37 Comments
Oct 31Liked by Arnold Kling

I certainly can sympathize with Warby wanting a purging of the universities after reading about some of the nonsense being inflicted on university students in Australia (https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/school-life/multiple-victorian-unis-banning-students-from-completing-studies/news-story/1d661765e447d70f8feec365a5960a87 ) but as reading Dr. Kling’s substack has trained me to ask, “who is going to do the purging?”

In the United States, at least, it might be worth considering some of the reform measures that have been advanced. For example, the College Cost Reduction Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6951 ) that was reported in the House this year would seem to put the onus on the credential peddlers to clean up their act and eliminate pointless woke programs by making them financially responsible for when graduates of those programs fail to achieve employment sufficient to pay off their student loans. (https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/1.11.24_h.r._6951_the_college_cost_reduction_act_fact_sheet_digital_final.pdf ). It would also afford prospective students greater information about the costs of programs and their expected return on investment, increase clarity about transfer of credits, reform the accreditation grift, as well as provide comparative information about competing programs. I would have to think about all of the provisions for a while before advocating for it, or not, but my gut is that it is a step in the right direction, especially since several of the higher education lobby groups expressed concern about it. It can’t be all bad if the grifters hate it.

Another option for starving the beast, would be to advocate for the award of credit for study under independent scholars. As I understand it, in the early European universities, students paid tuition directly to teachers for instruction in a given subject. Now that independent scholars have their own lobbying groups, perhaps there might be some practical support for similar such arrangements today? Students would be able to patronize real scholars with a substantial incentive to provide meaningful education rather than getting stuck in the clutches of sinecured woke indoctrinationists.

And perhaps most importantly, if the United States had a functional vocational education system such as Australia’s (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/education-and-work-australia/latest-release#qualifications-held - note that in Australia, “certificate level III” means something like, if I understand correctly, has the knowledge and skills of someone who has completed a 3-4 year apprenticeship) one might expect the enrollment in outfits peddling woke program credentials to be greatly reduced. Unfortunately today many students lack confidence in the ability to find employment through vocational education and instead go to BA peddling outfits because they have been led to believe that credential has greater earning power.

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Who is going to do the purging? It can start by writing Substack posts by you, me and others. We can also vote with our feet. Don’t work for or attend government funded schools.

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A blue state governor acting in good faith.

Unfortunately, this is a bit like fiscally responsible Republican, a mythological beast.

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True. I think this topic actually deserves a full post. I take your comment to mean that academics aren’t going to say or do what is right because they are nursed by the public teet.

And why has Trump emerged? Why hasn’t someone more eloquent and dignified like Reagan emerged? I blame the academy which is almost entirely public in nature. I blame public K-12. I blame spineless private schools modeled after public schools.

There are too few truly private schools. Too few independent intellectuals free to educate the populace on what is best for our longterm health, and survival. Where are the rest of our independent intellectuals like Arnold Kling?

Arguably most academics are sucklings.

They won’t do what is right. So, what is to done? More politicians like Trump I suppose. And though undesirable to say the least: war is one possible outcome. Can we avoid it?

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How many more thousand times do we need to hear the Toro/Nunez-Mujica "insight" [Actually they leave out CCS as a way of "storing" zero MC electricity and that the costs of all these kinds of storage can fall over time]. But the implication that the alternative policy implication is obvious is quite frustrating. Giggling at or even shaming silly solar boosters is not a policy.

If you want less of something bad (net emissions of CO2 and methane), tax it.

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Pertaining to the Warby piece I ask, “Is government funding of education just?” I say no, and I point to the First Amendment as my justification. I argue that religion and education are siblings; and as we’ll explore in this essay—synonyms. I believe the First Amendment should make clear that religion is synonymous with education; both are means by which we learn, and from which we gain our beliefs, habits and skills—forming our identity and individuality. Consider the following clarification to the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

For more read my post “ Religion, Education and Identity: Exploring the Meaning of Religion in the Context of the First Amendment.”

https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-141328011

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Oct 31·edited Oct 31

From the Toro Article: "By now you’ve heard the news: solar energy panels have gotten so cheap, the power you get from them is basically free. Solar is now nearly always cheaper to generate than power from coal-fired plants."

"basically free". IN. SANE.

They forgot the little asterisk and footnote which says, "only in America, only when including multiple enormous federal subsidies from the 'Inflation Reduction Act' (and acting on some of them before 2026), anti-coal regulatory pressure, and making some wild assumptions about both coal plant and solar panel prices."

The report from Energy Innovations is nearly two years old. You may remember how the entire global coal industry collapsed overnight, mines closed, and coal plant construction ceased as all the energy market participants and experts in the world saw the writing on the wall and shifted their capital investment strategies accordingly. Oh wait, sorry, reality is exactly the opposite in places where the government isn't putting a giant thumb on the scale - and the other thumb - and heck it's entire body weight too.

ETA: Talk about your "epistemic crisis"! There is no way the true and basic facts about electricity costs can get through to the readers of this kind of content unless they are willing to put in enormous effort to wade through a dense jungle of, ahem, """misinformation""".

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Oct 31·edited Oct 31Liked by Arnold Kling

Peter Zeihan likes to point out a few very inconvenient facts about solar electric power.

1) The vast majority of electric power is, interestingly, generated within 100 miles or less of the end user.

2) The vast majority of the places best suited to solar power generation (for half of the day) are in the least populated areas of the country, whereas most electric power usage is in areas not well suited to solar generation.

3) Because of #1, we don't have a long distance grid capable of getting solar-generated electric power (for the half day it's generated) from where it could be produced to where it would be consumed, and the greenies have no concrete plan for creating the necessary grid.

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Zeihan may be right, but the point about solar can be made even when relaxing all those conditions. There are plenty of places in the world that are closer to the equator, sunny all the time, where temporal variabilities of solar supply and consumer demand are strongly correlated, where they would have to import their fuels, where the labor costs of electricians and the guys who have to constantly wipe the dust off the panels are low, and they have plenty of low-value land in spitting distance of major cities, and are already building out their grids. It is much easier to construct, operate, and maintain a solar panel farm than a giant fossil fuel plant, never mind not having to deal with the enormous logistical challenges involved in procuring the fuels, moving them to the plant, and dealing with the waste.

Forget about being competitive now, if solar were even expected to become apples-to-apples competitive with coal plants by 2030, these places would have immediately switched over to solar for all new growth, using their existing fossil infrastructure purely for baseload supply. Here's the average annual growth rate of coal use over the past decade by some examples.

Vietnam: 12.5%

Sri Lanka: 11.5%

Pakistan: 16.5%

Indonesia: 10.6%

Bangladesh: 18.2%

Egypt: 12%

India: 4.3%

China, which consumes 56% of the world's coal output grew that already enormous level of consumption by nearly 5% just in 2023, consuming an extra 3.11 Exajoules, an increase that by itself would be the seventh-highest coal consuming country in the world.

But wait, isn't China making more panels than anybody and where -one third- of all new solar generation is being produced? Yes! And that was a while 0.5 more Exajoules. Since electricity is higher-grade energy we could multiply that by 3 to account for conversion losses and see that China is still ramping up coal use twice as fast.

The verdict of this jury is in, and they find the defendant cheaper than solar.

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>I’ll bet none of you ever read, or even heard of, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

heard of it, read it, recommend it!

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founding

Read it at Amherst before it became a madrasa! Love this book. Also really enjoyed The Public Burning.

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Ditto. Read it years ago and loved it.

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founding

I read it, too, and also recommend it

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“Warby’s rant reflects a worry that our universities will otherwise behave like madrassas.”

Are your relatively gentle words meant to suggest that they are not already behaving like DEI-religion madrassas?

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I'm a bit perplexed. Yesterday you posted a link to a piece that discusses the massively dropping prices of solar and battery storage. Today you post something that seems to ignore that.

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Oct 31·edited Nov 1

The article today is the answer to the one yesterday. Solar power is still incredibly expensive. The article today does not ignore the dropping prices you refer to, it explains why solar is still expensive in spite of that.

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Nov 1·edited Nov 1

Thanks but I think it is a faulty answer. It assumes that batteries are required the make solar work. With the possible (probably not) exception of California, most of the nation won't generate enough solar/wind to need batteries until some future date. At the same time it is looking at the price of batteries today, not in the future when they will be needed.

Also, the article linked the first day already mentioned and linked the counter-argument.

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They say: "[Storage] can come in the form of batteries, hydrogen, or pumped hydro. All of these are expensive; none of them scale. Storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a chemical battery costs an order of magnitude more than just generating it in a nuclear power plant."

You think, optimistically, that the cost of storage will come down fast enough to enable a transition to solar power. I'm skeptical of that, and in addition there is the problem of the huge amount of area the solar panels would have to cover, and Robert Bryce's point that "If climate change means we will face more extreme weather in the years ahead — hotter, colder, and/or more severe temperatures for extended periods — it’s [crazy] to make our electric grid dependent on the weather." We'll see... The point about the high cost of solar power now, and in the foreseeable future, stands.

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22 hrs ago·edited 22 hrs ago

It is worth noting that all the numbers are based on initial costs and operating costs, to include fuel, operations, maintenance, land, rehabilitation, and disposal. Assumptions one makes on interest rates, land lease, and other costs have a singinifcant impact on the comparison, even if we ignore government subsidies.

1 Solar is not more expensive if you use it when generated, which is currently the case for all solar in most locations.

2 My local nuke site has shut down multiple times in the last 30 years, at least a few times for more than a year. A couple years ago the owner decided to decommission but the state offered subsidies to keep it going. Not exactly reliable or cost effective.

3 If you look back to Scott Alexander's article linked the first day, in 2016 batteries were ~2500x the cost of nuke but that appears to be comparing apples (unit of generated power) to oranges (capacity of storage). If one were to cycle half the capacity the battery should last more than 1000 cycles. If so, now your looking at 5x the cost per kw stored minus whatever prices have come down since 2016. Still more but getting close. WAY closer than orders of magnitude.

3a In the ten years to 2016 battery prices didn't come down nearly as much as the previous ten years but they are clearly still dropping.

4 Most of the solar generation doesn't have to be stored.

4b Everything is dependent on how much storage you want. Energy used during the day doesn't have to be stored and neither does the load covered by other renewables or nuke. If one just wants to replace coal and a little gas the storage requirement goes way down. It only becomes burdensome depending on how much of the gas generation one wants to replace. Replacing all gas on the best day for renewables vs load is way easier than all gas on the worst day for renewables vs load.

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I just want to address your point #4. The only reason that most of the solar generation doesn't have to be stored is because they are using some other source when solar isn't generating, usually gas. The stated goal is to get rid of all fossil fuels, which means no gas. In order to get by with only solar (or only solar and wind), you would have to store electricity to provide for the times it isn't generating. Let's say the capacity factor is 33% (which might be possible for solar and is generous for wind), then you need to have triple the amount of generation so that you can store two thirds of it for when the sun isn't shining (or the wind not blowing). Btw, it wouldn't make sense to use nuclear for the missing time because it isn't easily turned on and off. You could use mostly nuclear with solar filling in for peak times, if the peaks occur during the day.

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ok. you want no fossil. Solar is currently about 4% of total generation. What year do you expect to have enough panels installed? 2035? 2050? Later?

And what do you think the cost will be then?

btw, nuclear makes a huge difference. Load is less for most of the night so a constant nuke source covers much more of the night load than daytime load. It significantly reduces storage requirements.

On top of that, other than flood stage most of the 6% coming from hydro can be used for peak loads and some can even be part of the storage by pumping from low pool to high.

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I don’t ask for much, I don’t think, but I would like to have a better understanding of what it means to be subsidized. Perhaps a post making all the proper distinctions.

For instance I used to live in a town that got its power from a huge power plant, oh, 70 miles away or so. Plus a teensy teensy bit from the water supply dam (there’s not much elevation) and it used to be, some from the nuke on the coast. But the nuke was costing the city so much money, they sued to get out of it and I think did, after many years. Or at least reduced their stake.

So anyway, that leaves the power plant. Plus a good of deal of wind, now, I believe.

But the power plant is obviously most important.

It’s one of my favorite objects in the world and I wish I could tour it. Why do you guys like stupid art museums so much?

It was built by the river authority, a sort of New Deal-ish thing largely brought to us by LBJ, though it may predate him. I’m not up on the history of the river authority - but it is a government entity, all the way. It built the dams, and the power plant, also I think the nuke, as it is located at the mouth of said river; and the associated reservoirs for the latter: kind of hard to understand if you don’t live here what a big deal this river authority is.

My city may have been involved in building it too, but at the time we’re talking about, the city would have been a very junior partner.

It is fired by coal that rolls in from Wyoming on tracks on land gifted by the federal or state government to the railroads in the 19th century.

So - is this the invisible hand at work? Just very invisibly?

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“This is a regular feature of human civilisations. There is nothing new in this.“ In addition to highlighting the word madrassas as Arnold did, I believe it’s important to point out other religious terms not used in Warby’s piece. Dogma and heresy. Again there is nothing new in this. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Wonderful link, but can we simplify and condense our posts. Something between tweets and rants please! :)

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“Warby’s rant reflects a worry that our universities will otherwise behave like madrassas.” Good. And therefore, what should we do about this? Maybe we should start talking about schools that don’t behave like madrassas and ask questions such as “What is similar about them?” “What’s different about them?” Curious that they don’t take any funding from government. See my post “How Good is Discourse at Hillsdale College? Possibly the best in the country.” I see the same behavior at Challenger School. I don’t understand why you guys aren’t talking about this.

https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/how-good-is-discourse-at-hillsdale

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Eric Chaney’s article contains one of the worst graphs I have seen in a while, two axis with the same measurement (percent of population) set up with different scales so that it looks like a 1:1 drop in science:increase in madrassa, when in fact it is roughly 1.5:3.5 (apparently the madrassa had roughly .5% population before the first madrassa?) That violates a number of rules from How To Lie With Statistics. I wouldn’t trust the work of someone who puts in such blatantly and intentionally misleading graphs.

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Today’s Dem dominated colleges already are Secular Humanist/Woke madrasses. Indoctrinating, rather than educating, so many students. All those with less than 30% Republican professors should lose tax benefits… and pay their fair share.

Lorenzo is mostly right.

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“Today’s Dem dominated colleges already are Secular Humanist/Woke madrasses. Indoctrinating, rather than educating, so many students.” Yes. Defund. And amend constitutions as necessary to prevent from happening again.

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"The Problem with Solar" was a fantastic link. The principles discussed apply across our economy . A surplus of a good thing can become a burdensome cost, even though the good thing is by itself inexpensive or even "free".

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There is a whole online community of avid solar-DIY'ers happy to tell you how - if you can get the permits - to build your own solar power and battery storage at the absolute lowest price you can without huge scale and with your "labor cost" reduced to the opportunity cost of your time. Just wait until you discover how "free" it is!

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Interesting links this morning. I especially appreciate the solar one.

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