Social Learning Links, 4/24/2025
Ed West on today's student radicals; Rob Henderson on social class; Michael Strong on school choice; Olympia Campbell on cousin marriage
They weren’t like the beatniks or hippies of the 60s who came out with ideas that horrified the establishment. What the students demanded – the elimination of racism – is the ruling class’s central belief. Its religion. It would have been like students of the 60s demanding stricter rules against extra-marital sex, homosexuality or women in the workplace.
In case you miss the point, he is saying that today’s student radicals are not rebelling against establishment norms; instead, they are demanding strict enforcement of elite norms, including canceling anyone who is not sufficiently on board with those norms.
if you don’t understand the signals, the customs, the shibboleths—you’ll still be shut out. And because class is one of the last taboos in American life—rarely mentioned, let alone explained—people misunderstand it.
No one will spell out the rules for you.
The only way to learn them is through exposure: being close enough to watch how people in that class live, talk, spend, and signal. Humans learn culture by immersion. That’s how we’ve always done it.
That might be the true value of going to college. It immerses you in the environment of the dominant social class.
There is solid evidence that pediatric suicides increase about 30% during the school year. This is an unusual pattern that ends at age 18.
There is solid evidence that parents and students are more satisfied with private schools than public schools.
There is solid evidence that LGBTQ students are bullied more in public schools than in private schools.
There is solid evidence that being bullied increases the odds of dying by suicide.
One might have thought that professors who care about pediatric suicides and professors who care about LGBTQ students would be interested in policy proposals that increase access to private schools.
Roughly, the baseline risk of unrelated parents having a child with a major birth defect is 3%; for a child of first cousins, this risk increases to 6%. This means that the vast majority of children born from consanguineous marriages will be healthy.
The second sentence is one way to position the statistics. Another way would be to say that cousin marriage doubles the risk of a major birth defect.
Her main point is that the cultural characteristics of societies with high rates of cousin marriage will not necessarily go away if you ban cousin marriage. Honor codes and patriarchy may be more deeply embedded.
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Re: "That might be the true value of going to college. It immerses you in the environment of the dominant social class."
College also immerses you in the environment of the professoriate, who differ in peculiar, systematic ways from corporate and government elites. Casual observation suggests that students (a) are quick to tell professors what the latter want to hear on exams, but (b) are nonetheless hard to brainwash.
At colleges that have (highly?) selective admissions, selection effects are the real treatment effect. Students, especially at residential campuses, pick up much more from one another than from professors.
What is the environment of the would-be dominant social class?:
• Communal residence/dining
• Agonistic extracurriculars
• Diffuse status anxiety
• High prevalence of mood drugs (especially the disinhibition drug, alcohol; and performance drugs)
• A culture of impossibly broad resume building (2 majors, a minor, a sport, community service off campus, 3 clubs etc etc etc).
The tendency to check all the breadth boxes at the expense of depth fits Michael Spence's signaling model of higher educational credentials.
But there are exceptions where narrow depth is the whole experience: D1 big-time sports athletes; computer science/engineering majors at Ivy+ universities.
The incidence of birth defects in the offspring of cousin marriage probably depends a great deal on how common cousin marriage is in the society. In populations where cousin marriage is rare, we'd expect a higher rate of such defects than in societies in which such marriage is common.
The frequency of deleterious genes in a population of organisms depends on two major factors: the rate at which mutation creates new such genes, which we can assume is constant whatever the population's sexual system; and the rate at which those genes are removed, owing to the death or reproductive disability of homozygotes. At equilibrium, those two rates are equal.
But the frequency of those genes depends heavily on the sexual system. If the organism regularly mates with close relatives (the extreme case being self-fertilization), significantly deleterious recessive alleles are quickly removed, and their frequency in the whole population is low. At the other extreme, if there's random mating within a very large population, the frequency of harmful recessives can be quite high. In either case, though, the rate of birth defects within the population is the same—enough to offset the production of new deleterious alleles by mutation.
So the problem with marriage to cousins or other close relatives arises when it occurs within a society where such marriages don't generally occur. Such a society would have a fairly high frequency of harmful recessives, so there'd be a fairly high likelihood that the two cousins would share one; and if they do, there's a one in four chance that any one of their offspring would be homozygous for that allele.
But if cousin or even sib mating were the usual practice in the society, the frequency of deleterious recessives would be low, so it'd be much less likely that the partners would share such an allele.