Links to Consider, 3/18

Dan Williams on complaints about social media; Tove K on status and fertility; How Industrial Policy is working; How Harvard isn't working

Dan Williams writes,

what many think of as a mid-twentieth century “golden age of an objective press” was in fact a highly insular, elitist media ecosystem that disproportionately represented the interests and voices of a very narrow segment of society. And even when you set aside political, nationalist, economic, racist, and other biases, scholars have long documented how all media organisations make decisions about what to cover and how to cover it that are shaped by countless factors distinct from the goal of informing audiences. To take just one example, the simple fact that mainstream media reports on an attention-grabbing but highly nonrandom sample of all the bad things happening in the world means that avid news consumers are often grossly misinformed about even very basic statistical trends.

He argues against the view that social media have made this era especially rife with disinformation.

Tove K writes,

Having a job always gave people social status. Having a family also gave them social status. What we have seen the last couple of decades is an almost imperceptible shift in the relative weights of those two competitions. Having a good job has increased in relative status while having a good family has seen a relative decline. 

Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson write,

Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Last July, in a comment on one of Noah Smith’s encomium’s for industrial policy, I wrote,

I am willing to bet that in 2030 you will regret your enthusiasm for industrial policy. Call this a vague broadside, but I don't think that our government is capable of running this type of program in a way that ends up achieving (or even working toward) its goals and not becoming utterly corrupt.

For Harvard Magazine, undergraduate Aden Barton writes,

three of my friends and I took a high-level seminar one semester, and, although we knew hundreds of pages of readings would be assigned each week, we were excited about the prospect of engaging with the material. As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.

College education is being re-engineered, but not by design of the faculty.

substacks referenced above:

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Make children part of the competition of life

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Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is not the "disinformation age"