Links to Consider, 2/13

Joel Kotkin on the non-profit sector; Lorenzo Warby on beliefs as status markers; Jon Haidt is on substack; Lee Booth makes the bullish case for nuclear power;

Joel Kotkin writes,

The predilections of the ultra-rich will likely loom over politics and policy debates for decades to come. In the U.S., nonprofits’ assets have grown nine-fold since 1980. In 2020, nonprofits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting more than 5.6% of the U.S. economy. And this process is just beginning, as the boomers begin to leave behind their riches. The consulting firm Accenture projects that the Silent Generation and baby boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by 2060. 

…The current oligarchs may deserve opprobrium, but the ultimate danger posed by the nonprofit tsunami lies in their feckless embrace of a policy agenda that undermines the very essence of competitive capitalism. Like feudal lords, this new elite, emboldened by a common ideology, may continue to thrive in a world of frozen social relations, but only by destroying the very system that brought them their own good fortune—and that could someday threaten even their own privileged position.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this. A wealth tax would transfer more power to politicians. I wish that we could raise the status of profit-seeking enterprises, so that the successful businessmen and their families would invest more in the for-profit sector and less in the non-profit sector.

On Helen Dale’s substack, Lorenzo Warby writes,

complex linguistic prolixity complete with delicate euphemisms modelling ostentatious concern can be an excellent way to elevate the status of the highly educated while deprecating, discounting, even de-legitimising, any language that “the lower orders” may use to express their concerns.

…The resulting censoriousness is not only a protector of status-through belief, it is also a status-play in its own right via a shared sense of moral entitlement to censoriousness. A status-strategy that reinforces coordinating action through signalling, if enough people are engaged in the same this-is-how-to-be-of-the-smart-and-the-good status games.

His essay reminds me of how I responded to a question posed by a listener during an online discussion put on by Humanities North Dakota (not available unless you join). I had used the term “Woke” and was asked to define it. I offered two definitions, one charitable and the other uncharitable. The charitable definition was that it means a concern for the impact of past treatment of certain groups on their status today and the need to rectify injustice.

The uncharitable view is that it is a set of status signals by which people in the educated class differentiate themselves from those who are less educated. Being able to toss around terms like “intersectionality” or “gender fluidity” enables one to signal membership in a self-described moral elite.

Jon Haidt writes,

if Phillips and Friedman were correct that “the kids are alright” and the appearance of an epidemic is an illusion based on Gen Z’s “more honest relationship with their mental health,” then we would not see any change in objective measures of mental health, such as hospitalizations for self-harm, or deaths by suicide. But in fact, we do see such changes, and the timing and magnitude of them generally match the changes in self-reported mental health problems.

Pointer from Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion.

Lee Booth writes,

a lithium-ion electric vehicle battery weighing a half-ton has the same range as about 12 gallons of gas weighing 85 pounds. To compare batteries with nuclear, one pound of nuclear fuel has the same output as one million pounds of Tesla batteries.

Renewables advocates claim that batteries, which have fallen in cost, will follow computing’s exponential price drops, but they haven’t yet and never will. In the words of energy expert Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute:

Such a comparison isn’t just flawed; it’s impossible in the physics of energy. If lithium chemistry could emulate digital progress since 1990, an EV today would have a battery the size of a single flashlight C cell, not one weighing 1,000 pounds.

But see Bryan Caplan and Alex Epstein on Why Not Nuclear Future?

Substacks referenced above:

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Why Not *Nuclear Future*?

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The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

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The Pravda Media Model