Aswath Domodaran on corporate sustainability; Hobart and Huber on scientific stagnation; Howard Husock on big philanthropy; me on bureaucracy; Noah Smith on social class in America
How well does Noah Smith know the working class? I'm not sure to what extent this is true for Smith, but many public intellectuals do little more than read about the working class. This past week I attended a talk by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk at Thales College in Raleigh. Before the talk I spoke with her about her new book, "Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth." In writing this book she actually drove around the country interviewing women that have given birth to five or more children. In talking with them face-to-face she probably learned a great deal more and more accurately why these women are having many more children than other American women. Any guesses as to who these women are and why they're having more kids?
The "working class" may not be as ideologically homogenous as the college cohort, but that is not to say they don't share many values. Perhaps one should simply think of those who on the one hand were ideologically indoctrinated in college, and everybody else, whether they went to college or not, rather than think of them in terms of "class," a word which has become freighted with esoteric baggage. Smith thinks of them as fragmented but they share a positive vision of the possibilities of the American future, in contrast to the college cohort's unrelenting negativity, cynicism, and nihilism, which proceed from the Progressives' cult of technocratic meliorism (with themselves in charge, of course), which devalues the present and past in comparison to an imagined perfected future.
Oh, a new word. meliorism - the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. That seems like a good thing. Count me in. But technocratic meliorism, count me out, especially if they’re in charge. Fortunately they’ll probably never be in charge, at least not during my lifetime.
Division by check-box categories, be they based upon education, race, sex, gender, etc. always runs up against the problem of overlapping distributions that depend upon the individual. In each check box you have all types of individuals including working class uneducated geniuses and some so called educated class with Ph.D. who are really quite stupid.
I’m sure that too many college grads think like Noah, only college (class; good) or non-college (class; bad), but there are two other big difference check boxes. The big one is working, vs non-working (the dole!), and the other is criminal or not.
The Dem policies are to reduce the discomfort of poverty, but stay needy & dependent, while the Rep policies are to push work and allow charities to do more about more helping the needy, but especially the Deserving Poor. Charity failure is way under talked about.
When a person chooses to get a job, trying to enter themselves, yet bad luck strikes, it seems he’s pretty deserving of help. When he goes out and parties on Tuesday so gets to work late on Wed, & Thur, & Friday, and gets fired, he’s much less deserving. Among the non-college folk, there are the workers and shirkers. Of course, since so many non-workers are Blacks, it’s considered racist to talk about it. Or even think about it—so Noah & Dems don’t.
On a visit to the parents’ leafy middle ring suburb neighborhood, bad metro school district (so bad the state “took it over” whatever that means) so - not a social address, but everyone prosperous enough: families who were choosing to send their kids to private school anyway; the more modest houses on their quarter acre lots changing over to larger new builds, white craftsman/mod farmhouse mashup or Minecraft stark, the process aided by a one-time “US Army Corps of engineers intervention” lol; and old people who have lived here forever, whose kids (us) went to the public schools which no one in the SFHs of the area attends now. And empty houses waiting for their transformation.
In recent years, people have started paying other people to do some rather everyday things. I think this started as a generational thing. Not sure the younger people really don’t know how to do anything, or if they think any kind of physical labor is off limits to them, or something to be embarrassed by; or if they just prefer the bland cookie cutter results. I guess it’s all more instagrammish, e.g. the landscaping of their yards looks more like the resorts they travel to all the time. Or indistinguishable from nearby shopping centers. Trees are less popular as well, with the younger folk. They are a little scared of them.
Gardening, that great 20th century women’s pastime, is completely over. Everyone has the same few plants, that Pablo brings.
So where the neighbors used to hang up their own holiday decorations, making a day of it after Thanksgiving, in a motley but interestingly varied fashion, which might have even come off as charming - the new homeowners instead now pay guys to string very straight lines of exclusively white lights along the edges of roof and eaves, which is the current fashion. A practice once confined to wealthy neighborhoods, that has now spread to an ordinary precinct like this. So far, five houses on this block have the exact same decor.
I noticed that among this set trick-or-treating was conducted from golf carts.
Block parties are back with the influx of younger people, which is nice.
One kid said he didn’t want candy, did we have any bottled water.
Growing up here, there was a dad who a couple years brought a trailer with hay bales and drove us around the area and we thought that was so fun. But mostly we walked and our parents definitely did not come trick or treating with us. Very different times, though there’s been no change in the safety of the neighborhood.
There’s one guy, American, who wears an elf hat and plays Christmas tunes while he does this seasonal decoration work solo, but for the most part it’s become a sideline for a few of the undocumented lawn crew outfits.
You might think it’s a replacement for the lawn work in winter, but no - the guys come every week, to every house, fire up the gas powered equipment and perform all the same lawn tasks even though there’s no need to mow and nothing to blow. I think we could solve the climate crisis by shutting down this odd Potemkin activity. And you’d get a little organic matter going into the soil as a bonus.
Your working class is Pablo, I guess (the been here long time guy). Mother’s efforts to e.g. ask his guys not to weed whack her amaryllis or blow the aspidistra bed (parents’ yard is very dated in its particular exotic plants) because it leaves them in shreds, never stick. I find it hilarious they pay people to run their plants through a paper shredder. The guys profess no Ingles, so she can’t talk to them - her Duolingo phone game has had no effect, but it pleases her - she likes the cute graphics - and in any case the crew are constantly changing.
That’s the nature of immigration.
It probably will result in people “needing” labor protections, in the old progressive conception of such - there are not infrequently stories about illegals in the construction industry especially, but also restaurant work - getting shorted on pay, usually by other immigrants; and certainly no less structural demand for the subsidies and transfers Noah Smith wants - but it would not be human nature, for Americans who pay somebody to pick up their dog poop, to view themselves as part of a great national chain of being with hordes of immigrants. There is no connection there, only a widening chasm.
Maybe you think it would be the opposite. You might think an American would say, what an unearned bonanza! - these prolific baby makers left their shitholes (no, we’ve not been there but we’re constantly told by left and right alike that that’s what they are) and walked into my country (sure, uninvited - if we pretend Soros Inc. didn’t invite them) and now my kid will never have to mow the lawn even once! Wow! I am grateful, I love the sight of all their babies, and rarely hearing my own native tongue in public, and will agitate for more leftist redistribution! And whatever else Noah Smith thinks is owed them!
No. The shithole, the lack of an invitation, the sheer numbers, the enclaves (enclaves of us, larger enclaves of them) - make all the difference. This is not a country anymore. Throw out the rule book on “how to appeal to voters”. Guilt is not going to cut it anymore.
How well does Noah Smith know the working class? I'm not sure to what extent this is true for Smith, but many public intellectuals do little more than read about the working class. This past week I attended a talk by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk at Thales College in Raleigh. Before the talk I spoke with her about her new book, "Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth." In writing this book she actually drove around the country interviewing women that have given birth to five or more children. In talking with them face-to-face she probably learned a great deal more and more accurately why these women are having many more children than other American women. Any guesses as to who these women are and why they're having more kids?
The "working class" may not be as ideologically homogenous as the college cohort, but that is not to say they don't share many values. Perhaps one should simply think of those who on the one hand were ideologically indoctrinated in college, and everybody else, whether they went to college or not, rather than think of them in terms of "class," a word which has become freighted with esoteric baggage. Smith thinks of them as fragmented but they share a positive vision of the possibilities of the American future, in contrast to the college cohort's unrelenting negativity, cynicism, and nihilism, which proceed from the Progressives' cult of technocratic meliorism (with themselves in charge, of course), which devalues the present and past in comparison to an imagined perfected future.
Oh, a new word. meliorism - the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. That seems like a good thing. Count me in. But technocratic meliorism, count me out, especially if they’re in charge. Fortunately they’ll probably never be in charge, at least not during my lifetime.
Division by check-box categories, be they based upon education, race, sex, gender, etc. always runs up against the problem of overlapping distributions that depend upon the individual. In each check box you have all types of individuals including working class uneducated geniuses and some so called educated class with Ph.D. who are really quite stupid.
I’m sure that too many college grads think like Noah, only college (class; good) or non-college (class; bad), but there are two other big difference check boxes. The big one is working, vs non-working (the dole!), and the other is criminal or not.
The Dem policies are to reduce the discomfort of poverty, but stay needy & dependent, while the Rep policies are to push work and allow charities to do more about more helping the needy, but especially the Deserving Poor. Charity failure is way under talked about.
When a person chooses to get a job, trying to enter themselves, yet bad luck strikes, it seems he’s pretty deserving of help. When he goes out and parties on Tuesday so gets to work late on Wed, & Thur, & Friday, and gets fired, he’s much less deserving. Among the non-college folk, there are the workers and shirkers. Of course, since so many non-workers are Blacks, it’s considered racist to talk about it. Or even think about it—so Noah & Dems don’t.
If people like "little charity" as I dom they should support giving partial tax credits instead of "deductions" for charitable contributions.
I don't know how much other members of my church choir contribute, but I'll bet I get the biggest % kicked in by the government.
How is Solow's "sustainability quote relevant to taxation of the CO2 accumulation externality?
On a visit to the parents’ leafy middle ring suburb neighborhood, bad metro school district (so bad the state “took it over” whatever that means) so - not a social address, but everyone prosperous enough: families who were choosing to send their kids to private school anyway; the more modest houses on their quarter acre lots changing over to larger new builds, white craftsman/mod farmhouse mashup or Minecraft stark, the process aided by a one-time “US Army Corps of engineers intervention” lol; and old people who have lived here forever, whose kids (us) went to the public schools which no one in the SFHs of the area attends now. And empty houses waiting for their transformation.
In recent years, people have started paying other people to do some rather everyday things. I think this started as a generational thing. Not sure the younger people really don’t know how to do anything, or if they think any kind of physical labor is off limits to them, or something to be embarrassed by; or if they just prefer the bland cookie cutter results. I guess it’s all more instagrammish, e.g. the landscaping of their yards looks more like the resorts they travel to all the time. Or indistinguishable from nearby shopping centers. Trees are less popular as well, with the younger folk. They are a little scared of them.
Gardening, that great 20th century women’s pastime, is completely over. Everyone has the same few plants, that Pablo brings.
So where the neighbors used to hang up their own holiday decorations, making a day of it after Thanksgiving, in a motley but interestingly varied fashion, which might have even come off as charming - the new homeowners instead now pay guys to string very straight lines of exclusively white lights along the edges of roof and eaves, which is the current fashion. A practice once confined to wealthy neighborhoods, that has now spread to an ordinary precinct like this. So far, five houses on this block have the exact same decor.
I noticed that among this set trick-or-treating was conducted from golf carts.
Block parties are back with the influx of younger people, which is nice.
One kid said he didn’t want candy, did we have any bottled water.
Growing up here, there was a dad who a couple years brought a trailer with hay bales and drove us around the area and we thought that was so fun. But mostly we walked and our parents definitely did not come trick or treating with us. Very different times, though there’s been no change in the safety of the neighborhood.
There’s one guy, American, who wears an elf hat and plays Christmas tunes while he does this seasonal decoration work solo, but for the most part it’s become a sideline for a few of the undocumented lawn crew outfits.
You might think it’s a replacement for the lawn work in winter, but no - the guys come every week, to every house, fire up the gas powered equipment and perform all the same lawn tasks even though there’s no need to mow and nothing to blow. I think we could solve the climate crisis by shutting down this odd Potemkin activity. And you’d get a little organic matter going into the soil as a bonus.
Your working class is Pablo, I guess (the been here long time guy). Mother’s efforts to e.g. ask his guys not to weed whack her amaryllis or blow the aspidistra bed (parents’ yard is very dated in its particular exotic plants) because it leaves them in shreds, never stick. I find it hilarious they pay people to run their plants through a paper shredder. The guys profess no Ingles, so she can’t talk to them - her Duolingo phone game has had no effect, but it pleases her - she likes the cute graphics - and in any case the crew are constantly changing.
That’s the nature of immigration.
It probably will result in people “needing” labor protections, in the old progressive conception of such - there are not infrequently stories about illegals in the construction industry especially, but also restaurant work - getting shorted on pay, usually by other immigrants; and certainly no less structural demand for the subsidies and transfers Noah Smith wants - but it would not be human nature, for Americans who pay somebody to pick up their dog poop, to view themselves as part of a great national chain of being with hordes of immigrants. There is no connection there, only a widening chasm.
Maybe you think it would be the opposite. You might think an American would say, what an unearned bonanza! - these prolific baby makers left their shitholes (no, we’ve not been there but we’re constantly told by left and right alike that that’s what they are) and walked into my country (sure, uninvited - if we pretend Soros Inc. didn’t invite them) and now my kid will never have to mow the lawn even once! Wow! I am grateful, I love the sight of all their babies, and rarely hearing my own native tongue in public, and will agitate for more leftist redistribution! And whatever else Noah Smith thinks is owed them!
No. The shithole, the lack of an invitation, the sheer numbers, the enclaves (enclaves of us, larger enclaves of them) - make all the difference. This is not a country anymore. Throw out the rule book on “how to appeal to voters”. Guilt is not going to cut it anymore.