This is my pick for the best article I read this week.
American education’s new dark age
Thinking isn’t easy, and critical thinking isn’t really being a ‘team player’. In markets it’s not too popular. While it can confer some benefits on heroic entrepreneurs like Peter Theil, most standard commercial innovation arises from cleverness and facility, not critical thought. That’s in markets. Then there’s bureaucracies — private and public. (Enough said — they’re wall to wall team players.) Then there’s the academy — or was. Even there, the prizes increasingly go to facile cleverness. Critical thinking is no way to get an article published in a top journal.
Then it drifted into an anti-woke rant which I figured would be pretty predictable — but I found it compelling, raising a number of points that hadn’t occurred to me:
Wokeism can be thought of as the opportunistic infection of a host with an already weakened intellectual immune system. Students haven’t learned to think, so they lack the means to spot its inconsistencies, its hypocrisies, its absurdities. They haven’t learned to read, so they uncritically absorb its empty language. They know little of history, so they accept whatever tendentious version wokeism hands them.
Wokeism also satisfies important psychic needs, of the kind that education ought to address but does not. It provides students with an interpretive framework with which to understand the world. For earlier generations of young adults, that function would have been performed by Marxism or Freudianism or feminism or liberal progressivism or American patriotism. All have long since been discredited except for feminism, which had itself been in abeyance and has now been absorbed by, and subordinated to, the new intersectional identitarianism.…
In telling students what to think, wokeism also provides them with something to say. The value of this should not be underestimated, particularly in the age of social media. Having opinions — easily, instantly, on everything — is essential to the contemporary presentation of the self. The process of forming them is aided immensely if you already know where you’re supposed to stand on every subject, including ones you haven’t heard of yet. …
No longer do [professors] see their role as challenging students’ unexamined convictions — of scraping the stupid off their brains, as the documentarian Rob Montz has put it. The old salutary adversarialism has been replaced by an insidious alignment of views. Students and professors now are social justice warriors together, marching in lockstep, wreathed in clouds of self-congratulation, for the one true cause.
But this is really no surprise. Wokeism, as a bundle of intellectual tendencies, began in the academy. Decades on — academics being great conformists — dissent has largely been bred out. Meanwhile, leftist professors (that is, most of them), ensconced in bureaucratic institutions and the upper middle-class, are desperate to hold onto their self-image as subversives, speaking truth to power (in their monographs), doing battle with the system (that pays their salaries).
Here’s a somewhat similar piece from a few years back on the wholesale failure of the very most elite liberal colleges to teach critical thought.
Four foundational principles for a flourishing organisation or society: Part Two
This was the second discussion of my framework of four principles needed for a healthy organisation or political system — the first was here. We began the discussion considering Elon Musk's recent complaint about censorship on social media. We reprised the basic principles we discussed last week and showed how they helped us understand Musk’s claim and why any ‘free speech’ alternative to existing dominant social media platforms is likely to run into similar dilemmas to them — even if it can get enough subscribers to become a force. I also refer to my comments on this post which elaborate these ideas further.
I also explain the fourth principle in the framework — merit — using the example of Wikipedia and open-source software. While we're in love with how 'democratic' and open these production methods are, while this is beneficial, the real 'secret sauce' of these extraordinary new production methods is not their radical openness and connectedness but that they have found a new and very effective way of building meritocracies. Anyone can contribute and, by doing so can work their way into a position of greater respect, standing and authority. If this was not in place, opening up their production process to all comers would lead to chaos, not the miracles to which it has. If you prefer the audio file, you can find it here.
Psychosis is Not the Absence of Consciousness
Powerful piece by Freddie deBoer:
What psychosis actually does is force you to see what a thin reed your conscious mind really is, how totally defenseless it is before the animal power of your primal brain, should you be unfortunate enough to ever be exposed to that encounter.
He followed up with this piece by someone else on Reddit.
I work and have worked in mental health for my entire adult life (late 20s now). I have my own mental health diagnoses. … I have met and helped and treated numerous individuals now who are my peers in age. … And so many have internalized a generational "understanding" of mental illness that is toxic and worthless beyond condemnation. Our youngest generations' understanding of mental health enables, encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity.
Accountability is absent to the nth degree. But more importantly, a lack of any accountability has deprived these people of personal empowerment and agency. Mental illness is no longer something to recover from and fight against. It is an identity and a definition of life itself.
To which Freddie responds:
More than anything, what these young people fail to understand is the regret. … They are idealistic and ignorant enough to think that their disorders remove the culpability that produces regret; for many of them, this denial of responsibility appears to be a key part of the attraction. But it doesn’t work that way. Over time, as you age, abstract questions of control and blame fall away, and what you’re left with is the accumulation of broken relationships and things you can never take back.
A 19-year-old on TikTok might look at her peers and their talk of borderline personality disorder and see glamour and a kind of pain that society might recognize. But if so afflicted someday that 19-year-old will be in her mid-30s and will look back and see the human wreckage that has accrued, and there will be nothing like glamour or fun, only the grubby slow unfinishable business of trying to stay medicated and alive. They don’t understand the regret, these kids. They don’t understand the regret.
Are things improving for my people? I don’t think that will happen until black fathers return to the job. We cannot continue to blame all of our problems on racism. If the black family can be restored, and if we can recover the dignity and self-respect that we have lost, we will find that we have finally arrived in the Promised Land.
She was a poor Senate committee performer, often mistaking aggression for forensic questioning in estimates, as her attack on Christine Holgate showed. … And none of that changes that she died far too young and with so much undone.
As parties have shrunk, they’ve become ever more the plaything of small-time figures who can, by dint of drawing heavily from targeted community groups, stack their way to power branch by branch. Kitching — who devoted her career to playing intra-party games, undermining factional opponents and pursuing the interests of her own political clique — was the perfect example.
And the media is complicit in the whole process. Political journalists provide platforms for politicians to engage in factional warfare against each other, making for great copy, and saving them the trouble of getting across public policy issues. In the world of hollowed-out parties, the media is for leaking to, not holding the powerful to account; for using against your enemies inside the party, not speaking truth to power. …
Corporations with ‘net zero’ carbon emission commitments have a system of certification which, one can expect, is systematically biased in their favour. Why? Because they fund it. As I explained here, the incentives for systematic lying are pervasive and normalised. Is it any wonder that, in another context, someone (anonymously) wrote this:
I spent 10 years of my life writing neighbourhood plans, partnership strategies, the Local Area Agreement, stretch targets [and much else]. These documents describe the performance of local government and its partners.
I have a confession to make. Much of it was made up, fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted. I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in pairs, strategic lies, operational lies, cross cutting lies. I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense. Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organisation and brought together into a single document.
Why did I do it? I did this because it was my job.
This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree (“business managers”) reduce their employees' wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers … do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter.
Why does crypto work for Russian ransomware, but not for the Ottawa truckers?
If these people feel strongly — I just wish they’d come out and say what it is!
Short answer: on-ramps and off-ramps. And without protecting those ramps we end up in oligarch land! A fine post by the thoughtful econoblogger J. P. Koning.
If drones have made the battlefield marginally more dangerous for armored vehicles, portable anti-tank weapons have been an absolute game-changer. Antitank guided missiles like the U.S.-made Javelin can kill armored vehicles at a range of more than 2 km. … These and other portable weapons have been supplied to the Ukrainians in great numbers … more than 17,000 so far. That’s probably more weapons than the Russians have vehicles …As long as they don’t miss much, of course. But the antitank weapons’ guidance systems appear to be so accurate that a large percentage of the shots hit their mark — one estimate early in the war guessed that 280 out of 300 Javelins fired had scored a hit. …
Armored vehicles may no longer be a cost-effective tool for fighting wars. That could be a very good thing in many ways.
An excellent provocation from one of the ClubTroppo stable — David Walker
Even if Russia finds some way to recover and eke out a victory in Ukraine … well, as far as I can see, China’s autocrats have already lost there. Badly.
And the reasons for that loss are much more to do with values than with military power. The Chinese regime’s problem is this: The Ukraine invasion is nudging the world’s democracies towards a new awareness of the risks of partnering with autocracies.
After last week’s mailout I was approached by a reader and an old friend saying this:
What's prompted this email is today's selection of pieces about Ukraine. I haven't read them but from the excerpts their slant seems pretty uniform and it seems to me your readers might benefit from somewhat more varied fare. In that spirit, here are a few links that paint a different and in my view more realistic picture.
Other than a sympathy for Zelenskyy and Ukraine, I’d also circulated John Mearsheimer’s view that we were courting disaster marching NATO up to Russia’s borders. In any event, I’m referencing two of the articles he sent me. The first is, as my heading says a “We poked the bear” article, which isn’t very helpful on what to do now we have a poked bear on our hands (see below).
The second, more telling article was this one:
Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia
The second article my correspondent sent me did strike me as more ‘realistic’ in its insistence that the Russians are not ‘targetting civilians’. They’re hitting some and that’s horrendous. But do we really think that if they were trying to kill civilians they couldn’t have killed a lot more?
A … retired U.S. Air Force officer says:
“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe. I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”
These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.
Until these Pentagon leaks it was difficult to confirm that Russia was entirely telling the truth and that corporate media were publishing fables cooked up by Ukraine’s publicity machine.
We can now add the lives of Ukrainians to the death toll of two decades of unnecessary war, spurred by Washington’s arrogance and myopia.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
This is very much in the tradition of Mearsheimer — whose views I included in a mailout a few weeks ago.
Russia and Ukraine are at war. Despite the warm words flooding forth from the West for Kiev, allied policy has been anything but pro-Ukraine. Indeed, America’s approach can best be described as fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian …
Last December, Dmitri] Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center [said this]. “It’s crucial to note that Putin has presided over four waves of NATO enlargement and has had to accept Washington’s withdrawal from treaties governing anti-ballistic missiles, intermediate-range nuclear forces, and unarmed observation aircraft. For him, Ukraine is the last stand. The Russian commander-in-chief is supported by his security and military establishments and, despite the Russian public’s fear of a war, faces no domestic opposition to his foreign policy. Most importantly, he cannot afford to be seen bluffing.”
My own view is that the fundamental problems of the next few years are not about moral hazard or financial markets. What really matters is rerouting global trade and securing stronger supply chains that are resilient not only in the face of public health shocks like pandemics, but to the obvious political risks present in the world today.
