College for Almost No One

Bryan Caplan, with whom I often disagree, is quite right about this:

From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity….

The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them….

Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy. Nonetheless, I believe that signaling accounts for at least half of college’s financial reward, and probably more.

Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line….

Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation. This in turn implies a mountain of wasted resources—time and money that would be better spent preparing students for the jobs they’re likely to do….

In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. The ignorance it revealed is mind-numbing. Fewer than a third of college graduates received a composite score of “proficient”—and about a fifth were at the “basic” or “below basic” level….

Of course, college students aren’t supposed to just download facts; they’re supposed to learn how to think in real life. How do they fare on this count? The most focused study of education’s effect on applied reasoning, conducted by Harvard’s David Perkins in the mid-1980s, assessed students’ oral responses to questions designed to measure informal reasoning, such as “Would a proposed law in Massachusetts requiring a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans significantly reduce litter?” The benefit of college seemed to be zero: Fourth-year students did no better than first-year students….

… When we look at countries around the world, a year of education appears to raise an individual’s income by 8 to 11 percent. By contrast, increasing education across a country’s population by an average of one year per person raises the national income by only 1 to 3 percent. In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations.

How is this possible? Credential inflation: As the average level of education rises, you need more education to convince employers you’re worthy of any specific job….

As credentials proliferate, so do failed efforts to acquire them. Students can and do pay tuition, kill a year, and flunk their finals…. Simply put, the push for broader college education has steered too many students who aren’t cut out for academic success onto the college track.

The college-for-all mentality has fostered neglect of a realistic substitute: vocational education. [“The World Might Be Better Off without College for Everyone“, The Atlantic, January 2018]

Caplan has been preaching this gospel for years. But he’s not the only one.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, writing in The Atlantic almost eight years ago, observed that

the phrase “higher education bubble” is popping up everywhere in recent months. This is thanks (in small part) to President Obama, who announced in his first State of the Union address that “every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.” But Americans have been fetishizing college diplomas for a long time now — Obama just reinforced that message and brought even more cash to the table. College has become a minimum career requirement, a basic human right, and a minimum income guarantee in the eyes of the American public. [“President Obama Is Not Impressed with Your High-School Diploma. Neither Is Wal-Mart.“]

Mangu-Ward is exactly right when she says this:

If we’re going to push every 18-year-old in the country into some kind of higher education, most people will likely be better off in a programs that involves logistics and linoleum, rather than ivy and the Iliad.

Vocational training, in other words. Which has languished, even as public schools have been dumbed-down.

Don Lee, writing at about the same time as Mangu-Ward, underscores the over-education — more correctly, mis-educaton — of America’s young adults:

[G]overnment surveys indicate that the vast majority of job gains this year have gone to workers with only a high school education or less, casting some doubt on one of the nation’s most deeply held convictions: that a college education is the ticket to the American Dream.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that seven of the 10 employment sectors that will see the largest gains during the next decade won’t require much more than some on-the-job training. These include home health care aides, customer service representatives, and food preparers and servers. Meanwhile, well-paying white-collar jobs, such as computer programming, have become vulnerable to outsourcing to foreign countries.

“People with bachelor’s degrees will increasingly get not very highly satisfactory jobs,” said W. Norton Grubb, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Education. “In that sense, people are getting more schooling than jobs are available.”

He noted that in 1970, 77 percent of workers with bachelor’s degrees were employed in professional and managerial occupations. By 2000, that had fallen to 60 percent.

Of the nearly 1 million new jobs created since hiring turned up in January, about half have been temporary census jobs. Most of the rest are concentrated in industries such as retail, hospitality and temporary staffing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [“Education Loses Its Luster“, reprinted in Akron Beacon Journal, June 21, 2010]

But that’s not news, either, this is from an anonymous piece that ran in The Atlantic almost ten years ago:

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college. [“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”, June 2008]

In fact, when I entered college 60 years ago, I was among the 28 percent of high-school graduates then attending college. It was evident to me that about half of my college classmates didn’t belong in an institution of higher learning. Despite that, the college-enrollment rate among high-school graduates has since doubled.

It’s long past time to burst the higher-education bubble. For one thing, it would mean fewer subsidies for the academic enemies of liberty.

Slow Traffic

I started blogging at WordPress in September 2009. Viewership built gradually and reached a satisfying level in late 2010. It continued at that level until November 2012.

But in the wake of the dispiriting election of 2012, I posted infrequently from November 2012 until June 2013. Coincidentally (or not), page views dropped to almost zero, and rebuilt slowly. But viewership never returned to the level attained before November 2012.

What do I make of this?

Is it an old lesson re-learned? If you want to build readership and hold onto your readers, don’t take a vacation from blogging. Blog often. Visibility to search engines depends more on quantity than on quality.

Does it also help to blog on a variety of topics? I suspect that this blog has lost some readership because my focus is narrow.

Or, given my outspoken and unrelenting opposition to Obama and the regulatory-welfare state, was this blog targeted for “throttling” by Google’s algorithms?

Comments? Advice?

UPDATE: Another possibility. With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, blogs are less popular than they were several years ago.

Religion, Creation, and Morality

I was trying to find a way into Keith Burgess-Jackson’s eponymous blog, which seems to have been closed to public view since he defended Roy Moore’s courtship of a 14-year-old person. (Perhaps Moore might have been cut some slack by a segment of the vast left-wing conspiracy had the person been a male.) My search for an entry has thus far been futile, but I did come across an intriguing item produced by Burgess-Jackson last August: A Taxonomy of Religions.

In it, KBJ (as I will refer to him hereinafter) claims that there are religious atheists (e.g., Jainists and Buddhists) as well as irreligious ones. Atheistic religions (a jarring term) seem to be religions that prescribe moral codes and ways of life (e.g., non-violence, meditation, moderation), but which don’t posit a god or gods which created and in some way control the universe.

What’s interesting (to me) about KBJ’s taxonomy is what isn’t there. The god or gods of KBJ’s taxonomy are “personal” — a conscious being or conscious beings who deliberately created the universe, exert continuous control of it, and even communicate with human beings after some fashion.

What isn’t there, other than atheism, which denies a creator? It’s the view that there was a creator — a force of unknown qualities — which put the universe in motion but may no longer have anything to do with it. That kind of creator would be impersonal and therefore uncommunicative with the objects of its creation. This position is classical deism, as I understand it.

The only substantive difference between this hard deism (as it’s sometimes called) and non-religious atheism, as I see it, is the question of creation. A hard deist believes in the necessity of a creator. The atheist rejects the necessity and holds that the universe just is — full stop.

But if a hard deist sees no role for the creator after the creation, isn’t he really just an atheist? After all, if the creation is over and done with, and the creator no longer has anything to do with the universe, that’s tantamount to saying that we’re on our own, as an atheist would say.

But a deist could subscribe to the view that the creator not only set the universe in motion, but also did so by design. That is, things like light, the behavior of matter-energy, etc., didn’t arise by accident but are part of a deliberate effort to give order to what would otherwise be randomness.

If one accepts that view, one becomes a kind of soft deist who sees a semi-personal god behind the creation — something more than just a brute force. This position resembles the stance of the late Antony Flew, an English philosopher:

In a 2004 interview … , Flew, then 81 years old, said that he had become a deist. In the article Flew states that he has renounced his long-standing espousal of atheism by endorsing a deism of the sort that Thomas Jefferson advocated (“While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings”).

I take the view that a creator is a logical necessity:

1. In the material universe, cause precedes effect.

2. Accordingly, the material universe cannot be self-made. It must have a “starting point,” but the “starting point” cannot be in or of the material universe.

3. The existence of the universe therefore implies a separate, uncaused cause.

Elaborating:

1. There is necessarily a creator of the universe, which comprises all that exists in “nature”.

2. The creator is not part of nature; that is, he stands apart from his creation and is neither of its substance nor governed by its laws. (I use “he” as a term of convenience, not to suggest that the creator is some kind of human or animate being, as we know such beings.)

3. The creator designed the universe, if not in detail then in its parameters. The parameters are what we know as matter-energy (substance) and its various forms, motions, and combinations (the laws that govern the behavior of matter-energy).

4. The parameters determine everything that is possible in the universe. But they do not necessarily dictate precisely the unfolding of events in the universe. Randomness and free will are evidently part of the creator’s design.

5. The human mind and its ability to “do science” — to comprehend the laws of nature through observation and calculation — are artifacts of the creator’s design.

6. Two things probably cannot be known through science: the creator’s involvement in the unfolding of natural events; the essential character of the substance on which the laws of nature operate.

I would add a third unknowable thing: whether morality is implicit in the creation, and if so, what it comprises. But if it is implicit in the creator’s design, it is therefore discernible (if imperfectly).

How and by whom is it discernible? By clerics, reasoning from religious texts? By philosophers, reasoning from the nature of human beings and the discoveries of science?

Here is my view: If morality is something ingrained in human beings by their nature, as dictated by the “terms” of the creation, it reveals itself in widely accepted and practiced norms, such as the Golden Rule.

Such norms precede their codification by philosophers and holy men. They reflect what “works“, that is, what makes for a cohesive and productive society.

Positive law — legislative, executive, and judicial edicts — often undoes those norms and undermines society. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is but one glaring example.

Politics and Prosperity: A Natural Experiment

See Part IV of this post.

Screen Shots: “The Glass Castle”, “Victoria”, and “The Crown”

I seldom recommend a movie, but The Glass Castle (2017) has joined the relatively short list of films that I have rated 8 or higher on the 10-point scale at IMDb. (Relatively short is 700 of the 2,100 feature films that I have rated. If that seems like a high ratio, consider that I am picky about what I choose to watch, not an easy grader.)

The Glass Castle is based on the eponymous memoir by Jeannette Walls, which my wife has read. Here’s a summary of the story, courtesy of Amazon.com:

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town — and the family — Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

That barely skims the surface of the memoir, which (as my wife tells) me is often harrowing in its depiction of the poverty, squalor, rootlessness, and shame inflicted on the Walls children by their parents. The film captures the essence of the memoir without rubbing the viewer’s nose in squalor or seeking to blame “society” for the fate of the Wallses. And why would a Hollywood film do that, in this day and age, for the Wallses weren’t ghetto blacks or “undocumented” immigrants. They were just rednecks.

And it is for that reason that I admire the film. It just tells it like it was, according to Jeannette Walls. In fact, it pulls a few punches, as it must to fit a book-length memoir into 127 minutes of screen time. But it lands a lot of punches, and lands them effectively. There are no cardboard characters or ersatz themes in this film, which manages to convey Jeannette Walls’s love for her parents, despite all that they put her and her siblings through.

Woody Harrelson, who plays Rex Walls, has the redneck thing down pat. He is like most of the many rednecks I have known and encountered: full of false braggadocio and seething resentment, with the ever-present threat of sometimes-realized violence. Harrelson’s performance deserves far more prestigious recognition than a nomination for Central Ohio Film Critics’ Actor of the Year.

I can’t leave The Glass Castle without mentioning the fine work of Naomi Watts, who does a good hillbilly for an Englishwoman. Watts works in the tradition of British actors, who mostly are able to sound authentically American. This is a talent that is reciprocated only be very few American actors who have tried to sound British.

But if Victoria is representative — and it is, in my experience — British actors should be banned from doing German accents. Three main roles — Prince Albert, his brother Prince Ernest, and his uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians — are given to Brits: Tom Hughes, David Oakes, and Alex Jennings. It would have been hard to get worse German accents by randomly choosing from among American high-school students who have been cast in a senior play.

But that matters little in the grand scheme of Victoria, which is a sumptuous, feminist soap opera. Albert is always trying to usurp or guide little Vickie, who is always putting her tiny royal foot down, when she isn’t making passionate love (with Albert) that results in yet another little encumbrance to the performance of her royal duties.

Poor Vickie. She should have commanded her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to marry her. The result would have been a much more satisfactory soap opera, inasmuch as Rufus Sewell (who plays Lord M.) is a more convincing lover than Tom Hughes (Albert), despite being 20 years older than Hughes.

I must add that Jenna Coleman (below, left) is a cute Victoria. Certainly cuter than the real item (below, right). But that’s a main part of Victoria’s appeal.

There will be a third season, and I probably will watch it, but only because I enjoy soap-operas about the upper crust, like Downton Abbey.

The Crown is another royal soap-opera, which is also destined for a third season (at least). The script-writers’ dislike for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip is so evident that Her Majesty and His Royal Highness might prevail in a libel suit. There may be shards of truth in The Crown, but they are cocooned in fabrications.

To take two blatant examples: The Queen didn’t conspire with Anthony Eden to prevent her sister, Princess Margaret, from marrying Peter Townsend. Harold Macmillian didn’t conspire to unseat Anthony Eden as prime minister in order to succeed him.

In keeping with the historical inaccuracy of the series is the producers’ penchant for casting actors who somewhat resemble the persons they play, but who are much too tall. Alex Jennings (he does get around), is several inches taller than the very late Duke of Windsor; Vanessa Kirby is likewise much too vertical to pass for the tiny (and somewhat late) Princess Margaret; and John Lithgow (question-mark-stooped as he plays Churchill) is far too hulking to pass for the immortal hero of World War II.

I might let the miscasting pass, were it not for the writers’ venomous and inaccurate telling of events. But, again, after ingesting several teaspoons of salt, I’ll probably stick around for another season of Downtown Abbey meets Buck House, as The Crown should have been titled.

Scapegoating in Baltimore

WaPo reports that Baltimore’s police commissioner has been fired:

Baltimore’s mayor on Friday abruptly replaced Police Commissioner Kevin Davis weeks after the city ended 2017 with a record-setting homicide rate and amid increased political pressure to control crime….

The leadership change comes as Davis was overseeing the department during one of its most difficult eras. He was tasked with driving down violent crime that flared to historic levels after a young man’s death in police custody while simultaneously reforming an agency the Justice Department cited for discriminating against black residents.

You can see the problem immediately. Homicide in Baltimore, as in other cities, is mainly a black-on-black crime. But how are you going to police black areas of the city if, in doing so, you’re accused of discriminating against blacks?

As the WaPo story puts it,

Davis was left to balance trying to change a culture of policing the Justice Department called discriminatory while being tough enough on criminals to deliver safe streets.

Officers were not as aggressive as they might ordinarily have been out of fear “they, too, would be arrested for doing their jobs,” said Gene Ryan, a Baltimore police lieutenant who heads the Fraternal Order of Police labor union.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said the average tenure of a police chief is three or four years but that Davis was “really between a rock and a hard place in trying to implement reform and deal with violent crime.”

“It’s almost like changing two tires on a car at the same time,” Wexler said.

What it’s really like is being expected to do a job without being allowed to use the requisite tools.

Baltimore’s soaring homicide rate is evidence of the Ferguson Effect, which Heather Mac Donald wrote about in “Yes, the Ferguson Effect Is Real” (National Review, September 26, 2016). She was seconded by John Hinderaker (“Violent Crime Jumped in 2015“, Power Line, September 26, 2016), who said:

I don’t know of any potential explanation for the jump last year other than the war on cops, Black Lives Matter, and the Obama administration’s anti-incarceration policies. Expect another increase when the numbers come in for 2016.

And he was right. See, for example, Mark Berman’s “Violent Crimes and Murders Increased for a Second Consecutive Year in 2016, FBI Says” (The Washington Post, September 25, 2017).

I get to the root of the problem in “Crime Revisited”, to which I added “Amen to That” and “Double Amen”. What’s the root of the problem? A certain, violence-prone racial minority, of course, and also under-incarceration. It’s not racism:

Criminologists talk about the race-crime connection behind closed doors, and often in highly guarded language; the topic is a lightning rod for accusations of racial hostility that can be professionally damaging. They avoid discussing even explicitly racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults, “polar bear hunting,” and the “knockout game.” What criminologists won’t say in public is that black offending differences have existed since data have been collected and that these differences are behind the racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. They also won’t tell you that, despite claims of widespread racial discrimination in the justice system, legal variables—namely, the number of prior arrests and the seriousness of the crime for which the offender has currently been arrested—account for all but a small fraction of the variance in system outcomes. Nor will they tell you the truth about politically correct remedies, such as diversifying police forces, hiring black police chiefs, or training officers in the alleged effects of implicit bias: that these measures won’t reduce racial disparities in crime….

… 50 years of research on the topic have failed to find the smoking gun linking justice-system disparities to racism. Claims to the contrary often manipulate data or ignore them altogether. [John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisis, “What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why“, City Journal, Summer 2017]

Follow the links — and read and weep.

Amazon and Austin

Austin is on the list of 20 finalists for the site of Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2). I have a strong interest in the outcome of the competition because I live in Austin, and I hope that Amazon puts HQ2 somewhere else.

Why? Because the Austin area — which already has terrible traffic, rapidly rising real-estate prices, and high property taxes — will just get worse with the addition of 50,000 employees (i.e., perhaps 100,000 more residents) and a $5 billion investment in HQ2.

It is de rigeur for persons who have lived in Austin for a long time to bemoan its changed character. And they should. Thanks to growth-oriented politicians who have governed Austin for the past few decades, its character and quality of life are as faded as Warren Beatty’s looks.

What was once a rather laid-back “town”, dominated by the government of Texas and the University of Texas (before it became UT-Austin), has become part of the 31st largest metropolitan statistical area in the U.S., as of 2016. The population of the city proper has quintupled from 200,000 to 1 million since I first came to the city as a visitor in the 1960s. It has been only in the last decade or so that Austin’s skyline has sprouted a flock of towers as high as 80 stories. Until then, it had been a low-lying city, with only a few 15-story buildings, which weren’t even tall enough to challenge the dominance of the State Capitol, perched atop a modest hill. Austin’s hippies, who are still around but rather the worse for wear, are almost invisible among the vast army of yuppies which has come to Austin from other locales — California being a leading supplier of the rude, SUV-driving jerks who clutter roads, stores, and restaurants.

Several locales among the 20 finalists are less populous than the Austin area. Raleigh, the smallest of the lot, would seem to be an ideal choice. Any of them would be ideal from the point of view of most of Austin’s current residents, who need more traffic and higher property taxes like a hole in the head. It is mainly Austin’s lame-brained “progressive” politicos who seem to want HQ2 in Austin, as if a bigger (more crowded, more expensive) city would somehow make them more manly, womanly, or it-ly (as the case may be).

In case you have some influence over Amazon’s decision about where to locate HQ2, I would like to point out some things about Austin — in addition to traffic, real-estate prices, and property taxes — that ought to push you in an another direction:

Austin’s summers, which last from April to November, are very hot. In 2011, for example, there were 90 100-degree days, 27 of them consecutive. And when there’s a prevailing wind from the Gulf of Mexico (as there often is), Austin is also quite humid. Not as humid as Houston or Washington, D.C., but the combination of heat and humidity is “challenging”.

Only a hardy few bicyclists will be seen doing something stupid, like bicycling, in the the heat of the day. And in most of Austin they will not be using bicycle lanes that take up valuable road space for naught.

Austin has some attractive areas, including a traditional downtown on the 10 blocks of Congress Avenue south of the Capitol, and some parks and hike-and-bike trails along and near the wide spot in the Colorado River called Lady Bird Lake, which is geographically in the center of Austin. The rest of the city is a mixed bag, which ranges from mostly flat and ugly (east of Loop 1) to somewhat attractive and hilly (west of Loop 1). But Austin isn’t in a truly scenic area like Pittsburgh (which is among the 20 finalists).

Those Amazonians who aren’t in the higher echelons will end up in the ugly parts of the city and surrounding area because they won’t be able to afford to live in the nicer parts. In fact they may not be able to afford to live in the ugly parts of the city proper. Pittsburgh is much more affordable, and it’s hard to find an ugly area in and around the city.

Loop 1, mentioned above, isn’t a loop. It’s one of Austin’s two, limited-access, north-south highways. There are no limited-access, east-west highways, and nothing resembling a loop around Austin. All of which is why Austin’s traffic is incurably terrible.

Austin has no “culture”, unless you think of bars with live music as culture. Its orchestra is third-rate; whatever passes for opera and ballet is almost unnoticeable; and its museums and art galleries are fourth-rate. It is decidedly philistine for a university town. Many of the 20 finalists, including Pittsburgh, are culturally superior to Austin. The prevalence of burnt orange (the color worn by UT athletes) should tell you all you need to know about the level of culture in Austin.

And about those live-music bars — and theaters and upscale restaurants: They’re mostly downtown, which has become practically inaccessible except to people who already live downtown. That’s Austin’s traffic for you. There’s no subway, and the dinky commuter rail line is about as useful as a table-top model, so the alternative to driving and searching in vain for a parking place is to hire a cab or ride-sharing service. But the ride won’t be cheap, and it will still take quite a while to travel a few miles (or more) to your downtown destination.

A p.r. person dubbed Austin the “Live-Music Capital of the World” — an accolade that I dispute. A more authentic title would be “Allergy Capital of the Word”. As a life-long allergy sufferer, I can tell you that Austin has more allergens in its environment than any other place I have encountered. And there’s something going on year-around. Mold spores are almost always in abundance, thanks to southerly winds from the Gulf of Mexico. But the granddaddy of them all is the pollen of the so-called mountain cedar tree (really the Ashe juniper), which grows profusely in central Texas. Pollen outbursts begin in December and peak in January. And when you’ve lived in Austin for more than a few years, you’ll probably come down with an attack of what’s called cedar fever — an extreme allergic reaction to the pollen that reduces you to a wheezing, sneezing, lethargic puddle of humanity. It’s like a cross between flu and pneumonia. Enjoy!

I would leave Austin in a trice, but house-selling, house-hunting, and moving are daunting tasks at my age. Luckily, I am long-retired, so commuting isn’t a problem for me. As for the rest of it, I patronize only those restaurants that are easy to get to, shop online for everything but groceries, avoid bars and theaters altogether, and give thanks that I enjoyed Austin’s few nice parks in the years immediately after I arrived here.

What else can I tell you about Austin? Perhaps some readers who know the place will comment. For now, I’ll leave you with links to some related posts:

Driving and Politics (1)
Life in Austin (1)
Life in Austin (2)
Life in Austin (3)
Driving and Politics (2)
AGW in Austin?
Democracy in Austin
AGW in Austin? (II)
The Hypocrisy of “Local Control”

On Government Shutdowns

The great pity is that Congress doesn’t shut itself down. The other great pity is that a government shutdown doesn’t really put a stop to government spending and regulation.

It’s just a kabuki dance.

The Conscience of a Conservative

My heart bleeds for the people of s***hole countries, cities, and neighborhoods. God knows there are enough of the latter two in the U.S. Why is that? Certainly, there are cultural and genetic factors at work. But those have been encouraged and reinforced by governmental acts.

Government — the central government especially — has long been a silent killer of economic opportunity. Jobs are killed by regulation that hinders business formation and expansion and every government program that diverts resources from the private sector.

How bad is it? This bad:

Because of increases in the rate of government spending and the issuance of regulations, the real rate of GDP growth has been halved since the end of World War II.

If GDP had continued to grow at an annual rate of 4 percent from its 1946 level of $1.9 trillion (in chained 2009 dollars), it would have reached $30 trillion in 2016 instead of $17 trillion.

Given the relationship between employment and real GDP, the cost of government policies is huge. There could now be as many as 207 million employed Americans instead of the current number of 156 million*, were it not for the “helpful” big-government policies foisted on hapless Americans by “compassionate” leftist do-gooders (and not a few dupes in center and on the right).

My heart bleeds.

* The relationship between employment and real GDP is as follows:

E = 1204.8Y^0.4991

where
E = employment in thousands
Y = real GDP in billions of chained 2009 dollars.

This estimate is based on employment and GDP values for 1948 through 2016, which are available here and here.

An increase in employment from 156 million to 207 million would raise the employment-population ratio from 60 percent to 80 percent, which is well above the post-World War II peak of 65 percent. The real limit is undoubtedly higher than 65 percent, but probably less than 80 percent. In any event, the impoverishing effect of big government is real and huge.

Tips for Living: II

Don’t get mad or get even; channel your energy into a constructive endeavor.

Is Inflation Back?

Not yet, based on the CPI-U, to which you may or may not lend credence:

Derived from BLS Series CUUR0000SA0, available here.

In the Non-News Department

Relentless California wildfires are followed by heavy rains and mudslides.

Massive hurricanes batter Florida [and other States, too], causing billions of dollars in property damage and the loss of many lives.

Ferocious winter storms pound the Northeast [or the Upper Midwest].

Terrible twisters devastate [the usual places in the Midwest and South]; whole communities are leveled and many are killed.

The mighty Mississippi [or another large river] overflows its banks, flooding millions of acres and driving thousands of people from their homes.

I don’t mean to make light of such events. But they are not news. They are as predictable as the sunrise. And they are proof (if any were needed) of the irrationality of human beings (or at least those who return to disaster-prone areas), and of the political corruption that subsidizes irrationality by rewarding it with taxpayers’ money.

For the media, events such as those listed above are just a means to an end: If it bleeds, it leads, and it leads because it attracts eyes or ears and therefore sells advertising (the end).

This Is a Test

Scott McKay writes:

Thursday saw a media firestorm erupt over a Washington Post report that amid a White House meeting with several members of Congress working on a compromise having to do with the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, President Trump asked why America should have to take in so many immigrants from “s***hole countries” rather than people from places like Norway.

The Post article isn’t exactly the finest example of American journalism, identifying as its source no one actually in the room to confirm what Trump supposedly said but instead naming two anonymous people who were “briefed on the meeting.”

I won’t get into the truth or falsity of the reporting. I suspect that it’s true. And it doesn’t bother me in the least if President Trump characterized some countries as s***holes. They are, and for two very good reasons: the low intelligence of their populations and their anti-libertarian governments (which make the U.S. seem like an anarcho-capitalist’s paradise).

Why are so many people (leftists, that is) upset? Because calling a s***hole a s***hole is a sin against cant and hypocrisy, in which the left specializes.

Here’s the test: If you were forced to live in another country, would you choose Norway or Haiti? Any sensible person — and perhaps even a leftist — would choose Norway.

Tips for Living: I

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Today in Googledom

Monica Showalter of American Thinker writes:

The Daily Caller reports that Google has taken to throwing shade on almost exclusively conservative websites through its search engine mechanism, using a sort of ‘fact-checking’ system to discredit certain news providers so that no one will want to click on them….

According to the Daily Caller:

And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.

When searching for a media outlet that leans right, like The Daily Caller (TheDC), Google gives users details on the sidebar, including what topics the site typically writes about, as well as a section titled “Reviewed Claims.”

Vox, and other left-wing outlets and blogs like Gizmodo, are not given the same fact-check treatment.

The Daily Caller has a photo of what it is talking about on its story here.

It seems downright suicidal for the company to be doing this, given that it’s been caught repeatedly under this kind of fire, there’s a hostile Republican Congress out there, and there’s lots of talk of breaking up the monolith under anti-trust laws….

I had a look myself at the supposed phenomenon described by the Caller … and found nothing there. I stripped off my name from the Google search to make sure the system wasn’t manipulating results … and still, on doing a search of Daily Caller, and other conservative sites, I found nothing there. I tried nutbag sites such as Occupy Democrats and Daily Stormer, and still found nothing there….

I doubt the Daily Caller’s reportage was wrong in this case. What may have happened is that Google’s bigs got wind of the Daily Caller’s story and ordered the staff leftists to cut it out immediately, ending the dubious practice of ‘fact-checking’ and the disguised censorship that practice can and has become. Or, there may be other versions of Google in other parts of the country or out there by other criteria that I can’t see.

Politics & Prosperity is a small fish in the vast sea of internet reportage and opinioneering. But I often use Google to find posts in which I’ve written about a particular subject. And Google usually comes up with useful results, so it’s evident that Google has thoroughly indexed P&P, and undoubtedly has flagged it as a conservative site.

Given that, I was heartened by the results of a side-by-side-by-side comparison of searches on “Politics and Propserity”, using Google and two alternative search engines: StartPage and DuckDuckGo:

Google’s number 1 hit was a link to this blog’s front page, with no adverse commentary about P&P. My Google search settings include an instruction not to save my search results.
StartPage produced the same result. StartPage claims not to track users or remember their search results.
This blog’s home page came up number 1 in DuckDuckGo’s list, and the “About” page came up number 2. DuckDuckGo, which isn’t Google-based, also claims not to track users or remember their search results.

What do I make of this? Not much. Google’s behavior toward this blog seems even-handed, but I can’t draw a conclusion about its treatment of conservative sites based on a single datum.

That said, on the evidence of its prevailing ethos and treatment of conservative employees, Google has long since violated its mottoes “Don’t be evil” and (later) “Do the right thing”. Google’s de facto mottoes are “Be evil” and “Do the left thing”.

Should Google be regulated or broken up, as some conservatives urge? I am loath to recommend such action. Google, like Microsoft and many others before it (e.g., the Big Three American auto-makers) will be tamed by market forces. I hope.

A Glimmer of Hope on the Education Front

Gregory Cochran (West Hunter) points to an item from 2014 that gives the annual distribution of bachelor’s degrees by field of study for 1970-2011. (I would say “major”, but many of the categories encompass several related majors.) I extracted the values for 1970, 1990, and 2011, and assigned a “hardness” value to each field of study:

The distribution of degrees seems to have been shifting away from “soft” fields to “middling” and “hard” ones:

The number of graduates has increased with time, of course, so there are still more soft bachelor’s degrees being granted now than in 1970. But the shift toward harder fields is comforting because soft fields seem to attract squishy-minded leftists in disproportionate numbers.

The graph suggests that the college-educated workforce of the future will be somewhat less dominated by squishy-minded leftists than it has been since 1970. It was around then that many of the flower-children and radicals of the 1960s graduated and went on to positions of power and prominence in the media, the academy, and politics.

It’s faint hope for a future that’s less dominated by leftists than the recent past and present — but it is hope.

CAVEATS:

1. The results shown in the graph are sensitive to my designation of each field’s level of “hardness”. If you disagree with any of those assignments, let me know and I’ll change the inputs and see what difference they make. The table and graph are in a spreadsheet, and changes in the table will instantly show up as changes in the graph.

2. The decline of “soft” fields is due mainly to the sharp decline of Education as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, which occurred between 1971 and 1985. To the extent that some Education majors migrated to STEM fields, the overall shift toward “hard” fields is overstated. A prospective teacher who happens to major in math is probably of less-squishy stock than a prospective teacher who happens to major in English, History, or similar “soft” fields — but he is likely to be more squishy than the math major who intends to pursue an advanced degree in his field, and to “do” rather than teach at any level.

Some Favorite Blogs

My blogroll in the sidebar includes all of the several dozen blogs that I follow through NewsBlur, which is the best RSS reader I’ve found to date. I follow many of the blogs because they report on and opine about politics from a conservative angle — a refreshing change of pace from the port-side slants of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

But there are many other blogs that I follow because of their originality, incisiveness, sparkling prose, humor, and libertarian-conservative positions (not mutually exclusive traits). Here are some of my favorites, by category:

Americana and Humor

The bluebird of bitterness has a magic touch when it comes to finding and packaging funny, touching, and zany material from around the internet. The bob was an indispensable source of comic relief during the runup to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, but the elimination of political coverage after 2012 (though lamented by me) has given the bob more space for outright funny and nostalgic material.

Climate Science

There are several blogs and websites that counter-balance the anti-scientific dogmatism of warmists. The two that I prefer are Roy Spencer, Ph.D. and Watts Up With That?.

Dr. Spencer, a bona fide climate scientist, acknowledges a relationship between CO2 and temperature, but is properly skeptical about the effect of CO2 and warmists’ emphasis on CO2 to the exclusion of other factors (like the drunk who searches for his missing car keys under a street lamp because that’s where the light is).

WUWT, founded and moderated by meteorologist Anthony Watts, offers a range of data-laden posts by Watts and several guest bloggers. WUWT‘s feistiness sometimes extends to internecine squabbles, which is a refreshing change from the monolithic pose adopted by the band of warmist zealots.

Economics

It’s hard to turn around on the web without running into an economics blog. There are some big names (among economists) out there competing for eyeballs. A less well-known name is that of Arnold Kling, who flies solo at askblog. Kling, who seems to consider himself a libertarian, comes across more often than not as a conservative. He is rightly scornful of mathematical economics, rightly skeptical about economists’ understanding of how the economy actually functions, and just plain right in his understanding of the sociological and psychological factors that influence economic activity. He delivers his insights moderately, but not without the force of conviction.

E-zine

Quillette is my e-zine of choice. I don’t always agree with the views expressed by the varied cast of writers who deliver analyses and opinions on a broad range of topics. But the pieces at Quillette are generally lucid and provocative. It’s like reading The New York Times Magazine without having to constantly filter out the left-wing-propaganda.

Instant Punditry

If the fire-hose of web-bits emitted by Instatpundit is too intense for you (as it is for me), try Dyspepsia Generation and The Right Coast. The former offering comes from “Tim of Angle” (~~a.k.a. Timothy D’Angle, I believe~~ see first comment), the latter from University of San Diego lawprof Tom Smith. Both serve up an engaging mixture of political, economic, and cultural samplings from around the web, seasoned with their own humorous and biting commentary, and issued at a digestible rate. In a just world, the traffic count for both sites would exceed that of Instapundit, with its relatively bland commentary. Spread the word.

Law

The Volokh Conspiracy may be the oldest law blog, or nearly so. It deserves its longevity and immense following because of its literate, authoritative, commentary on a wide range of legal, political, social, and economic issues. (An admixture of science, math, and other subjects adds to its sparkle.) The dominant theme is constitutional law, and the prevailing stance is libertarian to conservative (i.e., originalist).

Life Observed

My go-to guy for realistic (i.e., conservative) insights into the human condition is Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels in real life). His pieces appear in various places, but he’s a regular at Taki’s Magazine. (The link is to Dalrymple’s column; the rest of Taki’s Magazine is a very mixed bag.) Dalrymple/Daniels is a retired English prison doctor and psychiatrist. His observations about the debilitating effects of the welfare state are unerringly correct and delivered with sardonic humour, as are his observations about the vicissitudes of life in general.

Philosophy and Religion

Bill Vallicella is a professional philosopher, and a rare conservative member of the tribe. At his blog, Maverick Philosopher, he writes on a broad range of topics, and spares no one in his insistence on rigorous logic, sound evidence, and clarity of expression. His range includes philosophy, of course, but he gives much of his attention to politics. The left is squarely in his sights, and he scores hit after hit.

The author of Imlac’s Journal chooses to remain anonymous, which is no mark against him in this age of leftist witch-hunting. His range is broad, but given mainly to literature and philosophy. His style is erudite and meditative, rather than combative, and all the more refreshing for it.

Big Government and Disguised Unemployment

See Part V of this post.

Planning for the Last War

I am in the midst of an exchange with a former colleague. He is a retired political scientist who decades ago belonged to a small but hardy band analysts who questioned the conventional wisdom about Soviet naval strategy. It turns out that he and his comrades-in-arms were right, and the conventional wisdom was wrong. He worries, with good reason, that history might repeat itself, and is working on a paper to document the events of 40 years ago and the possibility that history is repeating itself.

I have no doubt that history is repeating itself. This is from a recent message from me to him:

It seems as if the Pentagon [of the 1970s] was planning to fight the last war (or two), just because that’s the way things are usually done. Fast forward to 2018: What war(s) is the Pentagon planning to fight now? I’m not au courant with the defense budget, but I believe that it’s considerably smaller (in constant dollars) than it was in the 1980s [after adjusting for the cost of America’s present wars]. Which means, rhetoric aside, that the Pentagon is actually planning to refight the wars of the past 28 years, with a side-helping of skirmishes of other kinds. In any event, it can’t be on the scale of the two-major/one-minor war strategy of the McNamara era, which (de facto) animated the Reagan buildup after the post-Vietnam let-down. The point of this ramble is to suggest that the U.S. is in a position (once again) to be “surprised” by the not-so-sudden emergence of an aggressive power or axis of them. You may not subscribe to this view, but if you do, some discussion of it in your paper would underline the essential point: The dire consequences of [the] persistent misreading of a potential enemy’s intentions and capabilities. It’s an old refrain, which begins (at least) with Pearl Harbor and extends through North Korea’s invasion of the South, the Tet Offensive (and some later reruns), 9/11, and the emergence of IS.

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