Quotulatiousness

May 28, 2022

Scott Alexander on the “Hearing Voices Movement”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’d never heard of the Hearing Voices Movement, but I don’t read the [spit] New York Times [spit]. Scott Alexander almost certainly also avoids reading the NYT, but he responds to a recent article there on the phenomenon that some of his psychiatric patients have reported:

The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement — ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:

I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:

2:

Plenty of people hear voices. Some of these people are your typical homeless schizophrenic, but many aren’t. One of my patients was a successful computer programmer who had near-daily auditory hallucinations. He realized they weren’t real, did his best to ignore them, and got on with his successful life — just like he had been doing for the past twenty years. He was seeing me for unrelated depression.

This guy kept his condition secret from his friends and co-workers. I don’t blame him for this choice at all. But when everybody who can hide it does, we only hear about the people who can’t keep it hidden, who are usually worst-case scenarios. Also (as a bunch of 1980s gay people can tell you) keeping a basic fact about yourself hidden from everyone you know sucks.

I recommended Hearing Voices Movement to this guy. I can’t remember whether he took me up on it or not. But I thought it would be helpful for him to have people he could talk to about his situation who wouldn’t think he was crazy, or try to get him locked up.

3:

People hate admitting that some cases are mild, and others are severe. Especially the kind of people who work at the New York Times

I talked about this a while back in the context of the autism rights movement. Many autistic people live great lives, enjoy the beneficial parts of their condition, and find it annoying or oppressive when psychiatrists keep trying to medicate them. Many other autistic people can’t live outside of institutions and constantly try to chew off their own body parts. A reasonable conclusion might be “the first group seem mild and should be left alone, the second group seem severe and probably need intensive treatment”, but it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this.

Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7.

And that’s just the activists! We psychiatrists have the same problem from a different direction: we have seen some crazy @#!$. No matter how mild your case is, we’ve seen some case that looked like that at first glance, then slowly descended into a horror movie premise. Our instinct is naturally to round off the person who uses Xanax once a month to the lifetime drug abuser, the mildly depressed housewife to the gory suicide victim, and the occasional voice-hearer to the guy who needs to be in a straitjacket.

Still, some cases are mild and others are severe. People with mild psychosis — like my patient the programmer — probably don’t need to be on really strong medications with severe side effects. They probably just need support. In a perfect world, expert psychiatrists would have a major role in providing that support. In the real world, a lot of these patients expect their psychiatrist to freak out, overmedicate them, and maybe even commit them to a hospital. This being the real world, many of those patients are right. So they look elsewhere.

Morality is Dead. Hollywood Killed It.

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published 27 May 2022

What’s with all the nihilistic, amoral, dark anti-hero leads in movies and shows? Are we supposed to treat horrible characters as pinnacles of human behavior now?

The bleak content that’s crept its way mainstream over the last 10 years should concern us all. The stories we tell matter, for they influence what we believe and what values we adopt.

Fortunately, a renewed appreciation for natural rights and individualism could be the antidote to the immense darkness that’s blanketed American culture as of late. That’s what we’ll get down to on this feature episode of Out of Frame.
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“… the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist pans the latest official misinformation from the federal government on telecommunications legislation:

Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne unveiled the government’s proposed new telecom policy directive yesterday, hailing it as a “historic step”. However, a closer look at the policy suggests that the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada. Once again, the government has shown itself unwilling to take a strong stand in favour of consumers and competition, instead releasing a directive that largely retains the status quo and sends the message to CRTC Chair Ian Scott to stay the course. Indeed, the primary purpose behind the announcement would appear to be an attempt to shield the government from criticism over its decision to leave the controversial CRTC decision on wholesale Internet access intact, thereby denying consumers the prospect of lower costs for Internet services.

While the new proposed policy directive features much needed details and helpfully replaces the 2006 and 2019 directives that often conflicted and enabled the CRTC to pay little more than lip service to the issue, it sends a strong signal that it is happy with the Commission’s current approach. For example, the directive’s summary on measures to address wholesale Internet access are all about the status quo: “requiring large companies to continue to give access to competitors” or “directing the CRTC not to phase out the existing model for wholesale access.” These are not instructions to change.

The same is true for mobile wireless competition. Rather that using the opportunity to accelerate competition through mobile virtual network operators, the CRTC is instead to directed to improve its hybrid MVNO model “as necessary”. A full MVNO model? The government says it is prepared to support it “if needed”. Based on the current market, it apparently believes it isn’t needed.

Modele 1890 Berthier Cuirassier Carbine

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Jul 2017

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When the Modele 1890 Berthier carbine was adopted for the French cavalry, the decision was made to produce a special version for the Cuirassier troops. These were the elite heavy cavalry, equipped with steel breastplates and elaborate plumed helmets. They existed in that very brief window where the worlds of Napoleon and the smokeless-powder rifle coexisted.

The armor worn by the Cuirassier required some special adaptations to their firearms, specifically to the stocks. The scaled chinstrap of the helmet interfered with a normal cheek weld to the carbine, so the comb was removed from the stock. The metal buttplate also was a poor match for the metal cuirass, as it was difficult to hold the gun in position to aim. To account for this, a leather buttplate was used on these carbine, which would be much less slippery on armor.

Aside from these changes to the stock, the carbine was identical to the standard 1890 cavalry carbine. A total of 20,000 Cuirassier carbines were made in 1891 at the Chatellerault arsenal, and few survived World War One. By fairly early in 1915 the cavalry units had been repurposed as infantry, and the Cuirassier went into the trenches with the armor and carbines — perhaps better equipped, ironically, than the infantry in the greatcoats, kepis, and with Lebel rifles.

Thanks to Justin for finding this rifle for me!

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QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tactical air power

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first function aircraft were put to in WWI was reconnaissance. In 1914, that might mean locating the enemy in a fast-moving battlefield, but as soon as the trench stalemate set in, reconnaissance mostly meant identifying enemy buildups along the line and – still more importantly – serving as spotters for artillery. It wasn’t a huge cognitive leap to go from having aircraft which identified targets for the artillery to thinking that the aircraft could be the artillery. But as with tanks, the technical limitations of the platforms in use meant that actually meaningful close air support was still two decades away when the war ended. The rapid development of aircraft in these early days means that there is a truly bewildering array of aircraft designs in use during the war, but the Farman F.50 is a good sample for what the most advanced bombers in common use looked like towards the war’s end. It carried a maximum of eight 44kg (totalling 352kg) bombs under the wings, which were dropped unguided. With a maximum speed of less than 100mph and a service ceiling under 5000m, it was also an extremely vulnerable platform: fragile, slow and with a relatively low flight ceiling. The French mainly used bombers at night for this reason.

But how much airpower does it take to really move a division out of position? In 1944, at the start of Operation Cobra as part of the Normandy breakout, it was necessary for US forces to move the powerful armored division Panzer Lehr out of its prepared positions outside of St. Lo. Over the course of an hour and a half, the U.S. Eighth Air Force hit Panzer Lehr with approximately three thousand aircraft, including 1,800 heavy bombers (each of which might have had bomb-loads of c. 2-3,500kg; the attack would have been the equivalent of about 13,000 Farman F.50s (of which only a hundred or so were built!)). By this point, even medium bombers carried bomb loads in the thousands of pounds, like the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, with a bomb load of 3000lbs (1360kg). This was followed by a hurricane artillery barrage! Despite this almost absurdly awesome amount of firepower (which, to be clear, inflicted tremendous damage; by the end of Operation Cobra, Panzer Lehr – the heaviest and most powerful Panzer division in the west – had effectively ceased to exist), Panzer Lehr, badly weakened was still very capable of resisting and had to be pushed out of position by ground attack over the next three days.

Needless to say, nothing on offer in 1918 or for a decade or more after, was prepared to offer that kind of offensive potential from the air. That kind of assault would have required many thousands of aircraft with capabilities far exceeding what even the best late-war WWI bombers could do. Once again, while close air support doctrine was developed with one eye on the trench stalemate and the role airpower could play in facilitating a breakthrough and restoring maneuver (either by blasting the breakthrough or – as in Soviet Deep Battle doctrine – engaging enemy rear echelon units to bog down reinforcements). But the technology wasn’t anywhere near the decisive point by 1918. Instead, the most important thing aircraft could do was spot for the artillery, which is mostly what aircraft continued to do, even in late 1918.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

May 27, 2022

Minoru Yamasaki and the Pruitt–Igoe urban housing project

Filed under: Architecture, Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joseph Kast recounts the story of a post-war government scheme to demolish slums, re-house the slum-dwellers in a massive public housing project and the architect whose career was forever blighted by the failure of the design:

An undated overview of some of the 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki and built in the early 1950s. All had been demolished by 1976.
Uncredited photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Can society be designed? Can an expert engineer alleviate people’s pains and struggles with a good-enough central plan and blueprint?

Minoru Yamasaki thought so.

Yamasaki was one of America’s most well-respected architects in the 20th century and was a member of the school of thought that people’s human nature could be improved (whether those people needed or wanted improving) by a properly planned building surrounding them.

Yamasaki got to test his theory by designing the public housing complex that promised to be a template for all public housing going forward. The complex, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, was made possible by post-war New Deal housing and urban development programs. And like many New Deal initiatives, Pruitt-Igoe was guided by the idea that good intentions, centralized planning, and strong government power would progress society more than protecting people’s rights or personal choices.

Pruitt-Igoe and Yamasaki’s designs were sold as the solution to poverty, crime, and housing in America’s major cities, but within just a few years, the complex would show the dangerous consequences when government planners take away people’s liberties and homes.

As with so many vast schemes to use the government’s power to reshape people’s lives, the hopes of the central planners quickly fell afoul of economic and social realities that the plan never took into account.

St. Louis quickly realized that Pruitt-Igoe was a problem. But it was unclear who, if anyone, could fix it. The federal government, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the state, and the City of St. Louis itself all shared responsibility for the complex. When a problem belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.

Within five years of its launch, Yamasaki was regularly apologizing for his role in the project. Though the final design of the complex differed from his original vision, he came to question the core assumption behind the project: that people’s lives could be effectively engineered through urban design. He expressed regret for his “deplorable mistakes” with Pruitt-Igoe. By the late 1950s, he was giving eloquent speeches about the “tragedy of housing thousands in exactly look alike cells,” which “certainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism.”

To the Detroit Free Press, he put it more simply: “Social ills can’t be cured by nice buildings.”

By the early 1970s, the 33 concrete tombstones lining St. Louis’ skyline were a cautionary tale for utopian housing schemes. It was a den of crime and misery, rather than anything anyone could call home. When the decision came to demolish the complex, occupancy was only 10 percent.

The day the demolitions began at Pruitt-Igoe, architectural historian Charles Jencks declared the death of high modernist architecture and its grand assumptions: “It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”

Three towers were demolished in 1972. The last tower finally came down in 1976, leaving nothing of Pruitt-Igoe behind.

The demolition of one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings, which began in 1972 with the final building demolished in 1976.
Uncredited image from Wikimedia Commons.

The Crusades: Part 8 – The Rise of Venice

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 12 Mar 2021

The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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The cognitive dissonance of the elites

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on yet another example of our kakistocrats congratulating themselves after presiding over failure:

[Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara] Ferrer is a relentless and enthusiastic interventionist, one of the highest-profile lockdowners and mask fetishists in the country, and here she is still wearing a mask — in the third year of a pandemic that hasn’t been ended by the widespread mask-wearing that has prevailed, and still largely prevails, in Los Angeles. Do X to cause Y, she says, doing X for a third straight year but still rather obviously not causing Y. Again, here’s Ferrer’s chart showing the effect of her bold public health interventions:

You can really see how that infections trendline came right down as Barbara Ferrer boldly threw herself in front of the virus.

But here’s the part that I find most telling: After Ferrer offers a long presentation on mitigations showing clearly that they haven’t worked as advertised, and after she says repeatedly and explicitly that the available Covid-19 vaccines “don’t work so great at preventing infection”, and that vaccinated people will be infected, Ferrer sits down for a discussion with several members of an expert panel. One of the panelists is Michele Kipke, a psychology PhD who serves as a clinical professor at USC and the vice-chair of research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (and as a school board member in my own small town in the suburbs). Having heard repeated statements about the unmistakably limited effectiveness of the available Covid-19 vaccines, Kipke offers this as a question:

“So, first of all, I just need to say, it is such an honor to be on the same stage with you. Barbara, you are my hero, and I am so glad that you have been our leader through these extremely difficult two years. So thank you.” And then there’s a long round of applause from the panel and the audience. You can just feel the scholarly skepticism and clinical rigor in that auditorium. This, ladies and gentlemen, is obviously the room where the tough questions are asked.

And then she goes on: “And so, as I think about this, I’ve really been asking the questions, what are, just picking up on the, I think, the discussion here, what are those lessons learned? There are, you know, sort of obviously a very difficult couple of years, but we’ve seen some really phenomenal successes that have come out of the last couple years. As Dr. Hu mentioned earlier, I had the good fortune of being a part of leading Vaccinate L.A., where we brought fourteen schools and programmatic units within USC together, and all harmonized our efforts, to get out there and support our communities, and to think about how to support vaccinations. And we engaged local artists. We — it was a community driven initiative, we wanted to listen and learn from the community, and then partner with them …”

And so on, but you get the point. “But through that work we’ve achieved so much,” she eventually says. The video is cued to the start of her “question”, if you want to see it all, but her question, in short, is, Why, in your view, did we do such an amazing job? Pivoting from Ferrer’s extremely open and direct discussion about the obvious limits of the vaccines — again, that actual direct quote is, “Vaccinated people are very likely to get infected” — Kipke asks about the success of the vaccination program.

How To Feed A Roman Emperor: Vitellius & the Year of 4 Emperors

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

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Published 20 Apr 2021

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QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin describes the consequences of elite overproduction. Middle-class youths strive for a college degree to ascend the social ladder. But because the true elites are always a small group, an excess of college graduates saturates the job market with mid-level managers. As these managers fight for scarce spots at the top, intra-elite jockeying becomes more fierce. Tests of ideological purity become a way of winnowing the competition. Those most insecure in their elite status do the most virtue signaling, and punch down on the “unenlightened” lower white classes as a way of confirming their rank. Ultimately, these people end up filling the ever-increasing number of mid-level positions in government, media, and universities.

The managerial class in Canada is much more powerful than that in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the managerial class makes up a much larger share of Canada’s population, because far more Canadians go to college. Whereas 51.9 percent of Americans between the ages of 25–34 have tertiary education, in Canada it is almost 65 percent. While America’s elites are decentralized (Wall Street and Silicon Valley are very different), Canada’s elites are concentrated in the Laurentian corridor of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. And there is a revolving door between the managerial institutions. Since Lester Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968, every leader of the Liberal party has begun his career as either a civil servant, academic, professional party hack, Bay Street lawyer, or leader of one of Canada’s Laurentian “continental corporations” — or as the son of one of these. These institutions receive generous federal funding. So does the Canadian media, which is now financially dependent on the federal government. Because these institutions are regionally concentrated and rely on symbiotic relationships with one another, Canada’s managerial classes hold hegemonic political power.

Canada’s vassalage to the U.S. intensifies the harmful effects of this situation. Once Canada surrendered its British character and integrated itself into the American empire, it became part of the continental system of elite overproduction. Ambitious Canadians seeking the top-tier education that will gain them elite status quickly discover that Canada’s universities are, as one professor once told me, “frustratingly above-average”. The most talented young Canadians therefore tend to jump ship and move to the U.S. The sine qua non for their success is mastering the American empire’s language, which is the language of liberalism. Every ambitious Canadian learns that to ascend, you must talk like American liberal elites. The Canadians who become fluent succeed: They get a top-tier U.S. degree and join the prestigious American networks. By and large, these people do not then want to move back to the imperial backwater. The few who do — such as former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff, who taught at Harvard, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who studied at Harvard and married a New York Times reporter — return home confident that they will be the big fish in the small pond. Hence Canada suffers a protracted brain drain to the U.S.

Nathan Pinkoski, “What Led To Canada’s Crisis”, First Things, 2022-02-24.

May 26, 2022

Why Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia Imploded in Moscow

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 25 May 2022

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When Napoleon took Moscow, he expected victory over Russia was just a matter of time. But six weeks later he has to flee the city as his entire Russia campaign collapses. The strengthened Russian Army is attacking from three sides, winter is coming and in far away Paris a coup is underway.

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Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon, Volume 1, New York 1966.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Maag, Albert. Die Schicksale der Schweizerregimente in Napoleons I. Feldzug nach Russland 1812. 1900.
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Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.

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The hierarchy of scientific journals

Filed under: Books, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Melinda Baldwin’s Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.

Full title: The Assumption of the Virgin..Artist: Francesco Botticini..Date made: probably about 1475-6..

For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.

Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige.

But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.

I grew curious about this when I realized that most researchers treat journal prestige as a given. Everyone knows that Nature and Science matter enormously, yet few would be able to say why exactly. But this is important! Prestigious institutions, from universities to media companies to major sports competitions, have a huge impact on the world. It’s useful to understand how they came to be, beyond “being famous for being famous”.

One reason this is more difficult than it sounds is that we often settle for superficial answers. Selectivity, for instance, is a common explanation: prestige simply comes from obtaining what is hard to obtain, such as a Harvard degree, an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize. Nature is indeed highly selective, accepting less than 10% of submitted articles (and the vast majority of papers are not even deemed worthy of a submission to Nature by their authors). Yet harsh selectivity alone cannot explain prestige, or it would be trivial to launch a prestigious journal or university just by setting an artificially low acceptance rate.

Another facile explanation is longevity. It’s true that prestigious institutions are often old, and indeed Nature has been around for more than 150 years since its birth in 1869. Science is only slightly younger, having been founded in 1880. But there are many older scientific journals: the oldest one, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was created two hundred years before Nature, in 1665. Then there are more recent publications that are prestigious: Cell, for instance, was founded in 1974. The correlation between prestige and longevity is real, but imperfect. It also says nothing of causation: does longevity cause prestige, or does prestige cause longevity?

What matters is not the span of time per se, but the specific events that happened — in other words, the history. Making Nature, while not specifically about prestige, gives us exactly that.

I’m Moving to a New Shop!!!

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 25 May 2022

It’s time to get out of the basement, but where am I going?

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(Needs tune-up to work well.)
Crown Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/3l89Dut
(Works out of the box)
Carving Knife: https://amzn.to/2DkbsnM
Narex True Imperial Chisels: https://amzn.to/2EX4xls
(My favorite affordable new chisels.)
Blue-Handled Marples Chisels: https://amzn.to/2tVJARY
(I use these to make the DIY specialty planes, but I also like them for general work.)

*Sharpening*
Honing Guide: https://amzn.to/2TaJEZM
Norton Coarse/Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/36seh2m
Natural Arkansas Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/3irDQmq
Green buffing compound: https://amzn.to/2XuUBE2

*Marking and Measuring*
Stockman Knife: https://amzn.to/2Pp4bWP
(For marking and the built-in awl).
Speed Square: https://amzn.to/3gSi6jK
Stanley Marking Knife: https://amzn.to/2Ewrxo3
(Excellent, inexpensive marking knife.)
Blue Kreg measuring jig: https://amzn.to/2QTnKYd
Round-head Protractor: https://amzn.to/37fJ6oz

*Drilling*
Forstner Bits: https://amzn.to/3jpBgPl
Spade Bits: https://amzn.to/2U5kvML

*Work-Holding*
Orange F Clamps: https://amzn.to/2u3tp4X
Screw Clamp: https://amzn.to/3gCa5i8

Get my woodturning book: http://www.rexkrueger.com/book

Follow me on Instagram: @rexkrueger

Alex Tabarrok reviews The Parent Trap

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok looks at Nate G. Hilger’s new book, The Parent Trap:

Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.

Let’s unpack some details. Begin with schooling. It’s very common to bemoan the state of schools in the “inner city” or to complain about “local financing” which supposedly guarantees that poor counties will have underfunded schools. All of this, however, is decades out-of-date.

    A hundred years ago there really were massive public-school resource gaps by class and race. These days, however, state and federal spending play a larger role than local property tax revenue and distribute educational resources more progressively … In fact, when we include federal aid, 42 states spent more on poor school districts than on rich school districts in 2012. The same pattern holds between schools within districts

    … The highest spending districts are large urban centers such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. These cities spend large sums to educate rich and poor children alike. p. 10-11

Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.

Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.

But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:

    If we compare individuals with similar cognitive test scores, Black college graduates earn higher wages than white college graduates. Studies that don’t control for test score differences but examine earnings gaps within specific professions — lawyers, physicians, nurses, engineers, scientists — tend to find Black workers earn zero to 10 percent less than white workers. These gaps could reflect discrimination, unmeasured skill differences, or other factors such as geography. In any case, such gaps are small compared to the 50 percent overall Black-white earnings gap and reinforce the idea that closing skills gaps would go a long way toward closing income gaps.

Hilger argues that racism does play an important role in explaining Black-white wage differentials but it’s the historical racism that made black parents less skilled and less able to pass on skills to their children. In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination. The success of Nigerians and Jamaican immigrants in the United States also speaks to this point. (Long time readers may recall that in 2016 I dubbed Hilger’s paper on Asian Americans and Black Americans the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Year.)

The Banshee | Artifacts Interview Series

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legion Magazine
Published 15 Mar 2019

Legion Magazine‘s Stephen J. Thorne sat down with Andrew Burtch, the Post-1945 historian at the Canadian War Museum, to discuss what was the crown jewel of the Royal Canadian Navy’s air fleet – the Banshee. Video edited by Adam Tindal.

For more information, visit: www.legionmagazine.com/artifacts

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