"Racism used to be an easy thing to define in America. We knew it was geographically concentrated in the southern states..."
Did we know that or just believe it? The last time I checked the stats, there was a significantly larger gap between black/white imprisonment rates in the North than in the South. This could correspond to northern whites being more sympathetic to blacks in theory, but less so in practice. Full of compassion for what they perceive to be oppressed blacks in the South, while lacking tolerance towards blacks who live near them. Reminder that Curtis Yarvin said (paraphrased) "leftism is about pretending to care about people you don’t interact with in order to justify being an asshole to people you do interact with."
I have a close friend who considers herself a progressive egalitarian. She once exultantly told me she lectured a DC cabbie who passed by a black fare to pick her up instead. Then a few months later when she saw black men hanging around in the alley behind her apartment, and then found next morning her tires had been slashed, she ranted about "nwords" with no self-awareness at all. I doubt even she knows what she really believes, but she does have a strong instinct for status-seeking.
For the cause of delayed marriage and declining fertility, I would go with what behavior reveals about preferences.
Those in their twenties and thirties aren’t putting off marriage and kids because of anxiety and future security, or at least maybe only on margin.
Most seem to view and take advantage of that period of their life as their only chance to self-actualize (whatever that means), and the preferred choices are traveling world, luxury consumption, and trying out new partners and social groups.
Because if you’re not born into wealth you can’t do both at the same time, unless you have at most one kid or maybe two for the really ambitious…
It's important to retain a lot of healthy skepticism about recent studies on the correlates of low fertility. The problem is like micro vs macro. Studies tend to look at data collected at the same time, usually recently, but what might be said in a micro sense to "account" for small differences between people at any one time can be totally different factors from the Macro cause which has caused similar huge reductions for all groups -over- time. Straining to see what patterns might distinguish contemporary 1.3 TFR women from 1.4s and 1.5s is going to come up with trivial results when the actual issue is that the most similar historically analogous groups to those had double or triple those numbers a generation or two ago. The studies are choosing the wrong dimension of analysis to discover the driver of the actually big and important deltas we care about.
Again, when elites were trying to reduce fertility, they considered it common knowledge that the way to do it was to increase opportunities for female education, work and independence, and that the effects would not happen overnight but occur gradually over the long term. And so it did. Now that some of trying to go in the other direction, looking across time at the past as if it has anything to teach us about the basis of high fertility is off limits and so we are limited to framing our inquiries as if the answers might be found in completely useless details of utterly negligible significance compared to the big fast reductions for everyone everywhere in the past 60 years. Straining at gnats indeed!
Here's a metaphor. Imagine there is a carbon monoxide leak in an area, but not enough to kill people, just enough to shorten their lives and make their lives very unhealthy and unpleasant in a number of ways, and that to the people exposed this is all kind of mysterious as they don't know about carbon monoxide poisoning.
Well, they start trying to figure out how to get healthier, and they do a giant population wide study trying to see what people might be doing different to lead healthier or sicker lives. They find some patterns with diet, exercise, heritage, profession, and the people at the extremes on multiple measures do indeed live about 30% healthier and longer lives than average. But -everybody- could be living -500%- healthier lives if only they could get rid of the carbon monoxide! Looking at the differences between people does not really tell you anything except for what factors make a tiny difference in being able to tolerate pervasive, long term exposure and carbon monoxide poisoning. Looking between people is pointless, looking for the same culprit affecting all the people is what's needed, and in the case of fertility, to do so, we have to look to the past to get at the truth, even if we don't like what we see there and find out.
Sure, I think we’re saying something pretty similar. What I’m speculating is a general cultural shift towards living to entertain oneself rather than living for family and children. This trend seems to have progressed over time and is more advanced temporally in those regions where it is easier and the culture encourages that lifestyle.
Where you see an exception to the trend, which may help prove the rule, is probably among the religious, and I think robust largely regardless of creed (comparing between people), but also over time (more people took their professed religious beliefs more seriously back when).
Religious piety matters, but not that much anymore in the middle of the range. I think that going from the 25th to 75th percentile on the piety scale used to translate into an extra 1.5 kids and now just 0.15 kids. These days you have to get above the 97th percentile for it to start to really matter and for the average number of kids to really start shooting up. And that indicates that's it's not really religious beliefs so much as the fact that at that extreme level of pious practice you are living in a different world, in an insular subculture trying hard to keep its exposure to the mainstream society down to a minimum and where the lives of and alternative opportunities for women are both intentionally and incidentally constrained so as to make early motherhood and frequent procreation the most desirable choice among limited options. The best example for this in the US is what is happening to fertility rates among Mormons which was near Amish/Hasidic levels just two generations ago but which has cratered dramatically. Mormons are still way more pious than the typical American Christian, but they aren't having the number of kids that level of piety would have translated into 40 years ago even for non-Mormons. Whether it's due to Sybaritic hedonism or something else, being part of mainstream culture at all is sterilizing and only radical levels of deviation from it is compatible with procreation levels necessary for population stabilization and growth.
My small kids read Bernstein Bear's books. One we have that they read the other day was about "The Easter Story". It's a bit odd to teach Jesus's death to a small child, so what the book says is that "Jesus was becoming too powerful" and so someone killed him. I vaguely feel like I might have been taught something similar at that age.
My kid was confused why anyone would want to kill Jesus, given that he was such a swell guy and all. My wife thought for a second and said that "some people just don't want things to change". She then said that MLK day had just happened and that MLK was killed for the same reason, just like Jesus.
It was in this moment that MLK secular saintificaiton, which I've always intellectually understood, became quite real. MLK = Jesus, the perfect spotless victim. People who oppose MLK are racist monsters who don't want the world to get better.
What do you do in such a situation? A small child can't understand even this sanitized story, is one going to start getting even more complicated. It's like when they come home singing about Kwanzaa because that's what the preschool program says they are supposed to learn. Do you tell them it's a made up holiday conjured up by a black radical terrorist that tortured people and wanted to get rid of the whites? Or do you just let them sing their song.
The goal of the people making these choices at this age is to associate X and Y and Z with "good" and A and B and C with "bad." Before the mind is even really capable of understanding good or bad.
You mentioned the sanctification of Angela Davis in a previous comment. I've seem a lot of people in person in my life but I never imagined she would be one of them. Well, I was in that part of the city yesterday to drop off some stuff at the end of a work day, stopped along the way out to grab a snack at a place I liked, and curious about a crowd with a noticeable pro-Hamas bent, and who should be going into Busboys and Poets to give a speech for "Palestine Week" but the living article, which I only realized after forcing my way to front so I could see and then literally bumping into her, though very lightly, fortunately. She was given the red carpet treatment, and adulation like some minor celebrity, standing room only.
I once tried to relay this anecdote before, on another blog, but it was deleted. I think it's considered tacky to mention the dead, especially the small dead; "sensationalist", hitting below the belt or something. Womanish.
This: long ago I dutifully subscribed to the NYT because I thought that's what adults did. A couple years later I cancelled my subscription. The trigger was - I was a young mother then - a story the Times ran, about a man in my area who had murdered a little girl; one of those, she disappeared on her bicycle, found raped and strangled, things. The killer - not his first violent offense - did not seriously dispute this and was found guilty, but due to the ways of lawyers and the imposition of their values, the then-current statute in my state enjoined no more than a 10 year sentence for the murder of a child. He was presently out of prison, and there was a little kerfuffle about where he should be halfway-housed or paroled to or whatever. No Texas town wanted him. Some places that were considered, made this very clear.
The NYT picked up on this - one might have said - purely local crime story. They printed a photo, not of the child victim, but of the killer, a photo that spanned the width of the page and in my memory had very much the look of a photo they might have run on their fashion page. A photo they had carefully staged, in other words. It seems to me the guy was in jeans leaning against a muscle car.
The purpose of the story was simply to attack my state; just one of their themes. Have theme, will run story. Mouth-breathers, you know. Much in the vein of the above-linked piece, a geographical blood taint. A people so unreconstructed that unlike good Yankees they had no tolerance at all, for a released prisoner wanting to get on with his life.
I do not say that their sympathies truly lay with a child-killer - their sympathies lay with themselves - but that was the effect, of course. Their antipathies were the raison d'etre of the story. Let's say they misjudged the tone a little, but I was presumably the only person in my state who noticed this almost-beatification. "The enemy of my enemies is my saint."
I might have forgotten this peculiar reason for cancelling the NYT long ago, if it weren't for the fact that that dude has been back in the news. A string of unsolved murders, that he scarcely troubled to conceal, in his wake ... they finally bothered to bring him in a couple years ago.
For all the problems with modern civilization, it is still the case that you'd have to be pretty... eccentric, to be charitable, to prefer living in any previous time in human history to our own, given the continuing pace of material enrichment. This goes double if you could not choose, behind the veil of ignorance, whether in that previous time you would be located in the Western world. Technological progress is not an unalloyed good but we remain extremely far from any realistic worry about it's being a net bad.
"I think it in itself is enough to explain the mystery of why humans are the animal that seemingly lacks an instinct to reproduce."
What? Humans are like all other animals. We have instincts for behaviors (fornication) that predictably led to sex in the ancestral environment. Rip us away from the environment we evolved in and sexual behavior and reproduction can decouple.
I'm also pretty sure that animals in captivity have trouble reproducing, with potentially interesting implications for how our current, more domesticated world might be affecting the expression of sexual behavior.
I didn't like NS Lyons' piece. The claim "If you believe everything in the future will be better than in the past, then there is nothing from the past that deserves to be conserved." is on its face rather a silly thing to say. I might believe I will have a better house in the future, but that doesn't imply I should burn down my current house; I am going to need it until I get a better one. There is nothing inconsistent with thinking "Things will be better in the future" and "What we have now is worth keeping a hold of for a while." The belief that things will all be better in the future doesn't mean the future is now, the things will all get better at exactly the same moment, or even that we won't make mistakes about things being better in any given instance.
Andreessen put a target on his back by calling his piece a 'manifesto,' which I assume was deliberate (or perhaps tongue-in-cheek) given that he is a smart guy. He provoked a reaction on the left and right, which I assume is what he wanted to do. I'm not a techno-optimist myself. I never used to think about what kind of aircraft an airline is using when I book a flight, but now I'm wondering whether I do need to check to make sure I don't end up flying on a Boeing 737 MAX, and that's beside the issue of what went into the airline's decision to hire the pilot. And while household appliances have more bells and whistles (and chips) than they used to, in my experience they aren't as reliable and don't last as long as they did when I was a kid (see Ben's appliance and junk youtube channel). Andreessen is a software guru, so maybe that's why he's so optimistic, but you can't eat software and you don't need it to get your clothes clean.
I like McWhorter. Maybe it's because I tend to agree with him, maybe for better reasons. That said, has he held any positions other than prof to indicate his skills as an administrator/leader?
McWhorter has no experience either as an administrator/leader or as a spineless bureaucrat. Because colleges tend to hire spineless bureaucrats, I count his lack of experience as a feature, not a bug.
I'm skeptical the only options are spinless bureaucrats or inexperienced. Didn't the UChicago President say they weren't going to participate in protecting students from harm from speech or something like that?
Is Grove City still like it was in the 80s? What about Hillsdale? Aren't there others out there like this? Any economists from Chicago or George Mason in admin positions?
“The change wrought by technological innovation is incremental and ruthlessly evaluated by the market. I believe that makes it safer.”
A common complaint among successful entrepreneurs has been “where are our self-driving and flying cars,” but a conservative may say that many of them have built their success on capturing market value by technological products that feed our vanity (Meta, Instagram), our wrath (Twitter), our sloth and gluttony (Uber Eats), etc.
If as a conservative you view people on balance as fallen creatures or tending toward sin, then the market is perhaps the greatest and most efficient engine for indulging our baser whims, and perhaps accelerating a cultural shift towards the amoral, or even immoral.
That may be the more precise concern: we have become a society without an affirmative moral vision or purpose because technological progress and capitalism give us what we want, and that is an externality that is observable but not so easily measurable.
"Move fast and break things" is fine enough when all you can break is a website or an LLC, but when you break people you can't just write it off. They are still there, and usually society ends up paying to try to put broken people back together.
Racism is the biggest issue in America because it can be defined in such a way that there is no solution, no way to avoid "racism".
Racism-1: Official racist laws, like the Democrat Jim Crow laws which treated Blacks as legally different, and worse, than Whites.
Racism-2: Unwritten racist discrimination by businesses and organizations, including making less money for the same work.
Racism-3: Individual racist feelings that Blacks are inferior in some way.
Racism-4: Economic outcomes where Blacks have jobs which pay less to both Blacks and Whites, than the average jobs Whites have.
CRA got rid of 1 & 2, but all recognize getting rid of 3 is not really under gov't control.
Blacks are still poorer, so we have 4.
The truth is that IQ is important to education, and to jobs, and to making money -- and Blacks have significantly lower IQs. Whether it's mostly genetic or mostly cultural, the reality of inferior, lower IQs on average is a reality that means "reality is systemically racist". Just like the NBA failing to have as many Hispanics as Blacks, nor even close, despite there being more Hispanics than Blacks in the USA. If one defines the "rules of the game" as systemically racist, than it IS racist.
King's Poor People's Campaign was tending towards socialism in order to reach more equality in economic results.
The goal, for "poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity"
“We have an ultimate goal of freedom, independence, self-determination, whatever we want to call it"
Our society needs more honest support for low IQ workers. But no government program can give self-respect, it can only be earned by the individual. Giving each person a job would be a big help in that process; with less free cash for sub-optimal (/immoral?) lifestyle choices.
No on can prove anything, but looking at the last 100 years I'd say things have gotten much better on average and is we don't regulate ourselves into stasis, in 100 years things can be equivalently better.
"Racism used to be an easy thing to define in America. We knew it was geographically concentrated in the southern states..."
Did we know that or just believe it? The last time I checked the stats, there was a significantly larger gap between black/white imprisonment rates in the North than in the South. This could correspond to northern whites being more sympathetic to blacks in theory, but less so in practice. Full of compassion for what they perceive to be oppressed blacks in the South, while lacking tolerance towards blacks who live near them. Reminder that Curtis Yarvin said (paraphrased) "leftism is about pretending to care about people you don’t interact with in order to justify being an asshole to people you do interact with."
I have a close friend who considers herself a progressive egalitarian. She once exultantly told me she lectured a DC cabbie who passed by a black fare to pick her up instead. Then a few months later when she saw black men hanging around in the alley behind her apartment, and then found next morning her tires had been slashed, she ranted about "nwords" with no self-awareness at all. I doubt even she knows what she really believes, but she does have a strong instinct for status-seeking.
For the cause of delayed marriage and declining fertility, I would go with what behavior reveals about preferences.
Those in their twenties and thirties aren’t putting off marriage and kids because of anxiety and future security, or at least maybe only on margin.
Most seem to view and take advantage of that period of their life as their only chance to self-actualize (whatever that means), and the preferred choices are traveling world, luxury consumption, and trying out new partners and social groups.
Because if you’re not born into wealth you can’t do both at the same time, unless you have at most one kid or maybe two for the really ambitious…
It's important to retain a lot of healthy skepticism about recent studies on the correlates of low fertility. The problem is like micro vs macro. Studies tend to look at data collected at the same time, usually recently, but what might be said in a micro sense to "account" for small differences between people at any one time can be totally different factors from the Macro cause which has caused similar huge reductions for all groups -over- time. Straining to see what patterns might distinguish contemporary 1.3 TFR women from 1.4s and 1.5s is going to come up with trivial results when the actual issue is that the most similar historically analogous groups to those had double or triple those numbers a generation or two ago. The studies are choosing the wrong dimension of analysis to discover the driver of the actually big and important deltas we care about.
Again, when elites were trying to reduce fertility, they considered it common knowledge that the way to do it was to increase opportunities for female education, work and independence, and that the effects would not happen overnight but occur gradually over the long term. And so it did. Now that some of trying to go in the other direction, looking across time at the past as if it has anything to teach us about the basis of high fertility is off limits and so we are limited to framing our inquiries as if the answers might be found in completely useless details of utterly negligible significance compared to the big fast reductions for everyone everywhere in the past 60 years. Straining at gnats indeed!
Here's a metaphor. Imagine there is a carbon monoxide leak in an area, but not enough to kill people, just enough to shorten their lives and make their lives very unhealthy and unpleasant in a number of ways, and that to the people exposed this is all kind of mysterious as they don't know about carbon monoxide poisoning.
Well, they start trying to figure out how to get healthier, and they do a giant population wide study trying to see what people might be doing different to lead healthier or sicker lives. They find some patterns with diet, exercise, heritage, profession, and the people at the extremes on multiple measures do indeed live about 30% healthier and longer lives than average. But -everybody- could be living -500%- healthier lives if only they could get rid of the carbon monoxide! Looking at the differences between people does not really tell you anything except for what factors make a tiny difference in being able to tolerate pervasive, long term exposure and carbon monoxide poisoning. Looking between people is pointless, looking for the same culprit affecting all the people is what's needed, and in the case of fertility, to do so, we have to look to the past to get at the truth, even if we don't like what we see there and find out.
Sure, I think we’re saying something pretty similar. What I’m speculating is a general cultural shift towards living to entertain oneself rather than living for family and children. This trend seems to have progressed over time and is more advanced temporally in those regions where it is easier and the culture encourages that lifestyle.
Where you see an exception to the trend, which may help prove the rule, is probably among the religious, and I think robust largely regardless of creed (comparing between people), but also over time (more people took their professed religious beliefs more seriously back when).
Religious piety matters, but not that much anymore in the middle of the range. I think that going from the 25th to 75th percentile on the piety scale used to translate into an extra 1.5 kids and now just 0.15 kids. These days you have to get above the 97th percentile for it to start to really matter and for the average number of kids to really start shooting up. And that indicates that's it's not really religious beliefs so much as the fact that at that extreme level of pious practice you are living in a different world, in an insular subculture trying hard to keep its exposure to the mainstream society down to a minimum and where the lives of and alternative opportunities for women are both intentionally and incidentally constrained so as to make early motherhood and frequent procreation the most desirable choice among limited options. The best example for this in the US is what is happening to fertility rates among Mormons which was near Amish/Hasidic levels just two generations ago but which has cratered dramatically. Mormons are still way more pious than the typical American Christian, but they aren't having the number of kids that level of piety would have translated into 40 years ago even for non-Mormons. Whether it's due to Sybaritic hedonism or something else, being part of mainstream culture at all is sterilizing and only radical levels of deviation from it is compatible with procreation levels necessary for population stabilization and growth.
My small kids read Bernstein Bear's books. One we have that they read the other day was about "The Easter Story". It's a bit odd to teach Jesus's death to a small child, so what the book says is that "Jesus was becoming too powerful" and so someone killed him. I vaguely feel like I might have been taught something similar at that age.
My kid was confused why anyone would want to kill Jesus, given that he was such a swell guy and all. My wife thought for a second and said that "some people just don't want things to change". She then said that MLK day had just happened and that MLK was killed for the same reason, just like Jesus.
It was in this moment that MLK secular saintificaiton, which I've always intellectually understood, became quite real. MLK = Jesus, the perfect spotless victim. People who oppose MLK are racist monsters who don't want the world to get better.
What do you do in such a situation? A small child can't understand even this sanitized story, is one going to start getting even more complicated. It's like when they come home singing about Kwanzaa because that's what the preschool program says they are supposed to learn. Do you tell them it's a made up holiday conjured up by a black radical terrorist that tortured people and wanted to get rid of the whites? Or do you just let them sing their song.
The goal of the people making these choices at this age is to associate X and Y and Z with "good" and A and B and C with "bad." Before the mind is even really capable of understanding good or bad.
You mentioned the sanctification of Angela Davis in a previous comment. I've seem a lot of people in person in my life but I never imagined she would be one of them. Well, I was in that part of the city yesterday to drop off some stuff at the end of a work day, stopped along the way out to grab a snack at a place I liked, and curious about a crowd with a noticeable pro-Hamas bent, and who should be going into Busboys and Poets to give a speech for "Palestine Week" but the living article, which I only realized after forcing my way to front so I could see and then literally bumping into her, though very lightly, fortunately. She was given the red carpet treatment, and adulation like some minor celebrity, standing room only.
I once tried to relay this anecdote before, on another blog, but it was deleted. I think it's considered tacky to mention the dead, especially the small dead; "sensationalist", hitting below the belt or something. Womanish.
This: long ago I dutifully subscribed to the NYT because I thought that's what adults did. A couple years later I cancelled my subscription. The trigger was - I was a young mother then - a story the Times ran, about a man in my area who had murdered a little girl; one of those, she disappeared on her bicycle, found raped and strangled, things. The killer - not his first violent offense - did not seriously dispute this and was found guilty, but due to the ways of lawyers and the imposition of their values, the then-current statute in my state enjoined no more than a 10 year sentence for the murder of a child. He was presently out of prison, and there was a little kerfuffle about where he should be halfway-housed or paroled to or whatever. No Texas town wanted him. Some places that were considered, made this very clear.
The NYT picked up on this - one might have said - purely local crime story. They printed a photo, not of the child victim, but of the killer, a photo that spanned the width of the page and in my memory had very much the look of a photo they might have run on their fashion page. A photo they had carefully staged, in other words. It seems to me the guy was in jeans leaning against a muscle car.
The purpose of the story was simply to attack my state; just one of their themes. Have theme, will run story. Mouth-breathers, you know. Much in the vein of the above-linked piece, a geographical blood taint. A people so unreconstructed that unlike good Yankees they had no tolerance at all, for a released prisoner wanting to get on with his life.
I do not say that their sympathies truly lay with a child-killer - their sympathies lay with themselves - but that was the effect, of course. Their antipathies were the raison d'etre of the story. Let's say they misjudged the tone a little, but I was presumably the only person in my state who noticed this almost-beatification. "The enemy of my enemies is my saint."
I might have forgotten this peculiar reason for cancelling the NYT long ago, if it weren't for the fact that that dude has been back in the news. A string of unsolved murders, that he scarcely troubled to conceal, in his wake ... they finally bothered to bring him in a couple years ago.
MLK’s successors are teaching that minorities can never improve their lives as long as whites are racist and whites will always be racist.
For all the problems with modern civilization, it is still the case that you'd have to be pretty... eccentric, to be charitable, to prefer living in any previous time in human history to our own, given the continuing pace of material enrichment. This goes double if you could not choose, behind the veil of ignorance, whether in that previous time you would be located in the Western world. Technological progress is not an unalloyed good but we remain extremely far from any realistic worry about it's being a net bad.
No animal has an instinct to reproduce. What they have is an instinct to copulate.
"I think it in itself is enough to explain the mystery of why humans are the animal that seemingly lacks an instinct to reproduce."
What? Humans are like all other animals. We have instincts for behaviors (fornication) that predictably led to sex in the ancestral environment. Rip us away from the environment we evolved in and sexual behavior and reproduction can decouple.
I'm also pretty sure that animals in captivity have trouble reproducing, with potentially interesting implications for how our current, more domesticated world might be affecting the expression of sexual behavior.
I didn't like NS Lyons' piece. The claim "If you believe everything in the future will be better than in the past, then there is nothing from the past that deserves to be conserved." is on its face rather a silly thing to say. I might believe I will have a better house in the future, but that doesn't imply I should burn down my current house; I am going to need it until I get a better one. There is nothing inconsistent with thinking "Things will be better in the future" and "What we have now is worth keeping a hold of for a while." The belief that things will all be better in the future doesn't mean the future is now, the things will all get better at exactly the same moment, or even that we won't make mistakes about things being better in any given instance.
Well said.
Andreessen put a target on his back by calling his piece a 'manifesto,' which I assume was deliberate (or perhaps tongue-in-cheek) given that he is a smart guy. He provoked a reaction on the left and right, which I assume is what he wanted to do. I'm not a techno-optimist myself. I never used to think about what kind of aircraft an airline is using when I book a flight, but now I'm wondering whether I do need to check to make sure I don't end up flying on a Boeing 737 MAX, and that's beside the issue of what went into the airline's decision to hire the pilot. And while household appliances have more bells and whistles (and chips) than they used to, in my experience they aren't as reliable and don't last as long as they did when I was a kid (see Ben's appliance and junk youtube channel). Andreessen is a software guru, so maybe that's why he's so optimistic, but you can't eat software and you don't need it to get your clothes clean.
I like McWhorter. Maybe it's because I tend to agree with him, maybe for better reasons. That said, has he held any positions other than prof to indicate his skills as an administrator/leader?
McWhorter has no experience either as an administrator/leader or as a spineless bureaucrat. Because colleges tend to hire spineless bureaucrats, I count his lack of experience as a feature, not a bug.
I'm skeptical the only options are spinless bureaucrats or inexperienced. Didn't the UChicago President say they weren't going to participate in protecting students from harm from speech or something like that?
Is Grove City still like it was in the 80s? What about Hillsdale? Aren't there others out there like this? Any economists from Chicago or George Mason in admin positions?
“The change wrought by technological innovation is incremental and ruthlessly evaluated by the market. I believe that makes it safer.”
A common complaint among successful entrepreneurs has been “where are our self-driving and flying cars,” but a conservative may say that many of them have built their success on capturing market value by technological products that feed our vanity (Meta, Instagram), our wrath (Twitter), our sloth and gluttony (Uber Eats), etc.
If as a conservative you view people on balance as fallen creatures or tending toward sin, then the market is perhaps the greatest and most efficient engine for indulging our baser whims, and perhaps accelerating a cultural shift towards the amoral, or even immoral.
That may be the more precise concern: we have become a society without an affirmative moral vision or purpose because technological progress and capitalism give us what we want, and that is an externality that is observable but not so easily measurable.
"Move fast and break things" is fine enough when all you can break is a website or an LLC, but when you break people you can't just write it off. They are still there, and usually society ends up paying to try to put broken people back together.
Re: COBOL, "the obvious solution " ? The market will handle it, maybe not in the way you expect.
In fact, I would suggest that the market is already handling it.
Humans don't have the instinct to reproduce? That's an insane proposition.
Racism is the biggest issue in America because it can be defined in such a way that there is no solution, no way to avoid "racism".
Racism-1: Official racist laws, like the Democrat Jim Crow laws which treated Blacks as legally different, and worse, than Whites.
Racism-2: Unwritten racist discrimination by businesses and organizations, including making less money for the same work.
Racism-3: Individual racist feelings that Blacks are inferior in some way.
Racism-4: Economic outcomes where Blacks have jobs which pay less to both Blacks and Whites, than the average jobs Whites have.
CRA got rid of 1 & 2, but all recognize getting rid of 3 is not really under gov't control.
Blacks are still poorer, so we have 4.
The truth is that IQ is important to education, and to jobs, and to making money -- and Blacks have significantly lower IQs. Whether it's mostly genetic or mostly cultural, the reality of inferior, lower IQs on average is a reality that means "reality is systemically racist". Just like the NBA failing to have as many Hispanics as Blacks, nor even close, despite there being more Hispanics than Blacks in the USA. If one defines the "rules of the game" as systemically racist, than it IS racist.
King's Poor People's Campaign was tending towards socialism in order to reach more equality in economic results.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/poor-peoples-campaign
The goal, for "poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity"
“We have an ultimate goal of freedom, independence, self-determination, whatever we want to call it"
Our society needs more honest support for low IQ workers. But no government program can give self-respect, it can only be earned by the individual. Giving each person a job would be a big help in that process; with less free cash for sub-optimal (/immoral?) lifestyle choices.
Anxiety may play some role in fertility decline, but how much? There is a lot less to be worried about than the past.
No on can prove anything, but looking at the last 100 years I'd say things have gotten much better on average and is we don't regulate ourselves into stasis, in 100 years things can be equivalently better.