Links to Consider, 4/28

Joyce Benenson interview; Jason Manning on credentialism; Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras on academic freedom; Charles Murray on the prevalence of traditional families

Mark your calendars: This Monday, May 1, Tim B. Lee of Full Stack Economics will join our Zoom for paid subscribers at 8 PM New York Time to talk about his new Substack, Understanding AI. Then on May 8 Bryan Caplan will join us to talk about his latest collection of essays, Voters as Mad Scientists.

Bill Walton interviews Joyce Benenson. I wrote about her book, Warriors and Worriers. I ought to write more. As she points out in the podcast, her well-researched observations about sex differences in behavior has received very little attention, particularly in academia. Apparently, the research is correct but it is not politically correct.

Jason Manning writes,

for the educated classes, these bullshit jobs often bring pretty decent material rewards, and often some titles and respect as well. These new jobs resemble Max Weber’s concept of prebends — “positions distinguished for the purpose of monopolizing their incomes” (p.57).  Instead of being bought directly with cash, however, these positions are paid-for with cultural currency of educational credentials.  The term used in medieval society is sinecures.

There are many unnecessary administrative jobs on college campuses or in large public school systems. On the prospects for technology eliminating jobs, Manning writes

I wonder whether technology can ever truly make a sinecure obsolete. After all, the point of the job isn’t that it gets done, but that somebody does it. We create the position to have the right sort of person in it.

Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras write eloquently on why faculty are the ones who must stand up for academic freedom at a university.

A cadre of activists may find meaning and purpose in their cause and be willing to stop at nothing to prosecute it, while a larger number may disagree but feel they have other things to do with their time than push back. The activists command an expanding arsenal of asymmetric warfare, including the ability to disrupt events, the power to muster physical or electronic mobs on social media, and a willingness to smear their targets with crippling accusations of racism, sexism, or transphobia in a society that rightly abhors them. An exploding bureaucracy for policing harassment and discrimination has professional interests that are not necessarily aligned with the production and transmission of knowledge. Department chairs, deans, and presidents strive to minimize bad publicity and may proffer whatever statement they hope will make the trouble go away. Meanwhile, the shrinking political diversity of faculty threatens to lock in the regime for generations to come.

But Joshua Katz notes the relative absence of Harvard humanities scholars joining Pinker and Madras.

Charles Murray looks at whether or not a child lives with married birth parents. By ethnicity, he finds

Child’s Ethnicity              Married Birth Parents
Asian                                            82%
White                                           62%
Other or Mixed                          50%
Latino                                         43%
Black                                          23%

He also looks at geographic locales that differ by socioeconomic status. He writes,

I download data from the 1960 Census and determine that the proportion of children growing up with married birth parents then was more than 80 percent of all children

But today he finds only 39 locales (he calls them PUMAs) out of 2351 where this is true. Near me in Maryland, there are two of the 39: Bethesda and Columbia. There are so many of the 39 in NY-NJ relative to the rest of the country that I suspect some quirk in how PUMAs are determined. Murray writes,

Parenthetically, the high incidence of traditional marriage among all Jews, not just Orthodox Jews, combined with the concentration of America’s Jewish population in the New York City area, may help explain why so many affluent New York suburbs reached the 80 percent threshold, whereas equally affluent and equally white suburbs elsewhere did not.

Substacks referenced above:

@

Why We Created Harvard’s Academic Freedom Council

@

The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson - Backstage with Bill Walton

@

Books: The Credential Society