The root reason behind the likely pending fall of American Empire is the emergence of a super-class of Left-leaning liberals (I would call them Leftist) whose basic psychology is fundamentally different from their fellow countrymen and from everyone else in the world. They are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich (in global terms) and Democratic, or WEIRD. They are not exclusive to America, and are to be found in Europe and a few other majority white economically privileged parts of the world.
For those unfamiliar with Moral Foundations Theory (click here to find out what you are), it’s all laid out in Jonathan Haidt’s seminal work The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. There are six core Moral Foundations care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. Cosmopolitan liberals (Leftists) for the most part loath the theory- there have been numerous attempts to disconfirm it, all of which have failed miserably. The issue with cosmopolitan liberals they are incapable of understanding even the complete basic needs (Maslow) of the people the purport to want to help. To them low value, hard, gritty work is demeaning- to almost everyone else, it’s the lifeblood of community- the reason why it thrives or slowly dies. They are also deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the social conservatives who they so deride have far more in common with almost everyone else in the world than themselves, or indeed with most minority groups.
Perhaps the best illustration of cosmopolitan liberals misconceptions about other people comes from the history of the War on Poverty. By the sixties it was rapidly becoming apparent that the abundance created by industrial and agricultural productivity would create labour shortages- at the time they didn’t foresee the extent of the rise of the service sector. It was theorised that the only way to avert the pending crisis was to pay people a government supplement to stay at home and not work. The Democrats were convinced it would be a sure-fire vote-winner- imagine their surprise when they found that sizeable portions of the dispossessed populations they were trying to help didn’t want welfare, they wanted work.
You see, according to an even more firmly established piece of psychometric psychology, the Big Five Personality Model, (test here), liberals are high in trait Openness to New Experience and low in trait Conscientiousness. It’s a key characteristic of entrepreneurs and innovators (although liberals are terrible at running things well in general, because that requires conscientiousness and meticulous attention to detail) and is somewhat correlated with intelligence. The key to understanding why they were so dismayed by the reaction is because those high in trait Openness and low in trait conscientiousness tend to see labour, and especially low value monotonous or repetitious labour, as inherently exploitative- because to them there could be nothing worse than this life of quiet desperation.
By contrast, social conservatives (who in America can vary a great deal in political affiliation) are high in conscientiousness and low in openness, it’s why they tend to value the status quo and personal responsibility. To them labour is meaning. It’s why, if given the choice between government cheques and spending all day sitting on a sofa watching TV, or taking huge personal risks frequenting street corners and back alleys, so many young men of all races would willingly choose the latter. It’s why, if you are an older man living in Montana whose job, vocation and sense of meaning has been stolen from you, you are just as likely to end-up in the hospital overdosed as you are to suicide. Maslow missed something out- for so many- in addition to food, water, warmth, rest, safety and security, people need labour.
Of course, the dynamics are different when the social decay of joblessness and intergenerational welfare set in. It’s why everything is so dysfunctional in communities without labour. It is socio-economic, but liberals seem to think that it’s the economics, a lack of material needs being met, which cause the despair and the hopelessness, when reality it is the absence of labour which causes almost all the problems. It’s why whenever they go outside the Western bubble, to them people can seem to live in such desperate poverty, but to be relatively poor in West can, in so many ways, be so much worse, because what it really means is to be labourless. This doesn’t mean we should abandon welfare, but why perpetuate a system which causes so much harm- when it would be so easy to design one which doesn’t take away everything with the first dollar earned, but instead slowly eases people off welfare and into work, whilst supplementing those with perennially low incomes?
But back to the Moral Foundations. Although there are other way in which liberals and conservatives differ (a Left-leaning liberal’s psychology is care/harm and fairness/cheating, whilst conservatives possess these two, as well as the other moral dimensions- with the sanctity so key to their religiosity), the one characteristic I would like to focus on is the key difference between the way the two psychologies view fairness/cheating. For social conservatives it’s a matter of fairness in terms of proportionality- you deserve what you get according to your ability and the hard work you put it in.
For Left-leaning liberals it is equality in the sense that they want people to be as equal as possible in the distributive sense, they loath inequality of any sort, and whilst they might be somewhat mollified by the comforting lie that everyone has their forte, a unique talent of gift which for many as yet lies undiscovered, they are horrified to discover that high cognitive abilities tend to group or that successful professional athletes, performers, music artists all tend to be of higher than average intelligence because it takes smarts to manage the criteria to optimise your success. Even the highly attractive tend to be above average in intelligence, because it requires grooming, dress sense with an eye to making the most of what you’ve got and taking care of oneself in terms of diet and exercise.
Social conservatives see it differently, for them equality is all about fairness (if Rawlsian fairness is set aside). It’s the quintessential divide over equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Recently, there was an attempt in California to repeal prop 209, with prop 16, which would have seen a return to affirmative action and an attempt to arbitrarily redistribute opportunities in racial terms. But why did it fail in an overwhelmingly liberal state? Well, despite the the fact that wealthier white liberals thought it was a good idea, especially suburban women, many of the key constituencies it sought to help like Latinos didn’t want it. Even African Americans only voted for it by the tiniest of margins, which- given that men tend to skew more socially conservative- would mean that African American men (who have the done the least well under a socio-economic system designed by neoliberals), who stood the most to gain, were evenly split. This Pew survey tells us more- for the socio-economically privileged who almost exclusively compromise the Left-leaning liberal psychology, equity makes perfect sense- they are all keen advocates of Rawls and equity is just an extension of redistributive policies to status and position- but for those further down the economic spectrum, they just want a shot, a level playing field, they want fairness.
If we look back on all the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, it was fairness which was at stake, not equity. It had to be fairness in order to garner mass support through the simple necessity that the Moral Foundations of the majority in society are always going to grounded in fairness. Being in the top- which is almost a requirement of Left-leaning liberal psychology- is always going to be relative. Equally, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg quoted Sarah Moore Grimké with “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks” in her famous plea to the Supreme Court it was an appeal to basic fairness, not equity. Equality under Law, or justice, can only exist in a framework of equality of opportunity, for the simple reason that equity requires we treat people unequally. To put it another way Lady Justice has to be blind to preference to provide justice, and if she has presided over all manner of travesties and cruel inhumanities in the past it was because men are fallible, they insert their own preference over our highest ideals- she was blind in the past, but blind to injustice.
I always fail to find this particular psychology experiment online, but I will try explaining it nonetheless. A group of students in one of Scandinavian countries were divided into teams of two. They were given a set of maths questions and given a pot of money, based upon their paired scores, to divide between themselves. To no one’s surprise they did not divide the spoils equally, but what was surprising, and perhaps more than a little revelatory, is that they did not divide the prize up per question answered correctly. Instead those who got all of the questions right were disproportionately rewarded, whilst those who only answered a few questions right only received a consolatory pittance.
Let’s do a thought experiment. If we were to maroon five men and five women on a deserted island. If we came back six months later, we know innately and can almost guarantee that one of the men will have taken charge. He will always be the one who is hyper-competent in the outdoor domain, good at fishing and hunting, creating shelters and at lighting fires. A degree of specialisation will have emerged. Three of the other four men will have made themselves useful, perhaps surpassing in him in one prized task. Meanwhile, there will be one man who is resentful of his low status, shirks his responsibility and is generally useless.
The leader will by necessity be a good leader, if he is not the group will be dead- but chance favours him, because by its very nature having something of great value to offer the group invites reciprocity and establishes a hierarchy. Meanwhile the women will have returned to their gatherer roots and established a pecking order of their own, but at least some of their status will revolve around who has established access to the prize male. To be fair, it probably wouldn’t be that gender specific- at least if our nearest neighbours, the chimpanzees are anything to go by- there are females who run with the males- and we even have extensive evidence of female hunters. And with humans, we have every reason to believe from the archaeological record, that there were male artists and shamans who staid with the women.
You see we don’t have to imagine. There is ample empirical evidence to suggest that hunter gatherer societies possessed inequality- it may have been an inequality most similar to modern Denmark, but it was unequal, nonetheless. It goes against the grain, anyone attracted to theorising is likely to be high in trait openness to new experience and going to want to imagine an egalitarian past before inequality- just as many today imagine that life before industrialisation or in traditional non-intensive farming communities today was or is pastoral or idyllic when the truth is nature is brutally oppressive, life is or was short and generally malnourished- but the truth is that inequality is baked in.
We have to also remember that impoverished society generally have less inequality for the simple reason that there is far less of a distance to rise above others. Recent evidence has shown that with the advent of farming, inequality grew alongside wealth (although by todays standards it could hardly be classed as wealth). And, by degree, through the dark satanic mills of industrialisation, to mass produced and the dawn of the information age we have seen inequality grow by a staggering extent.
So what’s the solution? Well, some would argue that we don’t need one- that it is only material poverty which should concern us. Others like Charles Murray would have us believe that there is no solution, and we should simply learn to value other things, and they are right to an extent, but only to an extent. Because what this ignores is the priceless value of labour as a basic need. I’ve witnessed its transformative value myself- listless, apathetic boys barely past their teens turned into cheeky energetic young men, driving hire purchase cars and sporting girlfriends on their arms.
In order to understand the roots of our current existential crisis, we need how to understand how we solved the last one. Universal public education was largely instituted as a response to the general discontent and occasional rioting of the 19th century. It was by no means confined to America and swept through the Western Democracies. But gradually, as with de-industrialisation, the role of the vocational side of education was eroded and neglected and we slept walked into a system which places value on only one tiny aspect of human achievement, educational attainment.
Think through the consequences of this for a second. By its very nature education grades on curve, even if one is not imposed. It’s why participation medals are not only worthless, but cruel and a source of embarrassment- like a certificate of attendance upon graduating high school. It’s cruel and inhuman and teaches at least 50% of our kids they are worthless by the time they are 16. It’s why many, including some teachers, are so hell-bent on removing excellence wherever it is to be found and imposing equity in its place- because if there are no unequal outcomes there is no heartbreak, no slow grinding down of the soul.
But it is the wrong answer. Here is the right one- and, by the way, the answer to so many other cruel problems and racial inequities. Fathers have value in so many ways, but chief amongst them is their value when as collective and productive mentors- as a communal safety net for their community. When this roughly half or more of underperforming boys finish school so dejected, demoralised and downtrodden by a system which only values one single dimension of the whole range of human attributes which society can and does value, fathers step in to whisper in their ear “yes, you can have value”. Mike needs someone else to go up that ladder and onto that roof. Simon needs another driver for his deliveries. Would you like to be a plumber, an electrician, a baker?
Much of Professor Raj Chetty’s work into social mobility has recently been lost in the white noise of inequality, race and the drive for equity, but one single fact remains an absolute axiom- productive fathers in the community are the single biggest driver of upward social mobility in the West. It’s why even though the UK fares far better in terms of racial inequality than America, with average earnings for Black and White people roughly equal for the 18 to 30 age bracket, unequal levels of unemployment stubbornly persist, with Black unemployment roughly twice that of whites.
America needs to get radical with education, and reintroduce vocationally orientated education for every kid who doesn’t do well academically at 14. Fix that and you’ll see educational outcomes (and IQ) rise with the next generation. Because nothing raises overall ability beyond the innate more than the division of labour and the high parental engagement levels that come with two parent homes and it amplifies out through the peer group, because of self-selection in housing, and by extension schools. Pair that with a decent system of vocational mentoring for school leavers and you have decent shot a restoring a healthy society and one with a great deal more racial equality.
Take a look at this Swedish Sibling Adoption Study on the Malleability of IQ. Go to Fig. 1- notice how the there is a modest gain even with a slight downward shift in socio-economics- that’s because adoption systems select for two parent homes. But why does it drop so precipitously with a larger downward shift? Well, part of it socio-economic, but the larger part is because it necessarily means single parent peer groups because the parents can’t afford to live in areas where two parent families are prevalent. The cruel necessity of single parenthood means less parental engagement through the struggle for hours in the day most single parents encounter, and this is particularly important in the early pre-school years.
So we have three factors- socio-economic, parental status and peer group parental status. Here is the thing- the further we go up the the socio-economic spectrum- the more we select for two parent homes. You can’t go online without tripping over an article telling us that marriage is now a luxury good. Taken as a whole there is roughly an 11 point IQ gap between the top and the bottom. To be fair, it will average downwards in mean, but given that we know the socio-economics, parental status and peer group parental status all disfavour African Americans I think that this is a major dent in the argument for racial IQ gaps, which recent studies have shown is shrinking in the West already .
And here’s the beauty building success for communities from the ground upwards. There is no lack of blue collar jobs within the American economy- many of them paying significantly more than those available to many university graduates- if anything many of them are standing vacant as we speak. Especially if America favours its own disadvantaged, dejected and demoralised sons over those who are undocumented, then it has a chance at healing its wounds both psychic and real. Because the beauty of educating young men to fill blue collar jobs is you naturally create a cohort of responsible, productive and eligible young males.
In reality, stable family formation might have a less to do values than many think, with culture almost a distraction to one simple truth- it generally only happens when hypergamy can exist. Simply put, women might sleep with a man if he is a attractive and popular amongst his peers, but she will only settle down with him if he is a productive contributor. In this, culture or values matter less than the right benign conditions.
Ever since I watched Mellody Hobson and Adam Foss on Ted Talks I’ve been looking for answers. As I’ve watched events unfold in America from across the Pond in the UK, I have had an increasing sense of urgency and despair. I watched 13th, read The New Jim Crow, but in order to maintain balance and my critical thinking capacities I also read The War On Cops. It’s also what brought me to Quillette, because in addition the often dissenting and controversial articles it features, it also has a pretty intellectually diverse and well-read crowd.
I read about policing, education anything and everything I could get my hands on which might explain the mounting problems I could see building across the ocean. And, of course, in my travels I inevitably came across race and IQ. I don’t generally hold with the belief that ideas are harmful, but this one made me sick. I slept fitfully day this. It physically hurt me. I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails, even though it tells me nothing whatsoever about any single person as an individual. But rather than calling it a pseudoscience or claiming cultural bias I set out to investigate it. I won’t claim objectivity- my reasoning was high motivated- I wanted to destroy it. And, in my own small way, I think I’ve gone a good way to accomplishing just that.
In my journey, I’ve come across conservatives, argued with them, laughed with them and shared with them. If you are on the Left, they are nothing like you imagine. Apart from anything else I desperately needed them- because I knew in my bones that the problem could be solved by liberal thinking alone, the universities would have solved it decades ago. You truly are cousins separated by a common language- politics. Two warring tribes of brothers so resigned to the bad faith and insult hurled their way, they have no option but to return more in kind. I hope I’ve helped diagnose the problem, offer you a blueprint for how to fix it. The problem is a well without a ladder which some communities have sunken into, which all efforts so far to provide a ladder having failed. I hope (and pray) my ladder fares better.
"I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails"
I can not only imagine it, it is my Lived Experience every day and one can deal with it either via a Victim Narrative, or one can consider it as a minor inconvenience and get on with life.
Yes, I belong to the oldest and most universal of Victimhoods (with the arguable exception of females): I'm left-flippered. Lefties are as statistically different from righties as blacks are from whites. The whole world is dextrocentric isn't it? Whenever I mention all this I'm almost invariably ignored because I think my case is irrefutable -- if one *chooses* to create a Victim Narrative around one's differences one surely can.
Or one can choose not to. Lefties do not have Victimhood inculcated into them from birth, so we just get on with life. Yes, *as a group* we are more likely to fall behind in school and more likely to go into politics and *much* more likely to work at the highest level of STEM. Nobody tries to explain all this away, it just is what it is. Much better to just deal with the reality *but* do so in a zeitgeist where it just doesn't matter. What needs to change is the zeitgeist -- the assumption that differences must be explained away. I say that, on the contrary, and to quote a liberal slogan: 'diversity is our strength'. Meanwhile, I won't be triggered if someone says 'gauche' in my hearing or talks of doing the 'right' thing. I sure would like to be able to buy a left handed drillpress tho.
Yes, there are too many who believe the ends justify the means, even when they never arrive at the intended ends, and the means require you harm some for the benefit of others you prefer.
Good ideas will grow over time because they are good and people prefer better outcomes than worse ones -- this is actual progress.
If your good idea only works by forcing others to accept it, your idea probably isn't as good as you think, and your tactic makes you immoral and likely causes greater resistance to the idea, not because of any lack of value in the idea, but because of the force applied blinds people to that idea.
And yet we were all 'forced' to wear our seatbelts. It's one of those things where my guts agree with you but there are counter examples which should be admitted.
True, but without force the outcome may have been similar, or perhaps better for new alternatives like passive restraints or smarter cars, or because drivers may be a bit more reckless when they feel more secure.
Sure, but it would have been slower. My libertarian instincts take a back seat on this sort of thing. In the best of all possible worlds of course you could leave it to intelligent citizens to do the right thing. But in the face of a pandemic I quite understand that the government feels the need to make rules.
I guess I have less faith I can predict the future and less faith that we lose out on alternatives that never see the light of day once force is used instead.
As for lockdowns and forcing people to return home, and forcing schools closed and sending them all home, and keeping people from producing needed things, and stopping most people from going outside and exercising, and telling most that they are non-essential, and demanding health records to just participate in society, and sending the sick elderly from hospitals back to nursing homes, and forcing health labs to use for a broken CDC test kit early on, lying about 15 days to flatten a curve, and building unused excess hospital capacity during the first wave while not building any now that they claim hospitals are being overrun, and never promoting healthy living, and never promoting N-95 masks that actually protect both the wearer and others, and destroying people's small businesses while further enriching large corporations/industry/financial markets, and forcing landlords to sell properties when they could no longer collect rent for (and usually then bought by the rich using their near zero interest rates and special tax deductions), and forcing some nurses and other workers to quit their jobs over vaccinations that would only serve to protect them if they jabs do indeed work as advertised, and then wondering just how much better the outcomes were than those places that did hardly any of that sort of thing (think Sweden which was described by the MSM as near fanatical mass murderers)....
I think people just can't fathom that people will make better decisions voluntarily than when forced. That false safety measures (paper and homemade masks will work well, wiping down packages will work, vaccinations that apparently won't protect you from unvaccinated people, pretending that vaccinated people no longer spread the virus, staying home indoors will help...) make people feel good because government is "doing something" are the same that thought invading Afghanistan and Iraq where wise doing somethings in national interests too.
My brother has a Swedish girlfriend. They met online and she recently flew over for the first time. I was quick to compliment her on her country's response- basically saying that the rest of the world had gone mad. She agreed.
We also talked about the effect of PC on comedy. Her point was that she found it really annoying so many people people get offended on behalf of others...
That was a beautiful rant and on the gut level I'm already with you. I can't even disagree on a single specific point. Best I can do here is an analogy: WWII:
Are we, or are we not going to war? If we are, then we probably want to win. (Things were different then, now, we prefer to loose it saves the risk of hurting the enemy's feelings.) A declaration of war is binary, we have or we have not declared war on Germany, agree? Now, what can we look forward to? Blood, toil, tears and sweat.
War is messy, catastrophic mistakes will be made, countless lives will be thrown away in blunders. But the decision has been made to fight and it has to be all-in. There will be a draft and you cannot sit out the war because you disagree with this or that point of strategy otherwise panzers will be rolling down Pall Mall in a few weeks while everyone in Britain debates.
We had to turn off our individualism and fight as one nation even knowing perfectly well that there will be disasters. Mind, that's not to say that in the War Department they don't do everything they possibly can to minimize the disasters! But at the end of each day, decisions are made, orders are given and *everyone* has to obey them. "Pardon me, Monty, pvt. Smith here, I don't think we should attack tomorrow. I'm staying in my bunk."
Same with covid. We can have millions of deaths -- bodies on the sidewalk -- or we can fight it. But if we fight it and, all pros and cons having been weighed, the decision is to vaccinate then unfortunately it's another all-in kind of thing. No Typhoid Marys can be permitted.
Has the response been less than perfect? Of course. In the mean time we are at war with covid and I'm enlisted. My orders are to wear a mask and get the jabs. In this situation I do not give myself the luxury of an opinion, I'm going to cooperate with my government.
That's a key observation. Many of the prescriptions of neo-progressivism become immediately unworkable without an imposed asymmetry; if what's good for the goose is good for the gander, then it breaks down. So it's OK for those assigned the moral high ground to stereotype others, or silence dissent, or impose unequal rules. They can get power over others by being easily offended. But if the rules were equal, if a designated "privileged" person's taking offense was treated as equally valid to a designed marginalized person's doing so, it would quickly collapse.
So this narrative absolutely require unequal treatment, biased to favor the designated disenfranchised. As Kendi say, in this ideology, the only remedy for past discrimination is present and future discrimination (in the other direction). Equal treatment is the enemy, a trick used to sustain privilege.
And this also links to the ever present tendency towards authoritarianism. If you disdain win/win interactions as a base for your society (in favor of win/lose in the politically correct direction), then there will always be sustained or incipient rebellion; you can only get a fraction of a population to act against their own interests in a sustained way, while valorizing other groups acting in their self interest. Rather than growing a larger and more inclusive sense of "us", the strategy it to create more isolated smaller "us/them" groups in perpetual conflict - but hoping that guilt and shaming tactics can suppress "them" from perceiving their own self interest in a predominantly win/lose world. So you have to give up or impose by force, rather than persuade.
Thoughtful observation, and one I've noticed myself. What the intersectional mindset ignores is the internal conflicts within its grand coalition. For example, Latinos are around 3:2 opposed to CRT praxis in K-12, some vehemently so. One of the worst things is white privilege education- according to a study, it does nothing at all to increase empathy for poorer Blacks and actually decreases empathy towards poorer whites, because of their supposed privilege (as if a poorer white guy in a predominantly Black neighbourhood doesn't get stopped even more often, to balance the books). Reason wrote a pretty good article on the white privilege empathy problem- https://reason.com/2019/05/29/white-privilege-study-sympathetic-black-people/
While I agree with your solution on the whole, my main pushback would be that I doubt vocational schooling will be the panacea you seek. Problems are rarely monocausal and monocausal solutions inevitably fail to completely solve a problem. That said, vocational schooling is badly needed in American public school.
As someone who relatively recently attended a school with a robust/large vocational/trades wing, I think I can provide some perspective. Many students who performed abysmally in math and history graduated directly into decent careers in auto-body or construction or HVAC. But low performing students were not required to learn a trade and some of them had parents who looked down on manual labor.
There was also a sizable cohort who seemed to have no interest in working hard in either the trades or academics. These students were content to skate by.
I worked as a factory worker one summer and there were definitely two groups in the factory. 1. The people who liked the job and the pay and were glad to have them. 2. The people who showed up late, shirked responsibility, and did not want to work. The latter group did not tend to stay in the job very long. The work was hard but not brutal or inhumane. One day, the company paid for free ice cream for all the workers as a summer celebration. So the people who quit or got themselves fired were not protesting unreasonable conditions. Also among the workers who liked work, there was a stigma against people on welfare (who they knew and would talk about), who refused to work.
A friend of mine is a head engineer in another factory. They have the same two groups of workers. He said that although automation has eliminated some jobs, they have never laid off a worker. Anyone in group 1 will learn a new skill and has a job as long as they want it. People in the second group tend to quit.
All this goes to say that I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.
Finally, just wanted to mention that I very much enjoyed Haidt’s book and have found so much of it very useful over the years. But on the moral foundations, the last two years (especially the pandemic) have brought what I think are some interesting challenges to the formulation that Leftists don’t have strong hierarchy/authority or sanctity foundations. I’d love the opportunity to actually talk to Haidt about that.
The factory you worked at didn't have an absence management policy? I worked the technical side in a very similar situation. We used to give 1/2 a point on the scheme for turning up more than 15 minutes late (a day missed was one point). I was quite lucky actually, I really dodged a bullet on that one- I had originally been slated to learn and run the new Chronos timekeeping software, but my AS400 superuser stuff was seen as more vital to business needs.
When we started the absence management absenteeism was endemic at 20%- within two years the figure was closer to 5%. Very few workers were fired- we had some successes with better PPE (my job), and also shifting workers around more- some workers had been on the same job for 20 years, and obviously many of them were repetitive...
'I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.' Good point, but one only needs to shift community social dynamics by increments to completely change the game. In the UK, Afro Caribbean British were most harmed by government intervention- community fatherhood rates at 37% have led to them being four times more likely to excluded from school and way more likely to be the victims of knife crime. Conversely, African British tend to be more recent migrants, fatherhood rates are around 60%, they do better at school than whites, have no increased likelihood of exclusion and actually earn a bit more than whites, with no increased knife crime risk. I use ethnic examples, because it makes it easier to see the dynamics from the data.
I completely agree with you on Haidt. I've noticed the exact same thing. I think the authority change stems from a lack of unsupervised play as children, as well as anti-bullying policy which is too interventional. I think it also helps if the authority in charge aligns with your political affiliation. On the sanctity front, there were some early warning signs with organic food, etc and now we the same thing with ideological purity across the whole woke belief system- but I don't as yet know what to make of it, in terms of Moral Foundations Theory.
Ultimately, I think the current paradigm is geared to achieving cultural power, and attempting to silence heretics. The dynamics will shift when it becomes apparent that their shibboleths will not provide the societal changes they so desire- then it is highly likely they will want to tear society down completely, in the mistaken belief that it is society at fault, rather than their belief system.
It's not that I'm anti-woke- I've been lucky enough to talk to and persuade progressive individuals, and the ones I talked to were well-intentioned- unlike the activists who grab all the oxygen and attention. It's just that many of their ideas are fatally flawed, and in many ways obscure entirely fixable problems. A good example of this would be Scotland's approach to their knife crime epidemic and youth reform. It could do wonders in America, but it only came about in the first place because the population being helping/tackled was 99% ethnically white. Crucially, the activists want all the positive sounding community-led stuff that was a part of it, but they just don't see that it doesn't work without the proactive policing which was vital. In America there is a 100ft wall with 'Race' painted on the side which acts as an obstruction to any form of good public policy.
I don’t think we had a points system. I’m sure management kept track of absenteeism. Workers didn’t last long if they made it clear they didn’t want to work. I was late one time (set my alarm for PM not AM), and immediately went to apologize to my boss. He said it was fine as long as I didn’t do it again, since I otherwise was always at my station before the bell. He didn’t say anything about points.
Totally agree with you on fatherhood. That exact dynamic plays out in America, with perhaps slightly different demographic groups.
You may be right about the shibboleths on the woke Left ultimately boiling down to a power grab. I still think there’s something real there (at least for the rank and file). We will see if it ever comes to attempts to tear down society. For some more radical hard leftists that’s probably true.
At the same time, I also agree with your last point. I’ve got friends across the political spectrum, including fairly progressive individuals. As long as someone is willing to engage in dialogue with people they disagree with, their ideology shouldn’t be a barrier to friendship or engagement. If they will engage with me, I will with them.
What did Scotland do about knife crime? Think that was before my time. I lived in Scotland for a few months back in 2016 and was told that crime had been drastically reduced in the previous decade or so. I was actually in Glasgow, and despite all I heard about it’s tough reputation, I could walk alone at night.
With Scotland, they utilised every societal resource they had into a youth reform strategy, and added a few for good measure- social workers, youth clubs, diversion, housing, etc. The police set up specialised Violence Reduction Units and extensive use was made of violence interrupters. Perhaps the key element though, was employer buy-in, with everybody from roofing firms to restaurants offering second chances to wayward late teens from poorer backgrounds.
It's what the left is currently trying to do, but getting it completely wrong. You see they didn't stop proactive policing- they actually retooled it- if anything it became the lynchpin for earlier intervention, because they found that the sooner they could get to kids going wrong, the more likely the youth reform would work.
Despite early reservations the police loved it as well. Instead of simply locking young men up and knowing they would be back out in a few years and back to causing trouble (when dealing with a lesser offence likely to escalate to knife crime), they saw the positive impact they were having on kids from difficult backgrounds. Quite rewarding, I imagine.
After its initial success in Glasgow, they rolled it out to the whole of Scotland. It took Glasgow from being the knife crime capital of Europe, to Scotland having some of the lowest violence figures in Europe. Plus, despite the ongoing outlay, it actually managed to save money for the taxpayer, because keeping a large cohort of young men imprisoned actually works out to be quite expensive, especially when one considers things like court costs and the like.
There are a couple of ready made American resources ready to roll for American Police Reform. The first is Peter Moskos' work on Violence Reduction: https://qualitypolicing.com/violencereduction/ . The second is the Center for Policing Equity: https://policingequity.org/ . Despite the name it doesn't ask police to tackle the perceived racism which is in their head.
Instead it looks at resources utilised versus crimes committed to strategically allocate resources and in the process make their allocation more fair. The key takeaway should be that humans are great at recognising risk but terrible at estimating the extent of said risk, or its potential impacts.
A fairer assessment of probability, risk and impact can be used to create a safer society. The Center for Policing Equity has worked quite well, especially with the NYPD. Looking at actions rather than mind reading racist intent allows police to see how their actions could be misinterpreted and adjust accordingly.
Historcally education for all was brought in because a literate workforce had become a requirement. Of course as time progressed it suffered from mission creep which is why it's the mess it is now. This essay links to the need for affirmation which everyone needs but also to the need for affirmation AS AN INDIVIDUAL. Group affirmation is never enough and the liberal approach misses this. However, society cannot go backwards as some (on both sides of the political divide) believe. Return isn't one of the options and the 'Golden Age' was never quite as 'Golden' as is believed. New ways of engaging people need to be found but all we are likely to get is the usual round of muddle and prejudice.
Good comment. I'm not arguing for a return to a mythical golden age, or for a future utopia. But in 2019, there were 7 million reasonable well-paid blue collar jobs left vacant and unfilled, and in many areas of the economy, such as construction (and aggregates) there was pent up demand which supply was unable to fulfil for the simple reason that the sector lacked the labour.
Education should be about educating a workforce to fill the jobs of the present and the future, but the American model of education- like so many others across the Western world- is stuck in an obsolete mode primarily geared for generating office workers when these should and are going the way of the dodo, rightfully consigned to the waste bin of history. Only in government do they still persist, and the failure to cannibalise these redundant resources is undoubtedly why many Western countries are blighted by crumbling infrastructure.
The response from politicians is to 'learn to code' or to expect educators to start producing creatives, when in the former case only roughly 10% of the population is suitable for this work (and the option overlaps with virtually every other highly cognitive career) and in the latter case any educator capable of training creatives is necessarily going to be too busy as a creative themselves! Besides which, creative is a fiercely competitive field and dependent upon an attention economy which whilst somewhat elastic, can only sustain a tiny portion of the population in creative roles.
The service sector is for the most part limited to low value because it doesn't scale (it's why productivity figures look relatively flat in most OECD countries when in reality there have been massive productivity gains across manufacturing sectors, usually as a result of rationalisations). Large portions of the retail economy are likely to become similarly redundant, as more goods are dematerialised and go virtual and the shift to online purchasing continues.
It is only within the blue collar economy that opportunities are pre-existing, huge and largely untapped. China has already learned this lesson, it is why in one decade they poured more concrete than America did in the entire 20th century. Still, there cannot keep apace. The average purchase of residential property amounts to 46 times the annual wages of the average worker. If China have proven themselves smarter in this regard and already learned the lesson of how to create value in the 21st century- the question is when will we?
However Evergrande seem to show that there's a hiccup in the Chinese model. Statuswise blue collar jobs only generate disdain. It ties in with the woke approach that somehow blue collar workers are barely evolved knuckle draggers. The inability to value craft skills and hard physical work means that most people are turned off such professions. Couple that with the problem of a fair portion of employers in the industry not being interested in safe working conditions is it surprising that people baulk at these jobs. I'm with you all the way but am curious as to how they are made attractive.
'It ties in with the woke approach that somehow blue collar workers are barely evolved knuckle draggers.' Too true! However, it is not going to stop them paying a plumber substantially more than they earn per hour, when somebody flushes a tampon down their loos, or when running their washing machine on ecowash (without the occasional high temperature cycle) blocks their drains with with what amounts to blue concrete.
But, regardless of the unearned disdain, this is exactly what we want! Because as long as they believe certain certain jobs are beneath them, it gives kids with less privilege a shot at a decent living and a good life- and I mean privilege in the accurate sense of the word.
'I'm with you all the way but am curious as to how they are made attractive.' Well, one thing to point out is that it gives kids from Black, Brown or Poor backgrounds a force field against cops. It's not personal- it's just that proactive policing tends to focus their efforts wherever the violence is highest and this generally means some groups are more focused upon than others.
But cops have the deepest respect for trade professionals and construction workers of all kinds- they generally don't like stopping them unless the there is a serious problem and even then usually to just point out the problem. For kids from poor or minority backgrounds this is going to have a broad appeal.
The other thing is hot women. The most attractive females from the bottom 40% are always going to want strong, reliable breadwinners with which to feather their nests. Elite college women are likely to sneer down their noses, but community college and below, not so much.
I've known no end of hardworking lads who have traded up a couple of points in the out of ten scale, in terms of partner. They usually move up a point or so themselves, because the young women tend to treat them as fixer uppers, in terms of grooming, clothes and personal presentation. It's also great for the women themselves.
Years ago, there were specialist detective agencies which sprung up. The idea was to test the man before the wedding, by dangling one last hottie in front of them. Some might say that it was an unfair test to face before committing to monogamy, but of the one in ten men who resisted, almost all of them were marrying women one or two point above them.
It's not surprising. When playing blackjack, people always stick on twenty. We just need to find ways to persuade young men of the hidden benefits of a life of solid dependability. Of course, I missed another one- I don't know a single brickie or professional trade guy who isn't respected by his fellow men. For a start you get a better price off mates, but generally one also doesn't want to mess with them.
That's one of the great things about British pubs. We take the piss out of each other chronically- you will get called a big girls blouse if you object, provided it is all good-natured and said in jest. However, when travelling in other parts of the world, it is often better to keep the witty comments to a minimum, unless the circumstances indicate otherwise...
Reading this put me in mind of how discipline, vocational training and mentorship could save a near basket case like Temple Grandin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb7Y7ueMBmg
Yes- or rather to displace some who continue to flog a dead horse to kids who will never succeed through academics, with those who are ideally equipped to prepare teenage boys for a healthy and productive life. The other thing I mentioned was mentoring after K-12. To an extent we have trade school which comes nowhere close to filling current demand (which is one the reasons why undocumented migration is so attractive), but there are also plenty who already argue for either the option of a year of voluntary service for the young in non-military roles, or some other form of voluntary mentoring.
I don't think many people fully realise just how powerful a single mentor can be- I myself benefitted from one through work, and I'm sure you could say the same. After all, it is in employers interests to increase the value of their workers in areas which are not strictly in the job description, because the increased value often benefits the employer directly.
Plus, it's not as though you actually have to pay managers and supervisors to take on additional unpaid roles- make it voluntary and clear that success in mentoring will be very significant to their chances of promotion, and they will be tripping over each other trying to succeed. In my experience, the ambitious (who are exactly the types one would want) are always pushing their bosses for more opportunities to prove themselves.
Plus, speaking from personal experience, some of the most rewarding work I've done has been mentoring. Broadly speaking, my point would be that for those who don't well academically we do so little to prepare them for the life they will face, or indeed how to succeed. And, of course, in the past there used to be a thing called apprenticeships- I know they are a little bit of a historical antiquity, but perhaps you might have heard of them? :)
You mentioned both mentoring and apprentices Geary. I have the experience of having mentored apprentices. Funny thing is that the most difficult one who had come from a very muddled working class background was by far the most challenging and one of the most rewarding features of my life. The difference in that kid and the man he turned into over those five years was amazing. That's the thing about construction it develops pride within its creativity from effort. You also require team interconnections and interpersonal skills. So work is the commitment that places you into such a situation, but it's all the stories, conflicts, ups and downs of the everyday experience that changes people. I figure there is an absolute tie in that occurs in that as the apprentice develops his construction skills he simultaneously develops his life skills.
Sometimes we will drive these kids to the edge of quitting then pull them back and drive up their confidence. But each step over time means they keep on improving. As they improve they attach a kind of father figure respect toward all those that have aided them along the process. Although they figure they've learned it all themselves, which they have, they very much recognise that the older boys have steered them and by such example have steered them in a decision making process that helps them in all avenues of their lives. It's a nice feeling to give something back and we all get a further sense of pride in being part of it.
That's great, mate. The thing to bear in mind is that the more difficult they were to mentor, the more likely they are to be good mentors (with a few possible exceptions, such as autism- although as I've just learned from the Templin Grandin video on this thread, the autistic can be great in other ways!)
Sounds reasonable to me. Is there any slack on mentors though? We could also encourage entrepreneurship over academics before being an employee for life. Risk taking and non-conformity seem to not be valued traits.
I think some people have access to mentors, but many people don't. This is one of the fundamental ways that unfairness still persists. A while back Jordan Peterson interviewed a guy called Jamil Jivani. He was a demoralised Black kid. He almost got in trouble with the law. He did terribly at school, but because he went to a years free college (which Canada offers) he finally got to write about something he was enthusiastic about- his favourite rappers.
But that's not the point. One of the Ivy Leaguer came along to his college and recognised his unconventional and untapped talent. His story is exceptional, but there are so many who could be helped in more modest, but still profound ways. Although it's a problem which happens most for African Americans, I don't think we can honestly say that there is any group where some individuals don't suffer from this poverty of opportunity which a lack of mentoring causes.
Mentoring is voluntary, no? How do you encourage having wise elders with useful and transferable experience help further? Perhaps not everyone gets a good mentor because there aren't that many who can offer it well? Not all advice is good. And what is good for one may not be so great for another (think giving a hug/kiss, how some love that interaction while others find it sexual assault).
Well, obviously you would vet them and probably use an intro to mentoring approach where they shadowed an existing mentor for a short while. I seriously can't see it being any worse than the current situation, where a sizeable portion of some communities have absolutely no positive male role models at all.
It used to be a filtering question in interviews. Tell me about a male role model who has impacted your life personally? If they talk about a celeb, an actor or a music artist, then that's them gone.
One major difference between working class and middle class kids is that working class kids at school are largely directionless. They see education as a chore and little is done to link the benefits of educational effort toward how it may lead to improvements in their later lives. Most middle class kids are taught this by example from their parents and even those social engagements like eating out in posh restaurants, holidays abroad, a car at 17. It's linking in the kids mind that these engagements and possessions and freedoms come at a personal effort based cost. That is by imitating the ideas of ones parents you will get the same lifestyle later on.
Right now the UK requires 5.4 million new homes to be built over the next 25 years. Roughly around 250000 per year which they aren't able to achieve despite much effort. They just can't find enough skilled people and the demand is high. To my mind the education system could do with developing some form of practice along with an interventional way of placing these kids into construction apprentices and jobs after school. That some effort is placed in developing practical skills that these kids can identify with and thrive in. More akin to craft college learning. I bet if they had such motivation, incentive and vision they'd improve dramatically in subjects such as maths which is heavily used in construction.
Great comment, mate. Here in the UK we did the something with our polytechnics- effectively turning them into substandard unis- which had taught all manner of practical vocational skills, and now offer a range of crap degrees of no monetary worth.
"I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails"
I can not only imagine it, it is my Lived Experience every day and one can deal with it either via a Victim Narrative, or one can consider it as a minor inconvenience and get on with life.
https://www.webmd.com/brain/ss/slideshow-left-handed-vs-right
Yes, I belong to the oldest and most universal of Victimhoods (with the arguable exception of females): I'm left-flippered. Lefties are as statistically different from righties as blacks are from whites. The whole world is dextrocentric isn't it? Whenever I mention all this I'm almost invariably ignored because I think my case is irrefutable -- if one *chooses* to create a Victim Narrative around one's differences one surely can.
Or one can choose not to. Lefties do not have Victimhood inculcated into them from birth, so we just get on with life. Yes, *as a group* we are more likely to fall behind in school and more likely to go into politics and *much* more likely to work at the highest level of STEM. Nobody tries to explain all this away, it just is what it is. Much better to just deal with the reality *but* do so in a zeitgeist where it just doesn't matter. What needs to change is the zeitgeist -- the assumption that differences must be explained away. I say that, on the contrary, and to quote a liberal slogan: 'diversity is our strength'. Meanwhile, I won't be triggered if someone says 'gauche' in my hearing or talks of doing the 'right' thing. I sure would like to be able to buy a left handed drillpress tho.
Yes, there are too many who believe the ends justify the means, even when they never arrive at the intended ends, and the means require you harm some for the benefit of others you prefer.
Good ideas will grow over time because they are good and people prefer better outcomes than worse ones -- this is actual progress.
If your good idea only works by forcing others to accept it, your idea probably isn't as good as you think, and your tactic makes you immoral and likely causes greater resistance to the idea, not because of any lack of value in the idea, but because of the force applied blinds people to that idea.
And yet we were all 'forced' to wear our seatbelts. It's one of those things where my guts agree with you but there are counter examples which should be admitted.
True, but without force the outcome may have been similar, or perhaps better for new alternatives like passive restraints or smarter cars, or because drivers may be a bit more reckless when they feel more secure.
Sure, but it would have been slower. My libertarian instincts take a back seat on this sort of thing. In the best of all possible worlds of course you could leave it to intelligent citizens to do the right thing. But in the face of a pandemic I quite understand that the government feels the need to make rules.
I guess I have less faith I can predict the future and less faith that we lose out on alternatives that never see the light of day once force is used instead.
As for lockdowns and forcing people to return home, and forcing schools closed and sending them all home, and keeping people from producing needed things, and stopping most people from going outside and exercising, and telling most that they are non-essential, and demanding health records to just participate in society, and sending the sick elderly from hospitals back to nursing homes, and forcing health labs to use for a broken CDC test kit early on, lying about 15 days to flatten a curve, and building unused excess hospital capacity during the first wave while not building any now that they claim hospitals are being overrun, and never promoting healthy living, and never promoting N-95 masks that actually protect both the wearer and others, and destroying people's small businesses while further enriching large corporations/industry/financial markets, and forcing landlords to sell properties when they could no longer collect rent for (and usually then bought by the rich using their near zero interest rates and special tax deductions), and forcing some nurses and other workers to quit their jobs over vaccinations that would only serve to protect them if they jabs do indeed work as advertised, and then wondering just how much better the outcomes were than those places that did hardly any of that sort of thing (think Sweden which was described by the MSM as near fanatical mass murderers)....
I think people just can't fathom that people will make better decisions voluntarily than when forced. That false safety measures (paper and homemade masks will work well, wiping down packages will work, vaccinations that apparently won't protect you from unvaccinated people, pretending that vaccinated people no longer spread the virus, staying home indoors will help...) make people feel good because government is "doing something" are the same that thought invading Afghanistan and Iraq where wise doing somethings in national interests too.
My brother has a Swedish girlfriend. They met online and she recently flew over for the first time. I was quick to compliment her on her country's response- basically saying that the rest of the world had gone mad. She agreed.
We also talked about the effect of PC on comedy. Her point was that she found it really annoying so many people people get offended on behalf of others...
That was a beautiful rant and on the gut level I'm already with you. I can't even disagree on a single specific point. Best I can do here is an analogy: WWII:
Are we, or are we not going to war? If we are, then we probably want to win. (Things were different then, now, we prefer to loose it saves the risk of hurting the enemy's feelings.) A declaration of war is binary, we have or we have not declared war on Germany, agree? Now, what can we look forward to? Blood, toil, tears and sweat.
War is messy, catastrophic mistakes will be made, countless lives will be thrown away in blunders. But the decision has been made to fight and it has to be all-in. There will be a draft and you cannot sit out the war because you disagree with this or that point of strategy otherwise panzers will be rolling down Pall Mall in a few weeks while everyone in Britain debates.
We had to turn off our individualism and fight as one nation even knowing perfectly well that there will be disasters. Mind, that's not to say that in the War Department they don't do everything they possibly can to minimize the disasters! But at the end of each day, decisions are made, orders are given and *everyone* has to obey them. "Pardon me, Monty, pvt. Smith here, I don't think we should attack tomorrow. I'm staying in my bunk."
Same with covid. We can have millions of deaths -- bodies on the sidewalk -- or we can fight it. But if we fight it and, all pros and cons having been weighed, the decision is to vaccinate then unfortunately it's another all-in kind of thing. No Typhoid Marys can be permitted.
Has the response been less than perfect? Of course. In the mean time we are at war with covid and I'm enlisted. My orders are to wear a mask and get the jabs. In this situation I do not give myself the luxury of an opinion, I'm going to cooperate with my government.
"they loath inequality of any sort".
No, they loath inequality, unless it gives their pals power over others.
That's a key observation. Many of the prescriptions of neo-progressivism become immediately unworkable without an imposed asymmetry; if what's good for the goose is good for the gander, then it breaks down. So it's OK for those assigned the moral high ground to stereotype others, or silence dissent, or impose unequal rules. They can get power over others by being easily offended. But if the rules were equal, if a designated "privileged" person's taking offense was treated as equally valid to a designed marginalized person's doing so, it would quickly collapse.
So this narrative absolutely require unequal treatment, biased to favor the designated disenfranchised. As Kendi say, in this ideology, the only remedy for past discrimination is present and future discrimination (in the other direction). Equal treatment is the enemy, a trick used to sustain privilege.
And this also links to the ever present tendency towards authoritarianism. If you disdain win/win interactions as a base for your society (in favor of win/lose in the politically correct direction), then there will always be sustained or incipient rebellion; you can only get a fraction of a population to act against their own interests in a sustained way, while valorizing other groups acting in their self interest. Rather than growing a larger and more inclusive sense of "us", the strategy it to create more isolated smaller "us/them" groups in perpetual conflict - but hoping that guilt and shaming tactics can suppress "them" from perceiving their own self interest in a predominantly win/lose world. So you have to give up or impose by force, rather than persuade.
Thoughtful observation, and one I've noticed myself. What the intersectional mindset ignores is the internal conflicts within its grand coalition. For example, Latinos are around 3:2 opposed to CRT praxis in K-12, some vehemently so. One of the worst things is white privilege education- according to a study, it does nothing at all to increase empathy for poorer Blacks and actually decreases empathy towards poorer whites, because of their supposed privilege (as if a poorer white guy in a predominantly Black neighbourhood doesn't get stopped even more often, to balance the books). Reason wrote a pretty good article on the white privilege empathy problem- https://reason.com/2019/05/29/white-privilege-study-sympathetic-black-people/
While I agree with your solution on the whole, my main pushback would be that I doubt vocational schooling will be the panacea you seek. Problems are rarely monocausal and monocausal solutions inevitably fail to completely solve a problem. That said, vocational schooling is badly needed in American public school.
As someone who relatively recently attended a school with a robust/large vocational/trades wing, I think I can provide some perspective. Many students who performed abysmally in math and history graduated directly into decent careers in auto-body or construction or HVAC. But low performing students were not required to learn a trade and some of them had parents who looked down on manual labor.
There was also a sizable cohort who seemed to have no interest in working hard in either the trades or academics. These students were content to skate by.
I worked as a factory worker one summer and there were definitely two groups in the factory. 1. The people who liked the job and the pay and were glad to have them. 2. The people who showed up late, shirked responsibility, and did not want to work. The latter group did not tend to stay in the job very long. The work was hard but not brutal or inhumane. One day, the company paid for free ice cream for all the workers as a summer celebration. So the people who quit or got themselves fired were not protesting unreasonable conditions. Also among the workers who liked work, there was a stigma against people on welfare (who they knew and would talk about), who refused to work.
A friend of mine is a head engineer in another factory. They have the same two groups of workers. He said that although automation has eliminated some jobs, they have never laid off a worker. Anyone in group 1 will learn a new skill and has a job as long as they want it. People in the second group tend to quit.
All this goes to say that I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.
Finally, just wanted to mention that I very much enjoyed Haidt’s book and have found so much of it very useful over the years. But on the moral foundations, the last two years (especially the pandemic) have brought what I think are some interesting challenges to the formulation that Leftists don’t have strong hierarchy/authority or sanctity foundations. I’d love the opportunity to actually talk to Haidt about that.
The factory you worked at didn't have an absence management policy? I worked the technical side in a very similar situation. We used to give 1/2 a point on the scheme for turning up more than 15 minutes late (a day missed was one point). I was quite lucky actually, I really dodged a bullet on that one- I had originally been slated to learn and run the new Chronos timekeeping software, but my AS400 superuser stuff was seen as more vital to business needs.
When we started the absence management absenteeism was endemic at 20%- within two years the figure was closer to 5%. Very few workers were fired- we had some successes with better PPE (my job), and also shifting workers around more- some workers had been on the same job for 20 years, and obviously many of them were repetitive...
'I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.' Good point, but one only needs to shift community social dynamics by increments to completely change the game. In the UK, Afro Caribbean British were most harmed by government intervention- community fatherhood rates at 37% have led to them being four times more likely to excluded from school and way more likely to be the victims of knife crime. Conversely, African British tend to be more recent migrants, fatherhood rates are around 60%, they do better at school than whites, have no increased likelihood of exclusion and actually earn a bit more than whites, with no increased knife crime risk. I use ethnic examples, because it makes it easier to see the dynamics from the data.
I completely agree with you on Haidt. I've noticed the exact same thing. I think the authority change stems from a lack of unsupervised play as children, as well as anti-bullying policy which is too interventional. I think it also helps if the authority in charge aligns with your political affiliation. On the sanctity front, there were some early warning signs with organic food, etc and now we the same thing with ideological purity across the whole woke belief system- but I don't as yet know what to make of it, in terms of Moral Foundations Theory.
Ultimately, I think the current paradigm is geared to achieving cultural power, and attempting to silence heretics. The dynamics will shift when it becomes apparent that their shibboleths will not provide the societal changes they so desire- then it is highly likely they will want to tear society down completely, in the mistaken belief that it is society at fault, rather than their belief system.
It's not that I'm anti-woke- I've been lucky enough to talk to and persuade progressive individuals, and the ones I talked to were well-intentioned- unlike the activists who grab all the oxygen and attention. It's just that many of their ideas are fatally flawed, and in many ways obscure entirely fixable problems. A good example of this would be Scotland's approach to their knife crime epidemic and youth reform. It could do wonders in America, but it only came about in the first place because the population being helping/tackled was 99% ethnically white. Crucially, the activists want all the positive sounding community-led stuff that was a part of it, but they just don't see that it doesn't work without the proactive policing which was vital. In America there is a 100ft wall with 'Race' painted on the side which acts as an obstruction to any form of good public policy.
I don’t think we had a points system. I’m sure management kept track of absenteeism. Workers didn’t last long if they made it clear they didn’t want to work. I was late one time (set my alarm for PM not AM), and immediately went to apologize to my boss. He said it was fine as long as I didn’t do it again, since I otherwise was always at my station before the bell. He didn’t say anything about points.
Totally agree with you on fatherhood. That exact dynamic plays out in America, with perhaps slightly different demographic groups.
You may be right about the shibboleths on the woke Left ultimately boiling down to a power grab. I still think there’s something real there (at least for the rank and file). We will see if it ever comes to attempts to tear down society. For some more radical hard leftists that’s probably true.
At the same time, I also agree with your last point. I’ve got friends across the political spectrum, including fairly progressive individuals. As long as someone is willing to engage in dialogue with people they disagree with, their ideology shouldn’t be a barrier to friendship or engagement. If they will engage with me, I will with them.
What did Scotland do about knife crime? Think that was before my time. I lived in Scotland for a few months back in 2016 and was told that crime had been drastically reduced in the previous decade or so. I was actually in Glasgow, and despite all I heard about it’s tough reputation, I could walk alone at night.
With Scotland, they utilised every societal resource they had into a youth reform strategy, and added a few for good measure- social workers, youth clubs, diversion, housing, etc. The police set up specialised Violence Reduction Units and extensive use was made of violence interrupters. Perhaps the key element though, was employer buy-in, with everybody from roofing firms to restaurants offering second chances to wayward late teens from poorer backgrounds.
It's what the left is currently trying to do, but getting it completely wrong. You see they didn't stop proactive policing- they actually retooled it- if anything it became the lynchpin for earlier intervention, because they found that the sooner they could get to kids going wrong, the more likely the youth reform would work.
Despite early reservations the police loved it as well. Instead of simply locking young men up and knowing they would be back out in a few years and back to causing trouble (when dealing with a lesser offence likely to escalate to knife crime), they saw the positive impact they were having on kids from difficult backgrounds. Quite rewarding, I imagine.
After its initial success in Glasgow, they rolled it out to the whole of Scotland. It took Glasgow from being the knife crime capital of Europe, to Scotland having some of the lowest violence figures in Europe. Plus, despite the ongoing outlay, it actually managed to save money for the taxpayer, because keeping a large cohort of young men imprisoned actually works out to be quite expensive, especially when one considers things like court costs and the like.
Interesting. Thanks. Yes it seems like the sort of thing that might work in certain cities here in America. Or at least solutions along those lines.
Definitely explains why Glasgow always felt fairly safe to me when I was there. I honestly felt safer there than parts of the US.
There are a couple of ready made American resources ready to roll for American Police Reform. The first is Peter Moskos' work on Violence Reduction: https://qualitypolicing.com/violencereduction/ . The second is the Center for Policing Equity: https://policingequity.org/ . Despite the name it doesn't ask police to tackle the perceived racism which is in their head.
Instead it looks at resources utilised versus crimes committed to strategically allocate resources and in the process make their allocation more fair. The key takeaway should be that humans are great at recognising risk but terrible at estimating the extent of said risk, or its potential impacts.
A fairer assessment of probability, risk and impact can be used to create a safer society. The Center for Policing Equity has worked quite well, especially with the NYPD. Looking at actions rather than mind reading racist intent allows police to see how their actions could be misinterpreted and adjust accordingly.
Of course, all of this was before Bill de Blasio ruined everything.
Historcally education for all was brought in because a literate workforce had become a requirement. Of course as time progressed it suffered from mission creep which is why it's the mess it is now. This essay links to the need for affirmation which everyone needs but also to the need for affirmation AS AN INDIVIDUAL. Group affirmation is never enough and the liberal approach misses this. However, society cannot go backwards as some (on both sides of the political divide) believe. Return isn't one of the options and the 'Golden Age' was never quite as 'Golden' as is believed. New ways of engaging people need to be found but all we are likely to get is the usual round of muddle and prejudice.
Good comment. I'm not arguing for a return to a mythical golden age, or for a future utopia. But in 2019, there were 7 million reasonable well-paid blue collar jobs left vacant and unfilled, and in many areas of the economy, such as construction (and aggregates) there was pent up demand which supply was unable to fulfil for the simple reason that the sector lacked the labour.
Education should be about educating a workforce to fill the jobs of the present and the future, but the American model of education- like so many others across the Western world- is stuck in an obsolete mode primarily geared for generating office workers when these should and are going the way of the dodo, rightfully consigned to the waste bin of history. Only in government do they still persist, and the failure to cannibalise these redundant resources is undoubtedly why many Western countries are blighted by crumbling infrastructure.
The response from politicians is to 'learn to code' or to expect educators to start producing creatives, when in the former case only roughly 10% of the population is suitable for this work (and the option overlaps with virtually every other highly cognitive career) and in the latter case any educator capable of training creatives is necessarily going to be too busy as a creative themselves! Besides which, creative is a fiercely competitive field and dependent upon an attention economy which whilst somewhat elastic, can only sustain a tiny portion of the population in creative roles.
The service sector is for the most part limited to low value because it doesn't scale (it's why productivity figures look relatively flat in most OECD countries when in reality there have been massive productivity gains across manufacturing sectors, usually as a result of rationalisations). Large portions of the retail economy are likely to become similarly redundant, as more goods are dematerialised and go virtual and the shift to online purchasing continues.
It is only within the blue collar economy that opportunities are pre-existing, huge and largely untapped. China has already learned this lesson, it is why in one decade they poured more concrete than America did in the entire 20th century. Still, there cannot keep apace. The average purchase of residential property amounts to 46 times the annual wages of the average worker. If China have proven themselves smarter in this regard and already learned the lesson of how to create value in the 21st century- the question is when will we?
However Evergrande seem to show that there's a hiccup in the Chinese model. Statuswise blue collar jobs only generate disdain. It ties in with the woke approach that somehow blue collar workers are barely evolved knuckle draggers. The inability to value craft skills and hard physical work means that most people are turned off such professions. Couple that with the problem of a fair portion of employers in the industry not being interested in safe working conditions is it surprising that people baulk at these jobs. I'm with you all the way but am curious as to how they are made attractive.
'It ties in with the woke approach that somehow blue collar workers are barely evolved knuckle draggers.' Too true! However, it is not going to stop them paying a plumber substantially more than they earn per hour, when somebody flushes a tampon down their loos, or when running their washing machine on ecowash (without the occasional high temperature cycle) blocks their drains with with what amounts to blue concrete.
But, regardless of the unearned disdain, this is exactly what we want! Because as long as they believe certain certain jobs are beneath them, it gives kids with less privilege a shot at a decent living and a good life- and I mean privilege in the accurate sense of the word.
'I'm with you all the way but am curious as to how they are made attractive.' Well, one thing to point out is that it gives kids from Black, Brown or Poor backgrounds a force field against cops. It's not personal- it's just that proactive policing tends to focus their efforts wherever the violence is highest and this generally means some groups are more focused upon than others.
But cops have the deepest respect for trade professionals and construction workers of all kinds- they generally don't like stopping them unless the there is a serious problem and even then usually to just point out the problem. For kids from poor or minority backgrounds this is going to have a broad appeal.
The other thing is hot women. The most attractive females from the bottom 40% are always going to want strong, reliable breadwinners with which to feather their nests. Elite college women are likely to sneer down their noses, but community college and below, not so much.
I've known no end of hardworking lads who have traded up a couple of points in the out of ten scale, in terms of partner. They usually move up a point or so themselves, because the young women tend to treat them as fixer uppers, in terms of grooming, clothes and personal presentation. It's also great for the women themselves.
Years ago, there were specialist detective agencies which sprung up. The idea was to test the man before the wedding, by dangling one last hottie in front of them. Some might say that it was an unfair test to face before committing to monogamy, but of the one in ten men who resisted, almost all of them were marrying women one or two point above them.
It's not surprising. When playing blackjack, people always stick on twenty. We just need to find ways to persuade young men of the hidden benefits of a life of solid dependability. Of course, I missed another one- I don't know a single brickie or professional trade guy who isn't respected by his fellow men. For a start you get a better price off mates, but generally one also doesn't want to mess with them.
That's one of the great things about British pubs. We take the piss out of each other chronically- you will get called a big girls blouse if you object, provided it is all good-natured and said in jest. However, when travelling in other parts of the world, it is often better to keep the witty comments to a minimum, unless the circumstances indicate otherwise...
Reading this put me in mind of how discipline, vocational training and mentorship could save a near basket case like Temple Grandin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb7Y7ueMBmg
More Temple Grandin on the problem with doing away with education in skills/trades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWePrOuSeSY
Wow, thanks for that- to think that she had such an impact on the meat industry, just because her unique brain could think like a cow!
Just fyi, might want to mention that the equity vote was in CA. Not everyone is familiar with the history of that benighted place...
Cheers, I've fixed it now!
Interesting, but what's the one easy step? Just add vocation training to our existing mandatory, government-run K-12 schools?
Yes- or rather to displace some who continue to flog a dead horse to kids who will never succeed through academics, with those who are ideally equipped to prepare teenage boys for a healthy and productive life. The other thing I mentioned was mentoring after K-12. To an extent we have trade school which comes nowhere close to filling current demand (which is one the reasons why undocumented migration is so attractive), but there are also plenty who already argue for either the option of a year of voluntary service for the young in non-military roles, or some other form of voluntary mentoring.
I don't think many people fully realise just how powerful a single mentor can be- I myself benefitted from one through work, and I'm sure you could say the same. After all, it is in employers interests to increase the value of their workers in areas which are not strictly in the job description, because the increased value often benefits the employer directly.
Plus, it's not as though you actually have to pay managers and supervisors to take on additional unpaid roles- make it voluntary and clear that success in mentoring will be very significant to their chances of promotion, and they will be tripping over each other trying to succeed. In my experience, the ambitious (who are exactly the types one would want) are always pushing their bosses for more opportunities to prove themselves.
Plus, speaking from personal experience, some of the most rewarding work I've done has been mentoring. Broadly speaking, my point would be that for those who don't well academically we do so little to prepare them for the life they will face, or indeed how to succeed. And, of course, in the past there used to be a thing called apprenticeships- I know they are a little bit of a historical antiquity, but perhaps you might have heard of them? :)
Interesting bit about a mentoring charity run by Catholics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qPSxp7Fy-g
You mentioned both mentoring and apprentices Geary. I have the experience of having mentored apprentices. Funny thing is that the most difficult one who had come from a very muddled working class background was by far the most challenging and one of the most rewarding features of my life. The difference in that kid and the man he turned into over those five years was amazing. That's the thing about construction it develops pride within its creativity from effort. You also require team interconnections and interpersonal skills. So work is the commitment that places you into such a situation, but it's all the stories, conflicts, ups and downs of the everyday experience that changes people. I figure there is an absolute tie in that occurs in that as the apprentice develops his construction skills he simultaneously develops his life skills.
Sometimes we will drive these kids to the edge of quitting then pull them back and drive up their confidence. But each step over time means they keep on improving. As they improve they attach a kind of father figure respect toward all those that have aided them along the process. Although they figure they've learned it all themselves, which they have, they very much recognise that the older boys have steered them and by such example have steered them in a decision making process that helps them in all avenues of their lives. It's a nice feeling to give something back and we all get a further sense of pride in being part of it.
That's great, mate. The thing to bear in mind is that the more difficult they were to mentor, the more likely they are to be good mentors (with a few possible exceptions, such as autism- although as I've just learned from the Templin Grandin video on this thread, the autistic can be great in other ways!)
Sounds reasonable to me. Is there any slack on mentors though? We could also encourage entrepreneurship over academics before being an employee for life. Risk taking and non-conformity seem to not be valued traits.
I think some people have access to mentors, but many people don't. This is one of the fundamental ways that unfairness still persists. A while back Jordan Peterson interviewed a guy called Jamil Jivani. He was a demoralised Black kid. He almost got in trouble with the law. He did terribly at school, but because he went to a years free college (which Canada offers) he finally got to write about something he was enthusiastic about- his favourite rappers.
But that's not the point. One of the Ivy Leaguer came along to his college and recognised his unconventional and untapped talent. His story is exceptional, but there are so many who could be helped in more modest, but still profound ways. Although it's a problem which happens most for African Americans, I don't think we can honestly say that there is any group where some individuals don't suffer from this poverty of opportunity which a lack of mentoring causes.
Mentoring is voluntary, no? How do you encourage having wise elders with useful and transferable experience help further? Perhaps not everyone gets a good mentor because there aren't that many who can offer it well? Not all advice is good. And what is good for one may not be so great for another (think giving a hug/kiss, how some love that interaction while others find it sexual assault).
Well, obviously you would vet them and probably use an intro to mentoring approach where they shadowed an existing mentor for a short while. I seriously can't see it being any worse than the current situation, where a sizeable portion of some communities have absolutely no positive male role models at all.
It used to be a filtering question in interviews. Tell me about a male role model who has impacted your life personally? If they talk about a celeb, an actor or a music artist, then that's them gone.
One major difference between working class and middle class kids is that working class kids at school are largely directionless. They see education as a chore and little is done to link the benefits of educational effort toward how it may lead to improvements in their later lives. Most middle class kids are taught this by example from their parents and even those social engagements like eating out in posh restaurants, holidays abroad, a car at 17. It's linking in the kids mind that these engagements and possessions and freedoms come at a personal effort based cost. That is by imitating the ideas of ones parents you will get the same lifestyle later on.
Right now the UK requires 5.4 million new homes to be built over the next 25 years. Roughly around 250000 per year which they aren't able to achieve despite much effort. They just can't find enough skilled people and the demand is high. To my mind the education system could do with developing some form of practice along with an interventional way of placing these kids into construction apprentices and jobs after school. That some effort is placed in developing practical skills that these kids can identify with and thrive in. More akin to craft college learning. I bet if they had such motivation, incentive and vision they'd improve dramatically in subjects such as maths which is heavily used in construction.
40 years ago we closed vocational schools because it was unfair to direct some kids away from college. Really bad thinking.
Great comment, mate. Here in the UK we did the something with our polytechnics- effectively turning them into substandard unis- which had taught all manner of practical vocational skills, and now offer a range of crap degrees of no monetary worth.