Links to Consider, 12/14

Urban Segregation; Ed West on the advantages of strict order in cities; Jonathan Haidt on boys in retreat; Tyler Cowen on University Presidents on free speech

Hamed Nilforoshan and others find,

Using mobile phone mobility data to represent 1.6 billion real-world exposures among 9.6 million people in the United States, we measure exposure segregation across 382 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and 2,829 counties. We find that exposure segregation is 67% higher in the ten largest MSAs than in small MSAs with fewer than 100,000 residents. This means that, contrary to expectations, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have less exposure to a socioeconomically diverse range of individuals. Second, we find that the increased socioeconomic segregation in large cities arises because they offer a greater choice of differentiated spaces targeted to specific socioeconomic groups.

Pointer from Alexander Kruel. I read this as saying that blue cities may have diversity, but not so much equity and inclusion.

Ed West writes,

The Tokyo urban fabric, although often not pretty, testifies to this freedom from crime; there are vending machines everywhere, serving both cold and hot drinks and even meals, a convenience we couldn’t afford because everything has to be designed on the assumption that someone will vandalise it.

“We” refers to Britain, but it also applies to the U.S. He also says,

Where people behave themselves, and suffer sanctions for not behaving, then everyone can have nice things. 

…Too many influential people here like squalor and crime, or are unwilling to countenance the measures required to reduce it (Japan has strict anti-drugs laws, for instance, and the number of people in psychiatric beds is high). They are unable to appreciate that you’re not truly free if held hostage by the worst behaved members of society, and your behaviour has to adapt to them. After all, much of the cost of crime is not due to direct impact, but the efforts law-abiding people have to make to avoid criminals.

Jonathan Haidt writes,

For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting.

…Just as video games became more finely tuned to boys’ greater propensity for coalitional competition, the real world, and especially school, got more frustrating for many boys: shorter recess, bans on rough and tumble play, and ever more emphasis on sitting still and listening.

Tyler Cowen writes,

Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups.  That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.  As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”

How do you think that affects the quality of their other decisions?  The perceptions and incentives of their subordinates?

2. They are all in a defensive crouch.

In their testimony for a Congressional committee, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn did not pass the Turing test. They indeed sounded like robots reading scripts from their lawyers.

I am sure that their lawyers impressed upon them their legal vulnerability. On the one hand, these universities, and some others, are flat-out guilty of creating a hostile environment for Jews, and they are ripe for being sued on those grounds. If and when they get sued, their defense will have to emphasize free speech and neutrality, while dancing around their past behavior on other issues. The free-speech defense may be their best chance in court, but everybody knows that it is phony.

As a PR strategy, this failed. The college presidents became The Current Thing, at least for a few days. But as Moses Sternstein put it.

What exactly were people expecting? Why is anyone shocked? What new information entered the mix?

The solution is not to make these three the fall guys (girls?). It is to finally address the rot at universities that some of us have been talking about for years. But I think the elites would prefer to treat this as a temporary moral panic over the three college presidents.

After one of the presidents was forced to resign, Peter Savodnik wrote,

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill should not have been forced to resign Saturday. In fact, her resignation is a blow to academic freedom. It amounts to little more than a cave—yet another prominent American institution succumbing to the angry mob.

The problem at universities is not that they defend the right of students to chant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slogans. The problem is that they have completely abandoned the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of excellence in favor of a stupid, rigid ideology.

Substacks referenced above:

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The Ouster of Penn’s President Won’t Fix the Problem

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Random Walk at Night: Lights, Camera and Action

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Jonathan Haidt: I’m Worried About the Boys, Too

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Having nice things in Japan

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Links for 2023-12-06