Jason Manning on The Origins of Woke; Alice Evans on patriarchal beliefs; Matt Weidinger on taxing government benefits; Lyn Alden on the economy and the stock market
I am not a big Hanania fan, and I don't quite agree with the framing or strength of linear causation of his "villain origin story" of woke. Nevertheless, in defense of his thesis, the argument that it didn't work that way in certain other countries is weak and very easy to dismiss. It is hard to overstate the influence of America over similar and especially European countries over the past 80 years, and the tendency of high status elites and intellectuals abroad to pay close attention to and synchronize to the ideological fashions emerging from the most prestigious American elites, intellectuals, and institutions, and - while it is gilding lilies and would be unnecessary except as acceleration - this is further amplified by the active efforts among American elites to encourage such ideological convergence and synchronization. Indeed, this is really just a reflection of how this same fashion synchronization occurs via trickle-down imitation through the various tiers of class, status, and subculture, and the elites of many foreign countries are on the same level of the American second level of that cascade. You don't have to take my word for it, the elites in those other countries are constantly and openly complaining about the effect of getting infected with these American ideological imports whenever they disturb some matter of local importance to those local elites.
Indeed, it is impossible to understand what is happening at high political-ideological intellectual levels in some US-opposing counties without grasping that top leaders there are fully aware of this tendency, consider it to be on the level of an national existential problem, and are trying hard to think about what they could possibly do to prevent or mitigate it, and, similarly to the American right, often coming up empty.
Consider how there were practicality contemporaneous riot activities over there, inspired by what was happening in the US after Floyd's death, in even in places where the disconnection from that original context was at a completely hilarious level of absurdity. Notice also that this NEVER happens the other way around. Some race riot in France or Ireland or India is a matter of total indifference to Americans who - to the extent they would even become aware of such a thing happening at all - would never feel the urge to engage in any copycat behaviors at home. This one-way street really puts the lie to this impulsive imitation having something to do with conscious acts of intersectional """solidarity""" since Americans are curiously immune to thinking or acting that way when the the polarity is reversed.
Note that I am usually complaining how American intellectuals are -too- focused just on American facts, history, context and fail to test their ideas against a whole world's worth of additional data that usually easily falsifies some fashionable thesis about causation. But the timing of shifts in opinion among foreign elites compared to when corresponding policy reforms were implemented in those countries is an exception from which one can infer almost no insight of value, because of America's position at the top of the status hierarchy and the influence that necessarily follows from this state of affairs.
Rarely speaking English appears to be one of the very few things that provides any kind of buffer against Anglo cultural imperialism, however limited. If people speak English all the time they are going to imbibe American media and then it's all over.
There are lots of different things that contribute to insulation from influences and yes few are as important as a hard-to-overcome language barrier. Still, this fact is probably not very consoling for leaders of communities or nations worried about bad American influence, and it is even less actionable.
For one thing, whatever the rate of English proficiency may hold for the overall population, high-status and especially intellectual / highly-educated elites - and extra especially the younger cohorts of those - in any country are likely to have a -much- higher level of English proficiency.
Some facility with English is practically a requirement to participate in certain professions with rapid progress where a lot of the communication about those developments occurs at the global scale and is carried out either predominantly in English or with an English version or equivalent happening in parallel.
These kinds of elites will -want- to pay attention to what is happening in America, global elites will often want their kids to attend college in America (or its cultural satellites) and in many places they will consider it almost a form of child abuse to -not- make every effort to educate their children to be as proficient as possible in English and from the earliest ages. A person with the potential to get a lucrative job with a big, wealthy Anglosphere company will be motivated to continue improving his language skills, and it is just impossible for practically any person in the world with elite talents to not see the tremendous advantages English proficiency can offer to his opportunities.
As just one example among many, consider the advantage usually partially attributed to India's greater rate of high proficiency in English, which is the number of Indians now occupying C-level positions at many of the biggest and wealthiest American companies. That's not just about English, but English is an important part of it.
And to the extent all these elites know English and pay attention to America, they are not insulated, and the non-elites in those countries are not insulated from those elites. That may buy you some time and mean the influence gets watered down, which is not nothing, but it's also not much of a solution.
The other problem is that the language barrier just isn't much of a barrier with all this new translation tech, and it's getting to be less of a barrier everyday as we seem to genuinely be heading towards a world with Star Trek "Universal Translator Earpiece" / Hitchhiker's Guide "babel fish", not just "in our lifetimes", but certainly "within this decade" and now not even implausibly, "next year".
So, language alone is probably not going to help much. Going cold turkey on as much American info as possible in one's media diet is probably much more important, similar to the way some people went cold turkey on Twitter knowing that it was "bad for them".
Re: "the fundamental cause [of wokeness is] widespread discomfort with disparities in outcomes by identity category."
Plural causes reinforce one another. Here are some causes:
• Affirmative action laws (Hanania)
• Dismay at disparate impact of neutral rules (Kling)
• European propensity to emulate America
• Coalition of bootleggers and baptists (rent-seeking in guise of doing good)
• The residential campus (college as a 'total institution' in Anglosphere) + selectivity + putative role of diversity in education + belief that Ivies create new elites
• Self-sorting across towns or neighborhoods or k-12 schools to optimize youth peer group.
Analysis might distinguish necessary causes and jointly sufficient causes. My intuition is that there exists a cluster of mechanisms.
My intuition is that dismay at disparate impact of neutral rules (Arnold's mechanism) is a necessary cause.
Could you expand on what a "bureaucrat on the make" is like in the woke context. Or is it that all bureaucrats are on the make in whatever their context happens to be, so all bureaucrats are a kind of bootlegger corresponding to that particular kind of Baptist?
Influential activist stakeholders in an org become dismayed at (a) disparate impact of neutral criteria and/or (b) a scandalous and vivid, if rare, harm to a member of a putatively oppressed group.
Influential stakeholders then lobby to create specialized remedial bureaucracies for equity.
The specialized bureaucracy is granted extra room for rent-seeking because the influential stakeholders reason as follows: How will we know that you really care about what we care about (the oppressed group) if you give priority to efficiency? Waste signals care.
Other bureaucracies adapt their missions and programs in order to qualify for new equity resources. Broad participation signals general care. Everyone gets to wet their beak.
I read somewhere recently that if the Civil Rights Act had not passed congress, the activist Supreme Court of the time was prepared to pass it via judicial ruling.
The law ended up how it ended up because people think something is wrong and needs to be fixed. The law then punishes those that don't believe in this consensus and/or that don't like particular implementations. Since those that dissent are constantly being punished and those that assent rewarded its tough to get any major change in public opinion necessary to overturn the law.
The law as applied (not as written) does not match public opinion. There was never a time when the US public approved of "reverse" discrimination. The laws the passed Congress were therefore facially colourblind.
Elites then went and created a problem that nobody asked for by introducing their favoured discrimination anyway.
Gay-marriage never passed via referendum, so the courts did it anyway. However, the courts often only do these things when they think they won't make a critical mass of people they care about (i.e. progressive elites) angry, and that public opinion is moving in that direction and just needs a nudge. That's because when the courts act in the progressive direction, it has a way of accelerating those changes in opinion, such that, if those referenda were held today, the results probably would come out different.
My Dad was alive when CRA passed. He didn't like affirmative action. However, he also believed in literal physical equality of races, and assumed that once the legal barriers were removed that equality of outcome would naturally follow. I believe this is a very mainstream view.
When equality of outcome didn't naturally follow, this was a source of great concern to many people. Some wanted to be pro-active about it (affirmative action) and others didn't, but all basically accepted that "something" was wrong about not achieving equality of outcome and that it must be the result of "something". All vaguely feel like "something" should be done about "this problem", though they differ on what the something is. Naturally, officials and elite consensus ended up deciding the "something".
Steve Hayward and company on Powerline's 3 Whisky Happy Hour podcast have discussed several times how the opinion in Brown v. Board was carefully written to apply only to education as well as not being grounded on a Constitutional requirement that government action be colorblind (per Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson) but specifically on discrimination that is detrimental to minorities, leaving open the ability to create government-sponsored discrimination that was intended to be helpful. It was written a full decade before the Civil Rights Act so what you're suggesting is entirely plausible.
re: the first link: It's reductive to attribute the disparate impact standard to just Griggs. You will often see many people on the "dissident right" overattribute influence to Griggs without noting the limitations in the decision itself or in subsequent decisions that limited Griggs. It's easier to write that Griggs is the problem instead of recognizing the larger issue of full burrito of the CRA itself and other far better established core parts of 14th Amendment substantive due process jurisprudence. Similarly, it's convenient to heap opprobrium on Title IX as shorthand, but there's a lot of ruin in the other Titles as well that often has greater influence. It is easier to make the argument that One Bad Case is the proton torpedo exhaust port or whatever than it is to recognize that there is a much deeper issue here that goes back to the post-1937 interpretation of the Commerce Clause.
The CRA is not about the CRA or about concern for minorities (a justification running threadbare in the "majority minority" society) so much as it is about the basic legal justification for modern federal power. When the CRA has been discarded, our new tyrants will invent a new arbitrary justification: it does not matter. So I agree with the post author's inclination that the legal root cause theory is not fully explanatory. I think that non-lawyer Caldwell's way of exploring the phenomenon of the "new constitution" illuminates more than non-practicing lawyer Hanania's explanation of a similar phenomenon if only because Hanania's legal analysis does not go deeply enough.
When it comes to wokeness (probably better described as social justice fundamentalism), I’m reminded of the analogy of onion layers. If we peel off the wokeness layer, we encounter another disconcerting layer. Peel that layer off and we find another problematic layer. What is the average Joe going to do? Many will avoid the onion all together. That means moving to a red county, in a red state and avoiding the blue institutions as much as possible. Thus, demand for blue institutions and places should fall. This is no panacea of course, but it is the likely response of many. Then next question is how to build new institutions in those red places. It will be challenging, but perhaps easier to build new rather than fix blue.
"Thus, demand for blue institutions and places should fall."
California used to be red. Now blue.
Virginia used to be red, now blue.
Even deep blue areas used to be more purple.
The problem with "just move someplace more red" is that immigration is going to come for us all. Further, once national elections become uncompetitive the deep blue federal government is not going to tolerate red state independence.
Lastly, red states are still full of blue cities. If you move to a red state you are still likely to be in or near blue cities, your schools are still likely to have lots of blue professionals, and the place you work is likely to be run by blue people.
I do in fact tell every young person I know without too many attachments to leave behind to book it for Florida or Texas, but I don't think that represents a long term solution.
Yes, the big cities and the tourist towns are blue everywhere. The public schools and most private secular schools are blue everywhere. So what does the average Joe do then?
Turn to Christianity? Probably not. The supernatural dogma is too strong and dysfunctional, but maybe yes if it means turning certain Christian churches into secular improvement groups and schools. In some cases this might be easier than fixing blue institutions.
Otherwise, in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee here is one solution: Thales Academy with a $5000 annual tuition. This is not a blue school. https://www.thalesacademy.org
In Nevada, Utah, Texas, and Idaho here is another solution: Challenger School with a $15,000 a year tuition or $0 tuition for children of employees. This is not a blue school. https://www.challengerschool.com
Christian schools are another option for those wanting or willing to take part in them, but this is not a great longterm solution, unless these schools are willing to shed their supernatural dogma.
For college, the options seem very limited. Thales College? Grove City College? Hillsdale College? UATX? Community colleges + work experience? Other small liberal arts colleges with student viewpoint ratios less than 2:1?
None of this is a panacea, but it is better than living in a blue state or attending public schools.
Will the red places turn blue in another 10 years? Maybe. In that case, one could pickup and move to the next red town over yonder.
Is this a longterm solution? If it is, it’s not a great solution.
So besides just moving to the next red town, we need to be learning, growing and improving at every step. We need more people to understand basic economics and the principles behind the Founding, the Constitution, federalism, and the Declaration. We need to make the Constitution even better than it was at the Founding. We need more people developing habits of excellent moral character. We need to take a hard look at Christianity and improve it; take from it the good, and leave the rest. We need more people reading, writing and discussing on good forums like this Substack and at the local level in neighborhoods and communities.
We need to fix our communities. I especially like some of the wisdom that Peter Gray has been sharing at Play Makes Us Human. His recent posts on being an amateur reminds me that the best solutions are often simple solutions.
We should consider studying the Zionist project. This means thinking carefully about defense of and immigration to our communities. If our communities are to be places of high moral character, in which life, liberty, property, and equality before the law are valued, then we need to limit entry to those abiding by the rules and those willing to maintain respect for community norms. We need Constitutions for our communities.
Most importantly we need to abolish all government education within our communities.
California is gigantic and it seems likely that for the foreseeable future it will probably be exporting hundreds of thousands of residents a year who can no longer afford to live there or tolerate its oppressive regulations and unsafe disorder.
These are called "ruin voters" because experience is such that after they flee and arrive in some place they prefer because it is not like California, they vote to change that new place in the same old ways and for the same old things that made California a place they wanted to flee in the first place.
Those states can't stop getting politically transformed in this way because those governments cannot restrict the immigration of Californians. People have tried to point this out to Bryan Caplan in the context of immigrants fleeing dysfunctional countries for the US and then going on to see majorities voting in an analogously ruinous nature. His responses are, um, to put it mildly, not sufficiently compelling to put a rational person worried about these things at ease.
The comparison of high marginal tax rates and implicit high rates from benefit withdrawal is flawed. The solution on the benefit side is very strict rules on seeking work (most of the higher income at the low end is from working more hours, not just from being paid more).
Would agree that the state needs to be a lot more coherent on valuing all state benefits.
Lyn Alden is a diamond - a fantastic economic source of wisdom.
While Arnold's addition is true, " the ratio of stock market value to corporate earnings time the ratio of corporate earnings to GDP", the important asset inflation issue is the growth from 70% to 170%.
If US money printing continues to go mostly into asset inflation, which is mostly already owned by the rich, the money printing strongly contributes to the rich getting richer FASTER than the median workers.
It also implies that, if needed to solve a fiscal crisis, there's a huge amount of easily taxable financial wealth available in the stock market -- but just writing this makes it clear that such an implication is unlikely to be really true. In a crisis, those "too high" stock prices will drop in value faster than the value of the USD.
Which means to me that we need to be looking at wealth type taxes or policies to push up wages for the 3 middle quintiles: low middle (20-40), middle (40-60), upper middle (60-80). Perhaps this is where corporate earnings come in -- too much profit for capital owners and not enough wages for workers.
Probably due to semi-secret oligarchist tendencies of small, fast, competing firms being willing to be bought out by one of the biggest companies. With the big profit as an incentive to other creators to start small companies.
There's also the M. Munger claim (from 2019 Econtalk, among others), that liberal democracy leads to crony capitalism, which seems true, and bad. (BTSOTC - beyond the scope of this comment).
Weidinger - “That meant a household with two adults and two young children could collect more than $67,000 in pandemic benefits without a penny being counted in determining its eligibility for Medicaid. Two-thirds of that amount, or nearly $47,000, would have been similarly ignored when the family applied for food stamps."
In trying to understand the $67,000 number I end up at a wsj paywall. And then I reread my quoted text. It doesn't actually say anyone gets that much in benefits. Does anyone? How?
Wow. 24 comments and I see none on the stock market. Here's one.
The discussion entirely misses the biggest factor in stock values. Interest rates have mostly dropped over the last 40+ years and are far lower than decades back. Obviously the correlation isn't perfect but it explains most of Alden's 70 to 170% over the last 30 years.
On the one hand, as Arnold emphasizes, the woke are motivated by dismay at a statistical pattern: "disparities in outcomes" (disparate impact of neutral criteria). There is some numeracy in this mindset.
On the other hand, the woke are highly motivated by scandal at the rare, vivid, disturbing event — to the deliberate neglect of statistics and prevalence. The death of George Floyd is a prime example. Here, *innumeracy* governs the woke mindset. (Deaths of unarmed suspects at the hands of police are rare — and do not exhibit a substantial racial bias. A reasonable progressive policy to protect the disadvantaged would be, "More police, better trained," not "Defund the police.")
Hmmm. I think Hanania dislikes Americans. That doesn't bother me, I don't particularly like them myself - but it's *always* good to remember that while the world went crazy in the first half of the 20th century - in America, we had a good thing going. How fortunate we were. How fortunate were the Jews and Poles and yes, even the Germans and the Japanese - name any group you like - who got out of Over There and into here, before and during all those convulsions.
I peel the onion and find nothing but European ideas. For instance, that Frantz Fanon profile I linked to yesterday quoted Sartre's introduction to "The Wretched of the Earth":
"Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”
The How story of any social phenomenon tends to emphasize continuity, how existing structures have adapted. The Why story tends to emphasize discontinuity- what changed to cause or accelerate the adaptations. I see Hanania as telling more of a How than a Why story. He seems to think the 2 stories overlap substantially, but I think the larger populist trends on both Left and Right fit better with a Gurri-style discontinuity analysis.
I am not a big Hanania fan, and I don't quite agree with the framing or strength of linear causation of his "villain origin story" of woke. Nevertheless, in defense of his thesis, the argument that it didn't work that way in certain other countries is weak and very easy to dismiss. It is hard to overstate the influence of America over similar and especially European countries over the past 80 years, and the tendency of high status elites and intellectuals abroad to pay close attention to and synchronize to the ideological fashions emerging from the most prestigious American elites, intellectuals, and institutions, and - while it is gilding lilies and would be unnecessary except as acceleration - this is further amplified by the active efforts among American elites to encourage such ideological convergence and synchronization. Indeed, this is really just a reflection of how this same fashion synchronization occurs via trickle-down imitation through the various tiers of class, status, and subculture, and the elites of many foreign countries are on the same level of the American second level of that cascade. You don't have to take my word for it, the elites in those other countries are constantly and openly complaining about the effect of getting infected with these American ideological imports whenever they disturb some matter of local importance to those local elites.
Indeed, it is impossible to understand what is happening at high political-ideological intellectual levels in some US-opposing counties without grasping that top leaders there are fully aware of this tendency, consider it to be on the level of an national existential problem, and are trying hard to think about what they could possibly do to prevent or mitigate it, and, similarly to the American right, often coming up empty.
European friends have told me that their major newspapers simply follow the editorial line of the NY Times a day or two later.
Consider how there were practicality contemporaneous riot activities over there, inspired by what was happening in the US after Floyd's death, in even in places where the disconnection from that original context was at a completely hilarious level of absurdity. Notice also that this NEVER happens the other way around. Some race riot in France or Ireland or India is a matter of total indifference to Americans who - to the extent they would even become aware of such a thing happening at all - would never feel the urge to engage in any copycat behaviors at home. This one-way street really puts the lie to this impulsive imitation having something to do with conscious acts of intersectional """solidarity""" since Americans are curiously immune to thinking or acting that way when the the polarity is reversed.
Note that I am usually complaining how American intellectuals are -too- focused just on American facts, history, context and fail to test their ideas against a whole world's worth of additional data that usually easily falsifies some fashionable thesis about causation. But the timing of shifts in opinion among foreign elites compared to when corresponding policy reforms were implemented in those countries is an exception from which one can infer almost no insight of value, because of America's position at the top of the status hierarchy and the influence that necessarily follows from this state of affairs.
Rarely speaking English appears to be one of the very few things that provides any kind of buffer against Anglo cultural imperialism, however limited. If people speak English all the time they are going to imbibe American media and then it's all over.
There are lots of different things that contribute to insulation from influences and yes few are as important as a hard-to-overcome language barrier. Still, this fact is probably not very consoling for leaders of communities or nations worried about bad American influence, and it is even less actionable.
For one thing, whatever the rate of English proficiency may hold for the overall population, high-status and especially intellectual / highly-educated elites - and extra especially the younger cohorts of those - in any country are likely to have a -much- higher level of English proficiency.
Some facility with English is practically a requirement to participate in certain professions with rapid progress where a lot of the communication about those developments occurs at the global scale and is carried out either predominantly in English or with an English version or equivalent happening in parallel.
These kinds of elites will -want- to pay attention to what is happening in America, global elites will often want their kids to attend college in America (or its cultural satellites) and in many places they will consider it almost a form of child abuse to -not- make every effort to educate their children to be as proficient as possible in English and from the earliest ages. A person with the potential to get a lucrative job with a big, wealthy Anglosphere company will be motivated to continue improving his language skills, and it is just impossible for practically any person in the world with elite talents to not see the tremendous advantages English proficiency can offer to his opportunities.
As just one example among many, consider the advantage usually partially attributed to India's greater rate of high proficiency in English, which is the number of Indians now occupying C-level positions at many of the biggest and wealthiest American companies. That's not just about English, but English is an important part of it.
And to the extent all these elites know English and pay attention to America, they are not insulated, and the non-elites in those countries are not insulated from those elites. That may buy you some time and mean the influence gets watered down, which is not nothing, but it's also not much of a solution.
The other problem is that the language barrier just isn't much of a barrier with all this new translation tech, and it's getting to be less of a barrier everyday as we seem to genuinely be heading towards a world with Star Trek "Universal Translator Earpiece" / Hitchhiker's Guide "babel fish", not just "in our lifetimes", but certainly "within this decade" and now not even implausibly, "next year".
So, language alone is probably not going to help much. Going cold turkey on as much American info as possible in one's media diet is probably much more important, similar to the way some people went cold turkey on Twitter knowing that it was "bad for them".
Re: "the fundamental cause [of wokeness is] widespread discomfort with disparities in outcomes by identity category."
Plural causes reinforce one another. Here are some causes:
• Affirmative action laws (Hanania)
• Dismay at disparate impact of neutral rules (Kling)
• European propensity to emulate America
• Coalition of bootleggers and baptists (rent-seeking in guise of doing good)
• The residential campus (college as a 'total institution' in Anglosphere) + selectivity + putative role of diversity in education + belief that Ivies create new elites
• Self-sorting across towns or neighborhoods or k-12 schools to optimize youth peer group.
Analysis might distinguish necessary causes and jointly sufficient causes. My intuition is that there exists a cluster of mechanisms.
My intuition is that dismay at disparate impact of neutral rules (Arnold's mechanism) is a necessary cause.
Which groups do you think map to the metaphorical bootleggers and Baptists?
Bootleggers: Bureaucrats on the make.
Baptists: People dismayed at disparate impact of neutral criteria.
Could you expand on what a "bureaucrat on the make" is like in the woke context. Or is it that all bureaucrats are on the make in whatever their context happens to be, so all bureaucrats are a kind of bootlegger corresponding to that particular kind of Baptist?
A typical pattern:
Influential activist stakeholders in an org become dismayed at (a) disparate impact of neutral criteria and/or (b) a scandalous and vivid, if rare, harm to a member of a putatively oppressed group.
Influential stakeholders then lobby to create specialized remedial bureaucracies for equity.
The specialized bureaucracy is granted extra room for rent-seeking because the influential stakeholders reason as follows: How will we know that you really care about what we care about (the oppressed group) if you give priority to efficiency? Waste signals care.
Other bureaucracies adapt their missions and programs in order to qualify for new equity resources. Broad participation signals general care. Everyone gets to wet their beak.
I read somewhere recently that if the Civil Rights Act had not passed congress, the activist Supreme Court of the time was prepared to pass it via judicial ruling.
The law ended up how it ended up because people think something is wrong and needs to be fixed. The law then punishes those that don't believe in this consensus and/or that don't like particular implementations. Since those that dissent are constantly being punished and those that assent rewarded its tough to get any major change in public opinion necessary to overturn the law.
The law as applied (not as written) does not match public opinion. There was never a time when the US public approved of "reverse" discrimination. The laws the passed Congress were therefore facially colourblind.
Elites then went and created a problem that nobody asked for by introducing their favoured discrimination anyway.
Gay-marriage never passed via referendum, so the courts did it anyway. However, the courts often only do these things when they think they won't make a critical mass of people they care about (i.e. progressive elites) angry, and that public opinion is moving in that direction and just needs a nudge. That's because when the courts act in the progressive direction, it has a way of accelerating those changes in opinion, such that, if those referenda were held today, the results probably would come out different.
My Dad was alive when CRA passed. He didn't like affirmative action. However, he also believed in literal physical equality of races, and assumed that once the legal barriers were removed that equality of outcome would naturally follow. I believe this is a very mainstream view.
When equality of outcome didn't naturally follow, this was a source of great concern to many people. Some wanted to be pro-active about it (affirmative action) and others didn't, but all basically accepted that "something" was wrong about not achieving equality of outcome and that it must be the result of "something". All vaguely feel like "something" should be done about "this problem", though they differ on what the something is. Naturally, officials and elite consensus ended up deciding the "something".
Steve Hayward and company on Powerline's 3 Whisky Happy Hour podcast have discussed several times how the opinion in Brown v. Board was carefully written to apply only to education as well as not being grounded on a Constitutional requirement that government action be colorblind (per Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson) but specifically on discrimination that is detrimental to minorities, leaving open the ability to create government-sponsored discrimination that was intended to be helpful. It was written a full decade before the Civil Rights Act so what you're suggesting is entirely plausible.
re: the first link: It's reductive to attribute the disparate impact standard to just Griggs. You will often see many people on the "dissident right" overattribute influence to Griggs without noting the limitations in the decision itself or in subsequent decisions that limited Griggs. It's easier to write that Griggs is the problem instead of recognizing the larger issue of full burrito of the CRA itself and other far better established core parts of 14th Amendment substantive due process jurisprudence. Similarly, it's convenient to heap opprobrium on Title IX as shorthand, but there's a lot of ruin in the other Titles as well that often has greater influence. It is easier to make the argument that One Bad Case is the proton torpedo exhaust port or whatever than it is to recognize that there is a much deeper issue here that goes back to the post-1937 interpretation of the Commerce Clause.
The CRA is not about the CRA or about concern for minorities (a justification running threadbare in the "majority minority" society) so much as it is about the basic legal justification for modern federal power. When the CRA has been discarded, our new tyrants will invent a new arbitrary justification: it does not matter. So I agree with the post author's inclination that the legal root cause theory is not fully explanatory. I think that non-lawyer Caldwell's way of exploring the phenomenon of the "new constitution" illuminates more than non-practicing lawyer Hanania's explanation of a similar phenomenon if only because Hanania's legal analysis does not go deeply enough.
When it comes to wokeness (probably better described as social justice fundamentalism), I’m reminded of the analogy of onion layers. If we peel off the wokeness layer, we encounter another disconcerting layer. Peel that layer off and we find another problematic layer. What is the average Joe going to do? Many will avoid the onion all together. That means moving to a red county, in a red state and avoiding the blue institutions as much as possible. Thus, demand for blue institutions and places should fall. This is no panacea of course, but it is the likely response of many. Then next question is how to build new institutions in those red places. It will be challenging, but perhaps easier to build new rather than fix blue.
"Thus, demand for blue institutions and places should fall."
California used to be red. Now blue.
Virginia used to be red, now blue.
Even deep blue areas used to be more purple.
The problem with "just move someplace more red" is that immigration is going to come for us all. Further, once national elections become uncompetitive the deep blue federal government is not going to tolerate red state independence.
Lastly, red states are still full of blue cities. If you move to a red state you are still likely to be in or near blue cities, your schools are still likely to have lots of blue professionals, and the place you work is likely to be run by blue people.
I do in fact tell every young person I know without too many attachments to leave behind to book it for Florida or Texas, but I don't think that represents a long term solution.
Within our communities,
separate school and state,
just as we have church and state.
Yes, the big cities and the tourist towns are blue everywhere. The public schools and most private secular schools are blue everywhere. So what does the average Joe do then?
Turn to Christianity? Probably not. The supernatural dogma is too strong and dysfunctional, but maybe yes if it means turning certain Christian churches into secular improvement groups and schools. In some cases this might be easier than fixing blue institutions.
Otherwise, in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee here is one solution: Thales Academy with a $5000 annual tuition. This is not a blue school. https://www.thalesacademy.org
In Nevada, Utah, Texas, and Idaho here is another solution: Challenger School with a $15,000 a year tuition or $0 tuition for children of employees. This is not a blue school. https://www.challengerschool.com
Christian schools are another option for those wanting or willing to take part in them, but this is not a great longterm solution, unless these schools are willing to shed their supernatural dogma.
For college, the options seem very limited. Thales College? Grove City College? Hillsdale College? UATX? Community colleges + work experience? Other small liberal arts colleges with student viewpoint ratios less than 2:1?
None of this is a panacea, but it is better than living in a blue state or attending public schools.
Will the red places turn blue in another 10 years? Maybe. In that case, one could pickup and move to the next red town over yonder.
Is this a longterm solution? If it is, it’s not a great solution.
So besides just moving to the next red town, we need to be learning, growing and improving at every step. We need more people to understand basic economics and the principles behind the Founding, the Constitution, federalism, and the Declaration. We need to make the Constitution even better than it was at the Founding. We need more people developing habits of excellent moral character. We need to take a hard look at Christianity and improve it; take from it the good, and leave the rest. We need more people reading, writing and discussing on good forums like this Substack and at the local level in neighborhoods and communities.
We need to fix our communities. I especially like some of the wisdom that Peter Gray has been sharing at Play Makes Us Human. His recent posts on being an amateur reminds me that the best solutions are often simple solutions.
We should consider studying the Zionist project. This means thinking carefully about defense of and immigration to our communities. If our communities are to be places of high moral character, in which life, liberty, property, and equality before the law are valued, then we need to limit entry to those abiding by the rules and those willing to maintain respect for community norms. We need Constitutions for our communities.
Most importantly we need to abolish all government education within our communities.
Within our communities,
separate school and state,
just as we have church and state.
Within our communities,
write new First Amendments,
making education and religion tantamount,
making separate education and state.
California is gigantic and it seems likely that for the foreseeable future it will probably be exporting hundreds of thousands of residents a year who can no longer afford to live there or tolerate its oppressive regulations and unsafe disorder.
These are called "ruin voters" because experience is such that after they flee and arrive in some place they prefer because it is not like California, they vote to change that new place in the same old ways and for the same old things that made California a place they wanted to flee in the first place.
Those states can't stop getting politically transformed in this way because those governments cannot restrict the immigration of Californians. People have tried to point this out to Bryan Caplan in the context of immigrants fleeing dysfunctional countries for the US and then going on to see majorities voting in an analogously ruinous nature. His responses are, um, to put it mildly, not sufficiently compelling to put a rational person worried about these things at ease.
The comparison of high marginal tax rates and implicit high rates from benefit withdrawal is flawed. The solution on the benefit side is very strict rules on seeking work (most of the higher income at the low end is from working more hours, not just from being paid more).
Would agree that the state needs to be a lot more coherent on valuing all state benefits.
Lyn Alden is a diamond - a fantastic economic source of wisdom.
While Arnold's addition is true, " the ratio of stock market value to corporate earnings time the ratio of corporate earnings to GDP", the important asset inflation issue is the growth from 70% to 170%.
If US money printing continues to go mostly into asset inflation, which is mostly already owned by the rich, the money printing strongly contributes to the rich getting richer FASTER than the median workers.
It also implies that, if needed to solve a fiscal crisis, there's a huge amount of easily taxable financial wealth available in the stock market -- but just writing this makes it clear that such an implication is unlikely to be really true. In a crisis, those "too high" stock prices will drop in value faster than the value of the USD.
Which means to me that we need to be looking at wealth type taxes or policies to push up wages for the 3 middle quintiles: low middle (20-40), middle (40-60), upper middle (60-80). Perhaps this is where corporate earnings come in -- too much profit for capital owners and not enough wages for workers.
Probably due to semi-secret oligarchist tendencies of small, fast, competing firms being willing to be bought out by one of the biggest companies. With the big profit as an incentive to other creators to start small companies.
There's also the M. Munger claim (from 2019 Econtalk, among others), that liberal democracy leads to crony capitalism, which seems true, and bad. (BTSOTC - beyond the scope of this comment).
Weidinger - “That meant a household with two adults and two young children could collect more than $67,000 in pandemic benefits without a penny being counted in determining its eligibility for Medicaid. Two-thirds of that amount, or nearly $47,000, would have been similarly ignored when the family applied for food stamps."
In trying to understand the $67,000 number I end up at a wsj paywall. And then I reread my quoted text. It doesn't actually say anyone gets that much in benefits. Does anyone? How?
Wow. 24 comments and I see none on the stock market. Here's one.
The discussion entirely misses the biggest factor in stock values. Interest rates have mostly dropped over the last 40+ years and are far lower than decades back. Obviously the correlation isn't perfect but it explains most of Alden's 70 to 170% over the last 30 years.
Re: The origins of woke.
There is a paradox:
On the one hand, as Arnold emphasizes, the woke are motivated by dismay at a statistical pattern: "disparities in outcomes" (disparate impact of neutral criteria). There is some numeracy in this mindset.
On the other hand, the woke are highly motivated by scandal at the rare, vivid, disturbing event — to the deliberate neglect of statistics and prevalence. The death of George Floyd is a prime example. Here, *innumeracy* governs the woke mindset. (Deaths of unarmed suspects at the hands of police are rare — and do not exhibit a substantial racial bias. A reasonable progressive policy to protect the disadvantaged would be, "More police, better trained," not "Defund the police.")
Hmmm. I think Hanania dislikes Americans. That doesn't bother me, I don't particularly like them myself - but it's *always* good to remember that while the world went crazy in the first half of the 20th century - in America, we had a good thing going. How fortunate we were. How fortunate were the Jews and Poles and yes, even the Germans and the Japanese - name any group you like - who got out of Over There and into here, before and during all those convulsions.
I peel the onion and find nothing but European ideas. For instance, that Frantz Fanon profile I linked to yesterday quoted Sartre's introduction to "The Wretched of the Earth":
"Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”
And just look at Algeria today
The How story of any social phenomenon tends to emphasize continuity, how existing structures have adapted. The Why story tends to emphasize discontinuity- what changed to cause or accelerate the adaptations. I see Hanania as telling more of a How than a Why story. He seems to think the 2 stories overlap substantially, but I think the larger populist trends on both Left and Right fit better with a Gurri-style discontinuity analysis.