Mark Mills has doubts about the EV future; The Zvi on skipping a grade; Peter Gray on skipping school altogether; Dan Williams' syllabus on philosophy of science;; my latest book review
The last of these, on clothing, is particularly useful for shedding light on premodern women's role and work.
On skipping grades, the stage of life and disposition of the kid matters a lot. I skipped first grade as well, also due to early reading, and it was never a big deal. Then I skipped eighth grade so I could start high school coursework early, and that *was* a big deal-- the social chasm between 12 and 14 year olds is very difficult to cross, and early high school was socially painful. But I have never regretted the acceleration, and if you'd offered me at 11-12 the choice of delaying my high school journey a year or two in order to have more friends, I would have scoffed and said: I'll take the isolation, bring on the challenge.
Crone's book was originally published in 1989, and contains so many striking insights for such a short book. She wrote: "We all take the world in which we were born for granted and think of the human condition as ours. This is a mistake. The vast mass of human experience has been made under quite different conditions." This is a perpetually useful reminder.
You see this constantly in the refrain “women weren’t allowed to work outside the home”. Leaving aside even the dubious merits of the thing - who cooked the king’s meals after all? - it goes to show that for all our modern smarts and preening, people appear to have troubled to grasp what the world was like - agricultural - about as effectively as a peasant would have grasped the internet.
Megan McCardle had a thing for commenting on that from time to time when she was just an interesting blogger. I remember one posting about the amount of labor that went into maintaining a Edwardian-era kitchen back when the Downton Abbey craze started
Mark drives me nuts on this front - he’s got kernels of truth and covers many of the key parts EV advocates really haven’t thought through, especially re: sourcing…
But, he also repeatedly says things like this “ The putative EV revolution will stall out for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that we’ll run out of money, we’ll run out of copper, and car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences. But before unbundling these truths about the practical limits of EV dominance, we have to deal with some of the myths that anchor all EV enthusiasms.”
… but then doesn’t actually make these claims, or makes them in much weaker forms - run out of copper is “copper will be much more expensive”, “stall out” is undefined, etc…
He’s not at all wrong that there are issues on all three fronts, but between pointing to scare numbers re: tons of earth moved (with no comparison to other mining or resource extraction, for example - take gold which has insanely low yields… or how much material is moved in coal extraction, to give context) is not something that leads me to score his efforts high on the Kling essay grading scale.
Yeah, I had a similar thought. Don't you need to compare tons of earth moved for EVs to ICE vehicles in order for this 250 tons statistic to be meaningful? I could imagine that the EVs include more rare materials, and thus you need to move a bunch more earth to obtain the same quantity of copper or aluminum as steel, but without some numbers to back it up...the reader is left merely speculating.
In the Midwest one once saw signs that said "one local farmer feeds 200 people!" People like 'real' ratios like that, and they respond to points made in those ratios I suspect better than they do to nominal arguments. The obvious thing to do in general is to just measure effort in money. That being said, around the normal business model given current price ratios and modes of production, it is something of a natural tendency in the commodity extraction sectors to rely on certain simplified ratios in mass quantities of input to output to compare the profitability or feasibility of otherwise similar projects but with diffrrences in the accessibility of the deposits. So one might talk about a Saudi well where light, sweet crude is not far underground, and it's also easy to get hot dense sea water nearby to pump down the hole and the pressurized oil just floats to the top, and an old hand in the industry would say "1 barrel of oil brings up 100.". Meanwhile in some place where you are having to use a lot of energy to frack and pump up deep sludge and then a bunch more to refine it into motor fuel, the ratio might be just 1.1 and just barely worthwhile.
Still, when prices shift enough the assumption of fixed mode of production no longer holds, and certain alternative business practices using substitute inputs become more viable and profitable. At some point oil is more valuable than uranium and it's worth putting nuclear reactors on site to pressurize, heat, pump, and refine, or even just to detonate a few megaton scale nukes below the deposit to fracture the rock and make everything hot enough to start flowing easy. I predict China will do this once by 2050.
I would say so. Additionally, just for fun - rough but in the ballpark back of napkin math if we're fixated on weight:
bbl of crude oil = 42 gallons -> ~20 gallons of gasoline... ~7.2 lbs/gallon of crude oil, so we'll round off to 300 lbs/bbl for each barrel of "earth product" moved assuming 100% efficiency in the upstream phase...
If the car goes 100,000 miles over its lifetime at a generous 40mpg... oh no! 375 short tons of liquid earth moved PER CAR just for the gasoline!!!!!
In The Bottomless Well, Mills contrasts the large acreage required to grow food for the horses of New York City in 1900, with the small amount of land given over to the oil wells that fuel the automobiles that have largely displaced the horses. Then he calculates that a lone SUV driver has far less environmental impact than a cyclist, even a vegetarian cyclist, by the same measure. Obviously this neglects a lot of other considerations.
Look up some of the talks a guy named Peter Zeihan does on YouTube. While he usually covers a wealth of other topics (all generally useful) but does include a slide or two on this topic as it relates to green tech. The amount of material we'd need just to convert the US is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of minerals we've extracted over our entire history as a species
Re: "[Feudalism] was not a viable order."—Kling, review of Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies
Feudalism did persist for centuries (i.e., for many successive generations). A question arises: What are criteria for institutions to count as viable? How long is long enough?
Hard questions about equilibrium, disequilibrium, and time span.
Carroll Quigley made the point that political systems are determined by the weapons systems available. Feudalism was a natural outcome of the dominance of defensive technologies (armor, castles), and that those technologies could only be owned by elites. The range of territory one leader could effectively control by force was very small, and the peasants could be trampled. This changed only as weapons systems evolved (armor-penetrating weapons and artillery), allowing larger and more egalitarian political units. By the time of the Revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, any citizen could own the best in weapons technology (a rifle) so egalitarianism was the rule. Now we are moving to a time when high tech weapons systems can only really be owned by the state and we are moving to a more authoritarian time.
Good comment. Arnold is usually more careful with his opinions to avoid implying they are facts. I thought of India’s caste system and how it compares with feudalism for “viability”. Plus the Serenity, Courage, and Wisdom elements of the prayer:
God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Techno optimists implicitly assert there are no systems, not even bio sex, that cannot be changed.
The solution is to give each child as much individualized learning/material as they can handle (and offer advanced courses/sections in grammar school) rather than forcing kids to move up grades.
Re: "The low level of labor productivity precluded a labor market based on wages and voluntary agreement."—Kling, review of Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies
Arnold, If you find a moment, might you explain (from an economist's vantage point) why low productivity per se would *preclude* a free labor market?
transactions costs too high relative to the value of the transaction. Right now, you would pay somebody to take out the trash, *if* it were costless to arrange the transaction.
If you control a serf, then the transaction costs at the margin drop to zero. You tell your serf to take out the trash.
You order the serf to do low-productivity work that you would not pay for if you had to search the market to find the worker. If the low-productivity work is plowing a field, serfdom prevails over market labor in agriculture.
In practice they fight like hell AGAINST low cost housing, but are happy with illegals as semi serfs at low wages. For in & around their very expensive, high maintenance houses / mansions.
The municipal waste department guys in my last city were white and Hispanic and black, but maybe a plurality black. Seems to be a sort of brotherhood. Once one of the guys was tragically killed by the trash vehicle, and we didn’t have service for a few days. Not knowing about this, or having forgotten I’d seen it on local news, I called to say our neighborhood had been missed.
“The guys are pretty upset right now. A lot of them just can’t come in. We’ll be back to normal soon.”
They had trucks with mechanical lifters for the city issued wheeled carts which residents put on the street.
Sometimes one guy could do it, only occasionally getting out of the vehicle.
Contrast that with the bizarro manner of trash collection in my parents’ neighborhood: different city, but this city is too large and has never been able to offer waste pickup to much of the postwar sprawl, so there is a private service.
It always involved guys coming up to the house, getting the cans from behind a gate or up a driveway, then returning them. This is the expectation especially among the older folks.
Some of the younger people in the hood now set their cans out themselves, either because they are used to doing that or because often they have security-locked driveway gates. Or because as young people now buy so many new things, they nearly always have stuff to throw out - furniture and whatnot, tons of boxes of course, a little trash mountain each week.
The private trash entity does not appear to give out wheeled cans, it’s all ad hoc. But the stuff they get from up by your house is supposed to be bagged.
Now this is the crazy: the trucks drop guys off who run (yes, run - the whole time) down the streets and go up and get the trash, carrying individual bags usually (Mother tries to follow this bagging dictum even when it means bagging up a single odd thing) - out of the cans, a bunch in both hands; or else dragging the can if too full; piling these things up at about 4 spots on the street, so that the driver will be able to make fewer stops.
These runners are all young Hispanic men.
I truly don’t know how long you could realistically do this running job.
It’s crazy to see this wild 6 AM sprint.
Immigration: turning modernity back on its heels a little at a time.
It amuses me that we all watched Downton Abbey, and of course even as benevolent as Lord Fussypants was presented, we are supposed to feel that being “in service” was a state that could not hold as the world turned into the sunlight of egalitarian modernity.
‘Cuz we just don’t do anything (!) like that anymore haha.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
If random includes all children I'm skeptical the results will be good. It might be that the only ones likely to succeed are the ones who voluntarily chose it. Other possibilities include some combination of those doing above grade level work, too fidgety to sit in a conventional classroom, those with motivated parents or some other skill, or combinations of these and other factors.
Yes. And the pining for an RCT does not seem too consistent with disregard for the published research that Mowshowitz cites. And would an RCT actually be measuring "unschooling" if the assignment to treatment vs control is random? As you point out motivate parents are part of what unschooling actually. Random assignment would be measuring something else entirely. FWIW I did a prolix prattle on these points at my substack today.
Another thought-provoking post with interesting links. Comment on two of them:
Skipping grades – my wife had similar experience as yours. Small for her age with a birthday on the borderline for eligibility to attend kindergarten, she was picked on (bullying in today’s parlance), told by a teacher she wasn’t old enough to read some books (even though she easily could), and so on. Early schooling was not fun but she did develop some friends as time went on and eventually flourished. So the choice to skip ought to be a highly individualized decision, IMHO.
Crone’s book I now must read since history is one of my hobbies, but particularly after your review reports she says Western Europe achieved modernity because its early institutions failed. Will be interesting to see her further describe how European feudalism differed from other parts of the world that also had strict hierarchies and strong religious influence, especially given her expertise in early Muslim history.
In the LA city schools in early 60s, there were half grades, so I skipped to 4a in the spring instead of 3b. Had a few friends, but was really skinny; in a working class suburb (South Gate, next to Watts). Then moved away and parents decided for me to go back rather than forward. Later moved back in with Grandparents and reconnected with a couple of my old friends who skipped forward. Was fine with them. Was fine with me to be right in the summer birthday cohort who is the same age throughout the school year, finishing at 17, turning 18 before college (or at USNA in the summer).
Bullying is a real problem. If you & your kids are in a good area, skipping is fine -- if bullying is a problem, better to hold back.
" Grade-skippers seem to excel in school, but at the cost of other areas of achievement." Getting good grades without too much work did allow me to read a lot, and even do a few other projects. For those who go to academia/ research, skipping likely good: "gifted (top 1% in math) adolescents to earn more doctorates, publish more papers, file more patents, and do it all at earlier ages."
Especially for math talents, more gifted programs would be better. There's more to life, for most folks, than studying. If there was more school choice, this would be more likely. Zvi does a fair job countering the Yglesias tin man arguments against school choice. Great conclusion "You know who does get massive selection effects? The places that provide great schools and then use real estate to price out everyone who is not rich."
Tho Zvi doesn't note the sad truth that great schools are mostly great because of the great students, who usually have great/ high attention parents, who care about the schools and the neighbors. Because school choice WOULD help the smart and hard working poor, this means more competition for very limited top 10% status. The desire to avoid competition with the best poor folk is likely never an explicit issue with Matt's elite readers against choice -- yet it has that effect. Reminds me of that Boomer movie Breaking Away about poor bike riders competing against preppies.
There was also a comment about calculus: "Almost all that math is deeply, deeply simple at its core. The hard part is figuring out what math to do. I still remember that one time I got to write an integral sign on a piece of paper in real life."
I learned a ton of math in school, but used almost none of it. Wished I'd learned more statistics. Taught myself most of the programming I needed to do as a programmer. Investment banking is not rocket science.
Mills observes that "At-home, overnight charging, using lower-cost slow chargers, currently accounts for 90 percent of all EV users, nearly all of whom have two or three cars and a garage. But only one-third of U.S. households have a garage." This may be in part responsible for the survey findings that Rob Henderson wrote about and which you noted (https://substack.com/@arnoldkling/note/c-48804800 ) . Henderson cited survey findings:
"- 70% of Ivy grads, 55% of elites, and just 22% of non-elites are in favor of banning non-essential air travel “to fight climate change.”
- The majority of Ivy graduates and elites are also in favor of banning private air conditioning, gas powered cars, gas stoves, and SUVs “to fight climate change.”
With respect to banning gas powered cars, the survey breakout was 24% of voters in general had a favorable response versus 72% of the elite 1% and 81% of Ivy League graduates. Yet we see things, like in Maryland, states with statutory bans on the sale of gasoline powered cars after 2035.
As you noted "So much of what we observe in politics and culture today reflects this chasm." Yet, no political accommodation for the non-rich seems remotely possible. "Eat the Rich" increasingly seems like the only path forward.
Those survey results about "elites" favoring banning air travel, air conditioning, etc. are incredible. I have to assume that they don't think the bans will apply to themselves.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
If random includes all children I'm skeptical the results will be good. It might be that the only ones likely to succeed are the ones who voluntarily chose it. Other possibilities include some combination of those doing above grade level work, too fidgety to sit in a conventional classroom, those with motivated parents or some other skill, or combinations of these and other factors.
Interesting comparison of Crone and North, Weingast, and Wallis. Perhaps they can be "harmonized" by saying that local orders are stable (NWW) but larger orders are unstable (Crone). I'm thinking a modern example might be Somalia.
I think this attitude toward school bears in a small way on what was discussed the other day (my memory is so poor) - Boomer nostalgia.
My parents aren’t Boomers but Mother in particular - so patriotic! - had an ideal of public school that involved its being a microcosm of “the world/country you would have to live in”. (To the extent this had any political valence, it would have come to her filtered through Reader’s Digest or the Saturday Evening Post or whatnot.)
She persisted in this belief all through the transition that ultimately led to *no one* in their neighborhood sending their kids to the public schools my brothers and I mostly attended, a transition complete shortly after I, the last, finished.
I remember my kindergarten teacher (which was actually half day at a Baptist church) trying to send extra work home with me. Mother brushed this off, returned it. Again: “we don’t try to stand out from others.”
She was not a perceptive woman, and it wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the feeling that her children were intelligent - but there was this immovable notion, fueled perhaps by the happy time she spent in school, with all the midcentury trappings - drill team, dances, dating; academics unregarded but her picture in the paper mysteriously often; a field trip she has mentioned so many times it is practically my own memory, where her class seems to have traveled over every road in Oklahoma - that public school is a civic exercise foremost. And I think she’s right. I think it really might have been, at one time.
When I read the Mills excerpt I concluded he doesn't understand supply and demand economics. I'm a little surprised that wasn't noted. Maybe he's not aware of Julien Simon either, though I suppose one could argue that isn't applicable to a huge demand increase. Either way, skimming his article did nothing to make me doubt my initial conclusion.
I don't know how the CEO came up with a tenfold copper price increase but I'd bet a 2 or 3x price increase compared to other resources from what looks like sustained demand (not a likely economic peak) would attract a lot of investment in mining. I have a hard time seeing the sustained price going much higher than that no matter what the demand. I'd be happy to take a bet on 5x real increase over the next decade. I suppose I'd even go longer if my lifespan wasn't an issue.
I don't know the specifics of what led to fracking but if I remember correctly, prices were near historical constant dollar highs. Fracking pretty much ended predictions of gas and oil shortages for another decade or more. And it pretty much puts an upper limit on sustained prices not too much higher than they are currently.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
Yeah, while this would be the ideal way to assess it, it will never happen.
A good recent complement to the Crone book is Bret Devereaux's series of posts on goods production in the premodern world, e.g.
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/
The last of these, on clothing, is particularly useful for shedding light on premodern women's role and work.
On skipping grades, the stage of life and disposition of the kid matters a lot. I skipped first grade as well, also due to early reading, and it was never a big deal. Then I skipped eighth grade so I could start high school coursework early, and that *was* a big deal-- the social chasm between 12 and 14 year olds is very difficult to cross, and early high school was socially painful. But I have never regretted the acceleration, and if you'd offered me at 11-12 the choice of delaying my high school journey a year or two in order to have more friends, I would have scoffed and said: I'll take the isolation, bring on the challenge.
Crone's book was originally published in 1989, and contains so many striking insights for such a short book. She wrote: "We all take the world in which we were born for granted and think of the human condition as ours. This is a mistake. The vast mass of human experience has been made under quite different conditions." This is a perpetually useful reminder.
You see this constantly in the refrain “women weren’t allowed to work outside the home”. Leaving aside even the dubious merits of the thing - who cooked the king’s meals after all? - it goes to show that for all our modern smarts and preening, people appear to have troubled to grasp what the world was like - agricultural - about as effectively as a peasant would have grasped the internet.
Megan McCardle had a thing for commenting on that from time to time when she was just an interesting blogger. I remember one posting about the amount of labor that went into maintaining a Edwardian-era kitchen back when the Downton Abbey craze started
I remember that, too!
Mark drives me nuts on this front - he’s got kernels of truth and covers many of the key parts EV advocates really haven’t thought through, especially re: sourcing…
But, he also repeatedly says things like this “ The putative EV revolution will stall out for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that we’ll run out of money, we’ll run out of copper, and car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences. But before unbundling these truths about the practical limits of EV dominance, we have to deal with some of the myths that anchor all EV enthusiasms.”
… but then doesn’t actually make these claims, or makes them in much weaker forms - run out of copper is “copper will be much more expensive”, “stall out” is undefined, etc…
He’s not at all wrong that there are issues on all three fronts, but between pointing to scare numbers re: tons of earth moved (with no comparison to other mining or resource extraction, for example - take gold which has insanely low yields… or how much material is moved in coal extraction, to give context) is not something that leads me to score his efforts high on the Kling essay grading scale.
Yeah, I had a similar thought. Don't you need to compare tons of earth moved for EVs to ICE vehicles in order for this 250 tons statistic to be meaningful? I could imagine that the EVs include more rare materials, and thus you need to move a bunch more earth to obtain the same quantity of copper or aluminum as steel, but without some numbers to back it up...the reader is left merely speculating.
In the Midwest one once saw signs that said "one local farmer feeds 200 people!" People like 'real' ratios like that, and they respond to points made in those ratios I suspect better than they do to nominal arguments. The obvious thing to do in general is to just measure effort in money. That being said, around the normal business model given current price ratios and modes of production, it is something of a natural tendency in the commodity extraction sectors to rely on certain simplified ratios in mass quantities of input to output to compare the profitability or feasibility of otherwise similar projects but with diffrrences in the accessibility of the deposits. So one might talk about a Saudi well where light, sweet crude is not far underground, and it's also easy to get hot dense sea water nearby to pump down the hole and the pressurized oil just floats to the top, and an old hand in the industry would say "1 barrel of oil brings up 100.". Meanwhile in some place where you are having to use a lot of energy to frack and pump up deep sludge and then a bunch more to refine it into motor fuel, the ratio might be just 1.1 and just barely worthwhile.
Still, when prices shift enough the assumption of fixed mode of production no longer holds, and certain alternative business practices using substitute inputs become more viable and profitable. At some point oil is more valuable than uranium and it's worth putting nuclear reactors on site to pressurize, heat, pump, and refine, or even just to detonate a few megaton scale nukes below the deposit to fracture the rock and make everything hot enough to start flowing easy. I predict China will do this once by 2050.
I would say so. Additionally, just for fun - rough but in the ballpark back of napkin math if we're fixated on weight:
bbl of crude oil = 42 gallons -> ~20 gallons of gasoline... ~7.2 lbs/gallon of crude oil, so we'll round off to 300 lbs/bbl for each barrel of "earth product" moved assuming 100% efficiency in the upstream phase...
If the car goes 100,000 miles over its lifetime at a generous 40mpg... oh no! 375 short tons of liquid earth moved PER CAR just for the gasoline!!!!!
In The Bottomless Well, Mills contrasts the large acreage required to grow food for the horses of New York City in 1900, with the small amount of land given over to the oil wells that fuel the automobiles that have largely displaced the horses. Then he calculates that a lone SUV driver has far less environmental impact than a cyclist, even a vegetarian cyclist, by the same measure. Obviously this neglects a lot of other considerations.
Yeah, like that the driver like the cyclist requires acreage to grow his food, as much as futurists would like to pretend this is not so.
Look up some of the talks a guy named Peter Zeihan does on YouTube. While he usually covers a wealth of other topics (all generally useful) but does include a slide or two on this topic as it relates to green tech. The amount of material we'd need just to convert the US is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of minerals we've extracted over our entire history as a species
Re: "[Feudalism] was not a viable order."—Kling, review of Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies
Feudalism did persist for centuries (i.e., for many successive generations). A question arises: What are criteria for institutions to count as viable? How long is long enough?
Hard questions about equilibrium, disequilibrium, and time span.
Carroll Quigley made the point that political systems are determined by the weapons systems available. Feudalism was a natural outcome of the dominance of defensive technologies (armor, castles), and that those technologies could only be owned by elites. The range of territory one leader could effectively control by force was very small, and the peasants could be trampled. This changed only as weapons systems evolved (armor-penetrating weapons and artillery), allowing larger and more egalitarian political units. By the time of the Revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, any citizen could own the best in weapons technology (a rifle) so egalitarianism was the rule. Now we are moving to a time when high tech weapons systems can only really be owned by the state and we are moving to a more authoritarian time.
Any citizen can build an FPV drone today. The only problem is explosives, but powder for rifles didn't grow on trees either.
Good comment. Arnold is usually more careful with his opinions to avoid implying they are facts. I thought of India’s caste system and how it compares with feudalism for “viability”. Plus the Serenity, Courage, and Wisdom elements of the prayer:
God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Techno optimists implicitly assert there are no systems, not even bio sex, that cannot be changed.
Yes, this struck me as a weak point in the review.
The solution is to give each child as much individualized learning/material as they can handle (and offer advanced courses/sections in grammar school) rather than forcing kids to move up grades.
For those interested Crone's book appears to be available in pdf... https://delong.typepad.com/files/crone-pre.pdf
Thanks for the pointer.
Re: "The low level of labor productivity precluded a labor market based on wages and voluntary agreement."—Kling, review of Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies
Arnold, If you find a moment, might you explain (from an economist's vantage point) why low productivity per se would *preclude* a free labor market?
transactions costs too high relative to the value of the transaction. Right now, you would pay somebody to take out the trash, *if* it were costless to arrange the transaction.
If you control a serf, then the transaction costs at the margin drop to zero. You tell your serf to take out the trash.
You order the serf to do low-productivity work that you would not pay for if you had to search the market to find the worker. If the low-productivity work is plowing a field, serfdom prevails over market labor in agriculture.
Is this why you get the urbanist types wanting below-market rate housing in their high-status enclaves? Illegal immigrants preferred?
In practice they fight like hell AGAINST low cost housing, but are happy with illegals as semi serfs at low wages. For in & around their very expensive, high maintenance houses / mansions.
The municipal waste department guys in my last city were white and Hispanic and black, but maybe a plurality black. Seems to be a sort of brotherhood. Once one of the guys was tragically killed by the trash vehicle, and we didn’t have service for a few days. Not knowing about this, or having forgotten I’d seen it on local news, I called to say our neighborhood had been missed.
“The guys are pretty upset right now. A lot of them just can’t come in. We’ll be back to normal soon.”
They had trucks with mechanical lifters for the city issued wheeled carts which residents put on the street.
Sometimes one guy could do it, only occasionally getting out of the vehicle.
Contrast that with the bizarro manner of trash collection in my parents’ neighborhood: different city, but this city is too large and has never been able to offer waste pickup to much of the postwar sprawl, so there is a private service.
It always involved guys coming up to the house, getting the cans from behind a gate or up a driveway, then returning them. This is the expectation especially among the older folks.
Some of the younger people in the hood now set their cans out themselves, either because they are used to doing that or because often they have security-locked driveway gates. Or because as young people now buy so many new things, they nearly always have stuff to throw out - furniture and whatnot, tons of boxes of course, a little trash mountain each week.
The private trash entity does not appear to give out wheeled cans, it’s all ad hoc. But the stuff they get from up by your house is supposed to be bagged.
Now this is the crazy: the trucks drop guys off who run (yes, run - the whole time) down the streets and go up and get the trash, carrying individual bags usually (Mother tries to follow this bagging dictum even when it means bagging up a single odd thing) - out of the cans, a bunch in both hands; or else dragging the can if too full; piling these things up at about 4 spots on the street, so that the driver will be able to make fewer stops.
These runners are all young Hispanic men.
I truly don’t know how long you could realistically do this running job.
It’s crazy to see this wild 6 AM sprint.
Immigration: turning modernity back on its heels a little at a time.
It amuses me that we all watched Downton Abbey, and of course even as benevolent as Lord Fussypants was presented, we are supposed to feel that being “in service” was a state that could not hold as the world turned into the sunlight of egalitarian modernity.
‘Cuz we just don’t do anything (!) like that anymore haha.
At least not housing the servants!
Thank you.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
If random includes all children I'm skeptical the results will be good. It might be that the only ones likely to succeed are the ones who voluntarily chose it. Other possibilities include some combination of those doing above grade level work, too fidgety to sit in a conventional classroom, those with motivated parents or some other skill, or combinations of these and other factors.
Yes. And the pining for an RCT does not seem too consistent with disregard for the published research that Mowshowitz cites. And would an RCT actually be measuring "unschooling" if the assignment to treatment vs control is random? As you point out motivate parents are part of what unschooling actually. Random assignment would be measuring something else entirely. FWIW I did a prolix prattle on these points at my substack today.
Another thought-provoking post with interesting links. Comment on two of them:
Skipping grades – my wife had similar experience as yours. Small for her age with a birthday on the borderline for eligibility to attend kindergarten, she was picked on (bullying in today’s parlance), told by a teacher she wasn’t old enough to read some books (even though she easily could), and so on. Early schooling was not fun but she did develop some friends as time went on and eventually flourished. So the choice to skip ought to be a highly individualized decision, IMHO.
Crone’s book I now must read since history is one of my hobbies, but particularly after your review reports she says Western Europe achieved modernity because its early institutions failed. Will be interesting to see her further describe how European feudalism differed from other parts of the world that also had strict hierarchies and strong religious influence, especially given her expertise in early Muslim history.
In the LA city schools in early 60s, there were half grades, so I skipped to 4a in the spring instead of 3b. Had a few friends, but was really skinny; in a working class suburb (South Gate, next to Watts). Then moved away and parents decided for me to go back rather than forward. Later moved back in with Grandparents and reconnected with a couple of my old friends who skipped forward. Was fine with them. Was fine with me to be right in the summer birthday cohort who is the same age throughout the school year, finishing at 17, turning 18 before college (or at USNA in the summer).
Bullying is a real problem. If you & your kids are in a good area, skipping is fine -- if bullying is a problem, better to hold back.
" Grade-skippers seem to excel in school, but at the cost of other areas of achievement." Getting good grades without too much work did allow me to read a lot, and even do a few other projects. For those who go to academia/ research, skipping likely good: "gifted (top 1% in math) adolescents to earn more doctorates, publish more papers, file more patents, and do it all at earlier ages."
Especially for math talents, more gifted programs would be better. There's more to life, for most folks, than studying. If there was more school choice, this would be more likely. Zvi does a fair job countering the Yglesias tin man arguments against school choice. Great conclusion "You know who does get massive selection effects? The places that provide great schools and then use real estate to price out everyone who is not rich."
Tho Zvi doesn't note the sad truth that great schools are mostly great because of the great students, who usually have great/ high attention parents, who care about the schools and the neighbors. Because school choice WOULD help the smart and hard working poor, this means more competition for very limited top 10% status. The desire to avoid competition with the best poor folk is likely never an explicit issue with Matt's elite readers against choice -- yet it has that effect. Reminds me of that Boomer movie Breaking Away about poor bike riders competing against preppies.
There was also a comment about calculus: "Almost all that math is deeply, deeply simple at its core. The hard part is figuring out what math to do. I still remember that one time I got to write an integral sign on a piece of paper in real life."
I learned a ton of math in school, but used almost none of it. Wished I'd learned more statistics. Taught myself most of the programming I needed to do as a programmer. Investment banking is not rocket science.
Mills observes that "At-home, overnight charging, using lower-cost slow chargers, currently accounts for 90 percent of all EV users, nearly all of whom have two or three cars and a garage. But only one-third of U.S. households have a garage." This may be in part responsible for the survey findings that Rob Henderson wrote about and which you noted (https://substack.com/@arnoldkling/note/c-48804800 ) . Henderson cited survey findings:
"- 70% of Ivy grads, 55% of elites, and just 22% of non-elites are in favor of banning non-essential air travel “to fight climate change.”
- The majority of Ivy graduates and elites are also in favor of banning private air conditioning, gas powered cars, gas stoves, and SUVs “to fight climate change.”
With respect to banning gas powered cars, the survey breakout was 24% of voters in general had a favorable response versus 72% of the elite 1% and 81% of Ivy League graduates. Yet we see things, like in Maryland, states with statutory bans on the sale of gasoline powered cars after 2035.
As you noted "So much of what we observe in politics and culture today reflects this chasm." Yet, no political accommodation for the non-rich seems remotely possible. "Eat the Rich" increasingly seems like the only path forward.
Those survey results about "elites" favoring banning air travel, air conditioning, etc. are incredible. I have to assume that they don't think the bans will apply to themselves.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
If random includes all children I'm skeptical the results will be good. It might be that the only ones likely to succeed are the ones who voluntarily chose it. Other possibilities include some combination of those doing above grade level work, too fidgety to sit in a conventional classroom, those with motivated parents or some other skill, or combinations of these and other factors.
Interesting comparison of Crone and North, Weingast, and Wallis. Perhaps they can be "harmonized" by saying that local orders are stable (NWW) but larger orders are unstable (Crone). I'm thinking a modern example might be Somalia.
I should have written WERE stable and WERE unstable. Crone's book is specifically about (and titled) Pre-industrial Societies.
I think this attitude toward school bears in a small way on what was discussed the other day (my memory is so poor) - Boomer nostalgia.
My parents aren’t Boomers but Mother in particular - so patriotic! - had an ideal of public school that involved its being a microcosm of “the world/country you would have to live in”. (To the extent this had any political valence, it would have come to her filtered through Reader’s Digest or the Saturday Evening Post or whatnot.)
She persisted in this belief all through the transition that ultimately led to *no one* in their neighborhood sending their kids to the public schools my brothers and I mostly attended, a transition complete shortly after I, the last, finished.
I remember my kindergarten teacher (which was actually half day at a Baptist church) trying to send extra work home with me. Mother brushed this off, returned it. Again: “we don’t try to stand out from others.”
She was not a perceptive woman, and it wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the feeling that her children were intelligent - but there was this immovable notion, fueled perhaps by the happy time she spent in school, with all the midcentury trappings - drill team, dances, dating; academics unregarded but her picture in the paper mysteriously often; a field trip she has mentioned so many times it is practically my own memory, where her class seems to have traveled over every road in Oklahoma - that public school is a civic exercise foremost. And I think she’s right. I think it really might have been, at one time.
When I read the Mills excerpt I concluded he doesn't understand supply and demand economics. I'm a little surprised that wasn't noted. Maybe he's not aware of Julien Simon either, though I suppose one could argue that isn't applicable to a huge demand increase. Either way, skimming his article did nothing to make me doubt my initial conclusion.
I don't know how the CEO came up with a tenfold copper price increase but I'd bet a 2 or 3x price increase compared to other resources from what looks like sustained demand (not a likely economic peak) would attract a lot of investment in mining. I have a hard time seeing the sustained price going much higher than that no matter what the demand. I'd be happy to take a bet on 5x real increase over the next decade. I suppose I'd even go longer if my lifespan wasn't an issue.
I don't know the specifics of what led to fracking but if I remember correctly, prices were near historical constant dollar highs. Fracking pretty much ended predictions of gas and oil shortages for another decade or more. And it pretty much puts an upper limit on sustained prices not too much higher than they are currently.
"But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample."
Yeah, while this would be the ideal way to assess it, it will never happen.