Keeping up with the FITs, no. 7

On Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion Community, Brian Stewart writes about the hopes and disappointments of the Arab Spring. I would point out that Martin Gurri first spotted what he calls “the revolt of the public” in this movement. It was the first set of mass demonstrations that was instigated over social media. As Gurri points out, in the past in order to get a large mass of people into the streets, you needed an organized movement, which in turn had some sort of plan or program. The demonstrations inspired by social media do not have any organization behind them, and they are thus prone to the syndrome of “you won, now what?”

On a completely different and more hopeful subject, Matt Ridley writes,

We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid. 

Glenn Loury participates in a discussion of the black family. Robert Woodson says,

there were at that time [in 1980] 3 million kids being cared for by non-relatives. Half of the 3 million are black. So blacks are disproportionately caring for non-relative children without any aid from the government as foster parents. That's a strength.

But is it? Woodson is a glass-half-full type. Others in the discussion are more glass-half-empty.

Amanda Ripley discusses education in America.

I followed a student from Oklahoma to Finland, and the vocational school in her town was actually way more popular [for students there]. It was a constant struggle for the university-track high school to keep students, and there was this interesting sort of competition between the vocational and academic tracks. The vocational school had all this cool equipment and technology and connections to big companies, and that was exciting for a lot of students because it ended in a decent-paying job.

Bari Weiss is going to spend the week with posts addressing the state of American education. In her introductory essay, she says

When anyone talking about justice and equality suggests that learning loss isn’t something that should be measured right now — last week the head of the L.A. teachers union actually said “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. . . They know the words insurrection and coup” — I think of Shemar.

Emily Oster explains why vaccine efficacy fades a bit but does not go away.

To briefly summarize, vaccines help protect you in two ways. First, you develop antibodies to the virus, which are immediately available to protect you if you’re exposed. Second, you produce memory cells, which remember how to produce antibodies if you need them later. The initial antibodies stick around for a while but not forever, but the memory cells remain. 

If you’re exposed to the virus in the period shortly after vaccination, when you have active antibodies, your body is ready to go. You fight off the virus fast, and you probably won’t get sick at all. If you’re exposed later, though, it takes a few days for your memory cells to kick in. So you may get slightly sick

Razib Khan discusses the crazy-quilt ethnic pattern of Afghanistan, and he mentions the just-plain crazy ethnic classification system used in America.

individuals from Afghanistan are classified as white under the US-Census racial categories, in keeping with the status of other ethnicities from the Middle East and North Africa. Bizarrely, a Pathan from Pakistan is an “Asian American,” while a Pashtun from just across the border is “white” (Pathan is simply the term for Pashtun in India and Pakistan), despite the two groups being nearly genetically indistinguishable.

I continue to argue that getting rid of ethnic classifications in all official surveys and reports, including the Census, would be very constructive.