviancy.
Well, I like a good mix of deviancy in my life, and the exurbs only exist because of a city. So they're a good mix for people like you, while I can live a pretty good suburban existence, dabble in deviancy, and not be 30 minutes away from a good hospital or decent bite to eat.
Some places (rural and urban) are always going to be managed better than others. I think my nearby city sounds better managed than yours. But as far as cost of living, I think it's indisputable that if you don't have enough people, in the market, things like health care are gonna get expensive.
I was recently in California after having not lived there for two decades. Since I left that state I have been reading posts from people there complaining about the NIMBY / zoning / anti-building problem the entire time.
And, even correcting for the number of writers there and how much worse their media-rent-to-median-income ratio was compared to the rest of the country, it seemed their complaints were still at least a little out of proportion to the issue which, in my impression, affected most places more or less to a similar degree. Even Houston has it de facto if not de jure.
I figured that California probably had the same amount of additional building on average as many other places, which however slow is still steady, and over 20 years has sometimes utterly transformed the places I have lived, some of which are barely recognizable in places. Sure, prop 13 is another special distortion, but how bad could it be in terms of freezing people in place? I used to think "BANANA" when presented as an accurate description was a ridiculous exaggeration.
But, lo and behold, especially near the beach areas, it was like going back in time! I recognized everything, as if nothing had changed at all except the names on a few restaurants. Places which, if they were anywhere else in the world, would be occupied by 40-story condo high-rises and luxury hotels like Miami Beach were still occupied by the same bunch of small, short units. It's amazing how "bedroom community" suburban so much of the whole LA metro feels.
Except for renovations and tear-down-rebuilds to make things look a little more modern and slick (probably for resale), I would figure the total amount of livable square feet or total bedrooms within 20 blocks of the ocean was probably no different than it was when Bill Clinton was President when the population was 25% smaller. I guessed that properties in some areas that seemed particularly frozen would be exorbitantly priced, and then when I looked it up, they were *five times* exorbitant.
I think the people who say that the current incumbents who got to California a generation or two ago, liked what they saw, and then decided they didn't want any of that to change even a little bit, are basically correct.
Also, there must be no incentive to maintain or upgrade some commercial lots that can't be put to any other use, so a lot of locations looked surprisingly shoddy and junky in appearance with a blighted, run-down look. Homeless tents and the smell of cannabis smoke everywhere didn't help things either.
A lot of places didn't seem like NYC (or some places in the Bay Area) where people of ordinary means are making it by living the ant-hill lifestyle and cramming together with a bunch of roommates in apartments. I don't think anyone could live near SoCal beaches without being genuinely very wealthy, but nevertheless, outside the few really lavish sites, these rich people weren't living large in any way except in their choice of location, and they had what by all appearances seemed to be a kind of ordinary middle class lifestyle, just at many multiples of what that same lifestyle would cost, say, somewhere in the midwest.
Can still spread them out more. I don't particularly care about them. There are something like 280k government workers, plus who knows how many contractors.
Take 30% of that, and disburse them up adding 10-20k jobs per target city. That'd be a meaningful boost to the economic base of several places.
I am in favor of this in theory and in intention, but every time I've looked closely at it, it doesn't really work in practice. People think "government worker" they think bureaucrat puke sitting in a DC cube. But that's not really most of them, just the admin. Think of IRS or FEMA in their regional offices, FBI and District Courts spread all out, VA in all the hospitals, military in the bases, immigration stuff at the border and ports, TSA in the airports.
A lot of the low-hanging fruit of moving stuff away has already been picked. The problem is that a lot of face-to-face meetings still need to happen at the top levels, and then those people with the level right below them, for more levels than you might think before it's not critical at high-frequency.
The way USG keeps all those cities and regions afloat is by a thousand redistribution programs which pump in far, far more money than relocating a few thousand bureaucrats ever could.
When I read Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton I was struck by how deeply concerned he was with avoiding too much democratization. He warned of the dangers of democracy up to the very last night of his life.
"Since one purpose of the duel was to prepare to head off a secessionist threat, he wrote a plea to Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, warning against any such movement among New England Federalists: “I will here express but one sentiment, which is that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good.” The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule."
Truly, this is the basic thrust of most of the Federalist papers and the US Constitution as designed by Hamilton and Madison.
A question I'm interested in is how does a contemporary conservative/libertarian audience such as this one make sense of Hamilton and Jefferson, his principal opponent. To simplify (perhaps too much) Hamilton was pro-government power and anti-democracy. Jefferson the opposite.
Being (like Jefferson) pro-democracy means favoring the tyranny of the majority. But being (like Jefferson) anti-government (i.e., favoring weak government) means that the tyranny will be relatively mild.
On the three layers of CRT - this understanding is fatally flawed if it does not include the layer making money off CRT, including HR employees, DIE consultants, and all those getting special preferences for school admissions, hiring, promotions, awards, publications, etc.
Re: Rufo, he misses the layer of useful idiots. The No Enemies to the Left types who will swallow anything you put on their plate, as long as it's served up as part of The Struggle. IE, The impressionable morons who hear "social justice" and think "oh, I like justice and fashionable causes du jour; guess I should sign up for CRT" and they jump on the bandwagon with both feet. These people exist, there are a lot of them, and they suck.
Mansfield "on Trump" could also have been "on close-mindedness in college":
"It's striking that the range of argument in the universities is so much more narrow than in American society as a whole. That, I think, is a great danger, more for the universities than for American society. The universities are the source of our experts and, it should be, of our open mindedness. But they've stopped being open-minded. That is a real problem, and that is getting worse and worse. I would say this “wokeism” characterizes the recent decade or so. There's been a real change even in the last ten years, I would say, toward aggressive intolerance in the universities.
...
Harvard hasn't hired a conservative professor… I don't know, in the last decade for sure, across all fields."
He's right.
Mansfield seems oblivious to the idea that Democrat aggressive intolerance has led Republicans to look for somebody, anybody, to "fight back". He had implicitly opposed fighting back as vulgar and lacking conservative dignity, as he discusses Trump as:
"against conventions. [Trump is] against morality, and propriety—I’ll use that word. The one thing he totally lacks is a sense of propriety, what is appropriate. And conservatives live by that, by propriety, by wearing neckties and so on, and trying to behave, and in trying to maintain one’s dignity. I think that's the way in which conservatives express their support for liberty."
If conservative propriety, like in Romney, means losing both culture and economics, the successful oriented Republicans will prefer Trump, and winning, or at least fighting to win.
Re: Scheffer et al., "Language is getting less rational" (PNAS 2022)
The study highlights also a second, parallel finding—a synchronous shift from "collectivistic" to "individualistic" language:
"use of words associated with rationality, such as 'determine' and 'conclusion,' rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as 'feel' and 'believe' declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as 'I'/'we' and 'he'/'they.' Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. [... .] All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion. [... .] the universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and—inextricably linked—between the rational and the emotional or framed otherwise."
I would not have guessed a positive correlation of individualism and the emotional. Upon reflection, neuroticism might be the link.
The parallel positive correlation of collectivism and the rational is more baffling. What am I missing?
If language embodies social psychology, and if libertarianism combines individualism and the rational, then libertarianism is swimming against a "sea tide" expressed in language change.
"As a thought experiment, imagine what you would do with your children if there were no state-provided day care, but the money that went for it went to you instead."
One obvious answer is 'private school', but that feels like cheating. The whole point is "what if you can't send them to a building" Maybe an additional fair constraint would be that they have to stay home or in small pods.
I think to make it a useful experiment, you'd also have to open up a lot of labor freedom that currently doesn't exist. The development of state-provided day care (/education) is coincident with the destruction of traditional forms of employment and apprenticeship.
If it were legal to do so, we could imagine a world where my company gives my kids a nominal wage (or its just part of my wage) to teach them my trade (statistical analysis, computer programming, office work, travel, conducting inspections, etc) just as, historically, a kid growing up on a farm would learn by doing how to be a farmer.
There have been reports recently that several countries are considering lowering the minimum age to operate certain equipment - for example, semi-trucks and forklifts - in order to help ease the logistics-sector labor 'shortage' contributor to supply chain crisis.
Typical comment, "Totally crazy, how can they even think of letting x-year olds do that? Can't be safe! And also, this is child-labor, those 'kids' should be learning or something. Our political leader is evil and stupid and insane!"
From the same person, "Waaah, the store shelves are not getting re-stocked, deliveries are taking longer, I can't get things the minute I want them at the old prices!"
Also from the same person, "Have you seen these prices? Inflation is terrible! I'll never shop at Y again! Why is the government not doing anything to stop this?"
Meanwhile, I turn to teenager, "How'd you like to earn about a hundred bucks a day moving stuff around on a forklift for a few weeks this summer?" - "Driving a forklift actually sounds kind of fun actually. I'd like to learn how to do that, and if they let me, and I might even do it for free for a while, just to have that experience."
"We can't maintain operations because employees might get covid and get sick."
"Yeah, it's too bad we don't have a reserve army of unemployed people who are mostly sitting on their asses, or wasting their time and money in signaling races with no real learning - who would like to earn a little money and actually learn new skills, and who, as a bonus, nature has made practically immune to covid."
Yeah didn't we already find this out during the pandemic.
We would either do private school, some kind of rotational homeschool pod, or just homeschool. We are doing one of those anyway as it is.
I'm partial to the idea that literally doing nothing but let kids play in the yard would be superior to the "open school" that Zvi describes. Even if the masks go away I can never trust my kids with those that have revealed themselves to be child abusers.
People may be less rational than they used to be. But part of the language shift may simply be more honesty. When people say, "I conclude", they may want people to think they have rationally considered the relevant evidence and thought about the relevant possibilities and rationally come to a conclusion. They may even believe it. But often they are actually acting more on feeling than reason. And it is more honest to say, "I feel this is true" or "I feel this is what we should do."
(This comes partly from reading Haidt, and Simler and Hanson, and Mercier and Sperber.)
Nah, it's just degeneration from repeated exposure to bad influences and from the breakdown of the former mechanisms which used to hold the line on discipline and standards. The schools have undergone a thorough de-Grammar-Nazification. It's just like when valley girl-speak and uptalking broke out into the mainstream. No need to try and make a lawyer's case of barely-plausible excuses for such clients.
Just last week I ribbed a retired General for putting "we feel" in an official memo, when he really meant and wanted to convey exactly what you said, "We thought about this rationally, weighed the pros and cons of various courses of actions, and determined that the best one was ... " He shook his head saying, "Ten years ago I would have had some Colonel's ass for putting that in a memo to me, but after years working here ... " (waves to desks occupied overwhelmingly by women).
Language is a social convention with its own trends and fashions and people are always re-adjusting to what they hear and read. Just like "you are the average of your five closest friends", or "you are what you eat", you say what you hear and read from the people to whom you have the most exposure.
Irving Kristol once wrote about the asymmetry of commentary about influences when the elite had taken up a posture of anti-elitism. It became 'problematic' to criticize something for being degrading or decadent or degenerative if the criticism either aligned with traditional bourgeois / conservative beliefs or else if it was seen as too elitist and 'snobby' or monoculturist to demand high standards from some particular source. But at the same time, the people who would condemn such criticism would praise high quality work (which, at the time, basically meant being able to meet those snobby elitist standards) as enlightening, uplifting, ennobling, and so forth. It's incoherent to simultaneously do the latter while rejecting the former.
I see the same asymmetry with regards to cultural qualities all over the place. Example of degeneration all have excuses, and they all stink.
Interesting hypothesis regarding women in academia. Of course the rational thing to do would be to look for empirical evidence regarding it and competing hypotheses. Has anyone done this?
“ The more that we elevate women in academia, the more that written words will come from women, which means that more language will reflect empathizing rather than systemizing. ”
The other day, Arnold, you confessed to making up a trend (growth in non-profits), did a thought experiment (too many of the next 10 young professionals I meet will be employed by non-profits), and thus was self-triggered into a parody of a rant for ATLAS SHRUGGED. If you instead had empathized with these imaginary young professionals and tried to figure out why they would be working for these imaginary non-profits, I think your writing would have been far more insightful.
Wright and Hanania link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsVA77iLkyo&t=6s
I thought Cowen's "living remote" thing missed the obvious point that there's a vast difference between living in a city and living in a big elite coastal city.
For instance, sure, if you want to move to the middle of nowhere in Indiana, there won't be Israeli dance classes. On the other hand, this does exist in Indianapolis. https://www.israelidanceindy.com
When I moved from NoVA to Indy, the property values were such that I went from having a mortgage to buying my home outright. Traffic is better, I have a huge increase in available time. I'd argue that governance is notably better in Indiana. Schools and school choice seem better. Pretty much everything a person would want to actually live seems better. Basically, moving from a huge metro area to a moderately sized metro area was a huge increase in practical wealth for me.
Randomly too, I've always though it'd be a great tool of economic development to break up the bureaucracy of DC by physically relocating major agencies to cities doing poorly. Like, relocate 75% of the IRS to Detroit.
Nearly everything that supposedly "in the city" is either in my exurban town or within a 15 min drive to the nearest bigger town. If its really specialized then its maybe a 30 min drive away.
Sorry, cities offer nothing but dysfunction and high cost of living. The only thing they have a comparative advantage in is deviancy.
Well, I like a good mix of deviancy in my life, and the exurbs only exist because of a city. So they're a good mix for people like you, while I can live a pretty good suburban existence, dabble in deviancy, and not be 30 minutes away from a good hospital or decent bite to eat.
Some places (rural and urban) are always going to be managed better than others. I think my nearby city sounds better managed than yours. But as far as cost of living, I think it's indisputable that if you don't have enough people, in the market, things like health care are gonna get expensive.
I think most of the excessive cost of cities is zoning against density and failure to price congestion externalities and urban road and street use.
I was recently in California after having not lived there for two decades. Since I left that state I have been reading posts from people there complaining about the NIMBY / zoning / anti-building problem the entire time.
And, even correcting for the number of writers there and how much worse their media-rent-to-median-income ratio was compared to the rest of the country, it seemed their complaints were still at least a little out of proportion to the issue which, in my impression, affected most places more or less to a similar degree. Even Houston has it de facto if not de jure.
I figured that California probably had the same amount of additional building on average as many other places, which however slow is still steady, and over 20 years has sometimes utterly transformed the places I have lived, some of which are barely recognizable in places. Sure, prop 13 is another special distortion, but how bad could it be in terms of freezing people in place? I used to think "BANANA" when presented as an accurate description was a ridiculous exaggeration.
But, lo and behold, especially near the beach areas, it was like going back in time! I recognized everything, as if nothing had changed at all except the names on a few restaurants. Places which, if they were anywhere else in the world, would be occupied by 40-story condo high-rises and luxury hotels like Miami Beach were still occupied by the same bunch of small, short units. It's amazing how "bedroom community" suburban so much of the whole LA metro feels.
Except for renovations and tear-down-rebuilds to make things look a little more modern and slick (probably for resale), I would figure the total amount of livable square feet or total bedrooms within 20 blocks of the ocean was probably no different than it was when Bill Clinton was President when the population was 25% smaller. I guessed that properties in some areas that seemed particularly frozen would be exorbitantly priced, and then when I looked it up, they were *five times* exorbitant.
I think the people who say that the current incumbents who got to California a generation or two ago, liked what they saw, and then decided they didn't want any of that to change even a little bit, are basically correct.
Also, there must be no incentive to maintain or upgrade some commercial lots that can't be put to any other use, so a lot of locations looked surprisingly shoddy and junky in appearance with a blighted, run-down look. Homeless tents and the smell of cannabis smoke everywhere didn't help things either.
A lot of places didn't seem like NYC (or some places in the Bay Area) where people of ordinary means are making it by living the ant-hill lifestyle and cramming together with a bunch of roommates in apartments. I don't think anyone could live near SoCal beaches without being genuinely very wealthy, but nevertheless, outside the few really lavish sites, these rich people weren't living large in any way except in their choice of location, and they had what by all appearances seemed to be a kind of ordinary middle class lifestyle, just at many multiples of what that same lifestyle would cost, say, somewhere in the midwest.
Isn't the IRS (which has shrunk employment about 20% in the last decade) already pretty spread out?
Can still spread them out more. I don't particularly care about them. There are something like 280k government workers, plus who knows how many contractors.
Take 30% of that, and disburse them up adding 10-20k jobs per target city. That'd be a meaningful boost to the economic base of several places.
I am in favor of this in theory and in intention, but every time I've looked closely at it, it doesn't really work in practice. People think "government worker" they think bureaucrat puke sitting in a DC cube. But that's not really most of them, just the admin. Think of IRS or FEMA in their regional offices, FBI and District Courts spread all out, VA in all the hospitals, military in the bases, immigration stuff at the border and ports, TSA in the airports.
A lot of the low-hanging fruit of moving stuff away has already been picked. The problem is that a lot of face-to-face meetings still need to happen at the top levels, and then those people with the level right below them, for more levels than you might think before it's not critical at high-frequency.
The way USG keeps all those cities and regions afloat is by a thousand redistribution programs which pump in far, far more money than relocating a few thousand bureaucrats ever could.
Re: Mansfield
When I read Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton I was struck by how deeply concerned he was with avoiding too much democratization. He warned of the dangers of democracy up to the very last night of his life.
"Since one purpose of the duel was to prepare to head off a secessionist threat, he wrote a plea to Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, warning against any such movement among New England Federalists: “I will here express but one sentiment, which is that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good.” The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule."
Truly, this is the basic thrust of most of the Federalist papers and the US Constitution as designed by Hamilton and Madison.
A question I'm interested in is how does a contemporary conservative/libertarian audience such as this one make sense of Hamilton and Jefferson, his principal opponent. To simplify (perhaps too much) Hamilton was pro-government power and anti-democracy. Jefferson the opposite.
Being (like Jefferson) pro-democracy means favoring the tyranny of the majority. But being (like Jefferson) anti-government (i.e., favoring weak government) means that the tyranny will be relatively mild.
On the three layers of CRT - this understanding is fatally flawed if it does not include the layer making money off CRT, including HR employees, DIE consultants, and all those getting special preferences for school admissions, hiring, promotions, awards, publications, etc.
Re: Rufo, he misses the layer of useful idiots. The No Enemies to the Left types who will swallow anything you put on their plate, as long as it's served up as part of The Struggle. IE, The impressionable morons who hear "social justice" and think "oh, I like justice and fashionable causes du jour; guess I should sign up for CRT" and they jump on the bandwagon with both feet. These people exist, there are a lot of them, and they suck.
Mansfield "on Trump" could also have been "on close-mindedness in college":
"It's striking that the range of argument in the universities is so much more narrow than in American society as a whole. That, I think, is a great danger, more for the universities than for American society. The universities are the source of our experts and, it should be, of our open mindedness. But they've stopped being open-minded. That is a real problem, and that is getting worse and worse. I would say this “wokeism” characterizes the recent decade or so. There's been a real change even in the last ten years, I would say, toward aggressive intolerance in the universities.
...
Harvard hasn't hired a conservative professor… I don't know, in the last decade for sure, across all fields."
He's right.
Mansfield seems oblivious to the idea that Democrat aggressive intolerance has led Republicans to look for somebody, anybody, to "fight back". He had implicitly opposed fighting back as vulgar and lacking conservative dignity, as he discusses Trump as:
"against conventions. [Trump is] against morality, and propriety—I’ll use that word. The one thing he totally lacks is a sense of propriety, what is appropriate. And conservatives live by that, by propriety, by wearing neckties and so on, and trying to behave, and in trying to maintain one’s dignity. I think that's the way in which conservatives express their support for liberty."
If conservative propriety, like in Romney, means losing both culture and economics, the successful oriented Republicans will prefer Trump, and winning, or at least fighting to win.
Losing not only culture and economics, but everything else (esp. *all* freedoms).
Good theoretical worry about Trump although in his case it's the tyranny of the minority.
Israeli dance sessions—that’s culture!
As for moving to a start-up seastead: You would expect a preponderance of libertarians, therefore a preponderance of men over women.
Re: Scheffer et al., "Language is getting less rational" (PNAS 2022)
The study highlights also a second, parallel finding—a synchronous shift from "collectivistic" to "individualistic" language:
"use of words associated with rationality, such as 'determine' and 'conclusion,' rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as 'feel' and 'believe' declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as 'I'/'we' and 'he'/'they.' Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. [... .] All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion. [... .] the universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and—inextricably linked—between the rational and the emotional or framed otherwise."
I would not have guessed a positive correlation of individualism and the emotional. Upon reflection, neuroticism might be the link.
The parallel positive correlation of collectivism and the rational is more baffling. What am I missing?
If language embodies social psychology, and if libertarianism combines individualism and the rational, then libertarianism is swimming against a "sea tide" expressed in language change.
Have a nice day.
"As a thought experiment, imagine what you would do with your children if there were no state-provided day care, but the money that went for it went to you instead."
One obvious answer is 'private school', but that feels like cheating. The whole point is "what if you can't send them to a building" Maybe an additional fair constraint would be that they have to stay home or in small pods.
In that case I'd probably go for a pod.
I think to make it a useful experiment, you'd also have to open up a lot of labor freedom that currently doesn't exist. The development of state-provided day care (/education) is coincident with the destruction of traditional forms of employment and apprenticeship.
If it were legal to do so, we could imagine a world where my company gives my kids a nominal wage (or its just part of my wage) to teach them my trade (statistical analysis, computer programming, office work, travel, conducting inspections, etc) just as, historically, a kid growing up on a farm would learn by doing how to be a farmer.
There have been reports recently that several countries are considering lowering the minimum age to operate certain equipment - for example, semi-trucks and forklifts - in order to help ease the logistics-sector labor 'shortage' contributor to supply chain crisis.
Typical comment, "Totally crazy, how can they even think of letting x-year olds do that? Can't be safe! And also, this is child-labor, those 'kids' should be learning or something. Our political leader is evil and stupid and insane!"
From the same person, "Waaah, the store shelves are not getting re-stocked, deliveries are taking longer, I can't get things the minute I want them at the old prices!"
Also from the same person, "Have you seen these prices? Inflation is terrible! I'll never shop at Y again! Why is the government not doing anything to stop this?"
Meanwhile, I turn to teenager, "How'd you like to earn about a hundred bucks a day moving stuff around on a forklift for a few weeks this summer?" - "Driving a forklift actually sounds kind of fun actually. I'd like to learn how to do that, and if they let me, and I might even do it for free for a while, just to have that experience."
Oh well.
Ironically, I learned how to drive a forklift when I was 15, and yeah, it was pretty awesome.
"We can't maintain operations because employees might get covid and get sick."
"Yeah, it's too bad we don't have a reserve army of unemployed people who are mostly sitting on their asses, or wasting their time and money in signaling races with no real learning - who would like to earn a little money and actually learn new skills, and who, as a bonus, nature has made practically immune to covid."
Yeah didn't we already find this out during the pandemic.
We would either do private school, some kind of rotational homeschool pod, or just homeschool. We are doing one of those anyway as it is.
I'm partial to the idea that literally doing nothing but let kids play in the yard would be superior to the "open school" that Zvi describes. Even if the masks go away I can never trust my kids with those that have revealed themselves to be child abusers.
People may be less rational than they used to be. But part of the language shift may simply be more honesty. When people say, "I conclude", they may want people to think they have rationally considered the relevant evidence and thought about the relevant possibilities and rationally come to a conclusion. They may even believe it. But often they are actually acting more on feeling than reason. And it is more honest to say, "I feel this is true" or "I feel this is what we should do."
(This comes partly from reading Haidt, and Simler and Hanson, and Mercier and Sperber.)
Nah, it's just degeneration from repeated exposure to bad influences and from the breakdown of the former mechanisms which used to hold the line on discipline and standards. The schools have undergone a thorough de-Grammar-Nazification. It's just like when valley girl-speak and uptalking broke out into the mainstream. No need to try and make a lawyer's case of barely-plausible excuses for such clients.
Just last week I ribbed a retired General for putting "we feel" in an official memo, when he really meant and wanted to convey exactly what you said, "We thought about this rationally, weighed the pros and cons of various courses of actions, and determined that the best one was ... " He shook his head saying, "Ten years ago I would have had some Colonel's ass for putting that in a memo to me, but after years working here ... " (waves to desks occupied overwhelmingly by women).
Language is a social convention with its own trends and fashions and people are always re-adjusting to what they hear and read. Just like "you are the average of your five closest friends", or "you are what you eat", you say what you hear and read from the people to whom you have the most exposure.
Irving Kristol once wrote about the asymmetry of commentary about influences when the elite had taken up a posture of anti-elitism. It became 'problematic' to criticize something for being degrading or decadent or degenerative if the criticism either aligned with traditional bourgeois / conservative beliefs or else if it was seen as too elitist and 'snobby' or monoculturist to demand high standards from some particular source. But at the same time, the people who would condemn such criticism would praise high quality work (which, at the time, basically meant being able to meet those snobby elitist standards) as enlightening, uplifting, ennobling, and so forth. It's incoherent to simultaneously do the latter while rejecting the former.
I see the same asymmetry with regards to cultural qualities all over the place. Example of degeneration all have excuses, and they all stink.
"Example of degeneration all have excuses, and they all stink." Please clarify.
Interesting hypothesis regarding women in academia. Of course the rational thing to do would be to look for empirical evidence regarding it and competing hypotheses. Has anyone done this?
“ The more that we elevate women in academia, the more that written words will come from women, which means that more language will reflect empathizing rather than systemizing. ”
The other day, Arnold, you confessed to making up a trend (growth in non-profits), did a thought experiment (too many of the next 10 young professionals I meet will be employed by non-profits), and thus was self-triggered into a parody of a rant for ATLAS SHRUGGED. If you instead had empathized with these imaginary young professionals and tried to figure out why they would be working for these imaginary non-profits, I think your writing would have been far more insightful.