Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2025

Materially well-off but downwardly mobile

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

Rob Henderson considers the plight of an entire generation of kids raised in privilege, but economically incapable of improving or even barely maintaining their material condition … the downwardly mobile children of wealthy parents:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem — the petty disappointments of a small slice of America — but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.

To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.

Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages — or perhaps the right word is privileges — it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.

Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory”. The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.

Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same — raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.

What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.

Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to — and surrounded by — overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.

In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.

It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.

Elite overproduction is real, and has real world ramifications …

September 1, 2025

QotD: The Ivy League

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

I’ve been around Ivy Leaguers, y’all, and everything you think is true about them IS true, in spades. The Ivy League is “elite”, all right, but it’s surely not because of the education.

The Ivies are now what they’ve pretty much always been — the equivalent of those Higher Party Academies in Moscow. They’re finishing schools for the Apparat. Oh sure, you can probably find a graduate of Ohio State or some such place at Quantico or Foggy Bottom … but I promise you, he hears about it every single day of his life. If they don’t actually teach classes called “How to be a Toady in the DOJ” and “Catching a Senator’s Farts” at Dartmouth, they might as well.

Take your Basic College Girl, make her unisex, crank her up way past eleven on meth and steroids, and that’s the typical Ivy League grad. And they all go directly into Government. Just in case you still cherished some vague hope we could vote our way out of this, remember that guys like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were the absolute best the Ivy League has produced in the modern era. The Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam says hi!

Severian, “First Mailbag of the New Year”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-07.

Update, 2 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 28, 2025

“According to elite theory our world is controlled by a ruling class”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Spaceman Spiff explores the notions of “elite theory”, which in one variant or another seems to be a bedrock belief of most dissidents in the west:

Elite theory is based on an important observation; small groups can more easily organize than large groups.

A modest number of wealthy individuals with common goals will easily run rings around a whole town, region or country because the masses cannot easily organize.

This infers enormous advantages, not the least of which is a small group can discuss and agree a strategy and then stick to it. Because of this some imagine elites as more able than they really are.

But power is tricky. All the money and all the clout in the world means nothing if you can’t project it far.

And our powerful, wealthy elites have one great weakness, they must work through others.

A hierarchy therefore exists which we occasionally glimpse adding to our confusion when we use words like “elites.”

Global rulers are ostensibly at the top. They sit above nation-states. They are truly post-national, controlling central banks and international finance. They are the closest thing we have to world controllers. Some seem to hold power over huge swathes of the globe, like gigantic economic zones.

In addition, all nations have visibly important people; kings, dictators, presidents and others. National elites are those whose power is largely confined to a territory. They lack the international reach of global elites.

The media represent power too. They are there to shape the narratives that govern our perceptions. Most traditional media outlets serve elite goals although some of their members wield tremendous power themselves.

The political class are the obvious lackeys of the powerful. Voters seem constantly amazed politicians never really improve anything once in power, but that is because they don’t serve those below them, only those above. Once you see this their behaviour makes much more sense. They dance to the tune of their paymasters. Their primary job is to pretend democracy works.

The corporate leaders are a less visible example of the same thing. They manage the commercial wing of elite interests while pretending to be businessmen.

Blackrock and others have almost completely abandoned anything resembling capitalism. They are gamers of systems, not the innovators of yesteryear. Just one reason our economies are struggling.

It is the major corporations who have helped establish diversity and climate goals, for instance, so they matter for furthering elite ambitions.

Local and regional elites exist too. Everything is replicated at ever smaller scales, including public sector employees and corporate managers.

These are the foot soldiers often oblivious to any elite goals. They just respond to the incentives and disincentives they are aware of at their level.

There is more, including academia and the major institutions. But the key idea is this is the hierarchy the powerful must work with to get anything done.

Projecting power downwards

At each stage there are numerous problems conveying information and taking action. Running the world is a demanding hobby. Power means nothing unless you can implement your schemes.

Communication is an ever-present issue. Things are misinterpreted. People misunderstand goals and aspirations.

There are probably no written plans. A lot of influence is achieved via think tanks and talking shops like the World Economic Forum, so is open to misinterpretation. It must be like herding cats as these grand ideas cascade down the hierarchy and are misunderstood or overlooked.

This process is further retarded by quotas and ideological capture. Woke brings many distortions; just ask the declining universities. Hiring for alignment does not select for the best. Elite need for control therefore leaves them with reduced options.

We’ve all seen some new appointee take over a position of authority and promptly run it into the ground. Imagine having to rely on that process to get anything done?

The lower down the totem pole we go the less able the people as a general rule. Specifically, in these benthic depths far from the centres of power, the minor lackeys run the grave risk of actually believing the claptrap used to control the masses which can be a real impediment to progress.

Those near the bottom generally lack the intellectual vigour to question anything which makes for obedient slaves, albeit dangerously detached from strategic awareness or understanding of the purpose of the narratives they uncritically embrace.

Such devotion is handy at first, it can provide real energy to make changes. Covid policies were established quickly thanks to this phenomenon. The implementation units were clearly unable to assess evidence or think for themselves; man on TV said wear mask and sit in back garden, so they did.

The price for such mindlessness is confusion and this is where control can be lost.

Anti-white animus gestated on university campuses was useful for the powerful to keep the most dangerous demographic down, and therefore less likely to form a counter-elite, but has now morphed into anti-Israel and pro-Palestine sentiment. It is evident many in academia, oblivious to the purpose of “decolonization,” have now misapplied this ethnic weapon to Israelis and Jews more generally to the horror of the powerful with plans of their own.

We see similar effects with climate zealots in positions of authority, especially in politics and media circles. It can be galling to realize some prominent person you once thought was capable actually thinks we only have twelve years to save the planet or wants to end cheeseburgers to help the coral reefs. Can they really be that impressionable?

What is frustrating for us must be maddening to the powerful as they watch brainwashed clowns misunderstand their goals. When your tools include the gullible things can get out of hand quickly.

That’s why many of the doom and gloom predictions based on some omniscient Illuminati are so off the mark despite their elevated position in society.

Projecting power is akin to shooting people in swimming pools. You can see them under the water, often very clearly, but it doesn’t necessarily help.

You fire off your rounds, but they quickly lose force as they enter some new medium of which you know very little, plus they can whizz away in unexpected directions, entirely missing their mark.

All that money and influence but you have to rely on dancing monkeys to get anything done. What use are trillions when Glenda in HR actually thinks her purpose in life is to root out systemic racism or heal the planet? Her initial zeal can quickly become a liability as ultimately happened during Covid when many began to wake up after the clownshow became too absurd to continue.

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

June 27, 2025

QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.1 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

[…]

By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.

But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.

Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

    2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!

    3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.

June 10, 2025

The limits of female empathy

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

Janice Fiamengo discusses the 2006 book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man by journalist Norah Vincent. Intended as a kind of exposé of male privilege, her investigations turned into something rather different than she originally intended:

    Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.

It’s a strange world in which the above observations — by a woman — are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.

In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.

With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.

Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.

The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and many men expressed gratitude and appreciation for the empathy and insight in Vincent’s work.

Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?

Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.

Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.

Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.

Even when someone goes beyond temporary male drag, there is a palpable surprise that mens’ lives are not a well-watered garden of male privilege:

Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears“. They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.

Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being”.

March 28, 2025

QotD: Prosopography

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the History Biz, prosopography is the study of quasi-familial relationships, a kind of “collective biography”. It’s different from genealogy, which studies direct lineal descent — So-and-So begot Wossname, like in the Bible. Your classic prosopography is Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which you still see Leftards on the Internet hauling out all the time, though of course they don’t know where it comes from (or that modern historians, who are far more flamingly Leftist than Beard ever dreamed of being, consider it largely discredited).

Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage” — a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius (et al.), the patron / client relationship got extended to the army — coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State — and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.

Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading — someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.

It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back — no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple — but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron / client relationship. But in a society like the USSR — ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution — ideology imposed some hard limits …

Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-01.

March 6, 2025

QotD: Old Etonians

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you’d told somebody in the mid 2000s that David Cameron would become Prime Minister, they would have laughed in your face. If you then told them that a few years later Boris Johnson would be one of his successors, they’d consider you bonkers. This was Blairite Britain – gone were the days of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, and the coterie of other prime ministers educated at that same dusty institution – the hegemony of the Old Etonian was firmly over. Yet Cameron became the 19th Prime Minister educated there, and Boris the 20th, making five out of the fourteen prime ministers elected during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign Old Etonians.

When I first started there, the traditions seemed daunting, and while you had a week of grace period to find your feet, it took a lot longer for the novelty truly to wear off. Dressed in a tailsuit that makes you look like a penguin, and that even the production team of Downton Abbey would question, it’s a complete culture shock. Teachers become “beaks”; homework becomes “EW (short for Extra Work)”, and the threat of “tardy book” (a punishment where you have to get up early to report to the School Office) is ever present. Your life is governed by a tutor, housemaster, and dame (a surrogate mother for your time there, and the most influential person in your day-to-day life), and outside of lessons (known as “schools”) you’re left to your own devices. It’s a sink or swim situation, and some can’t hack the overload of independence.

You’re constantly surrounded by things named after great men who have come before you – whether that be John Maynard Keynes (an economics society) or William Gladstone (a library) – and you can’t help but see yourself as heir to some great dynasty. Sitting in Upper School – a large schoolroom now mainly used for talks by visiting speakers – the walls are lined with marble busts of illustrious Old Etonians past, and it’s not hard to daydream about joining them. In our first ever assembly the head master put it best: “If you know that some interesting people have gone on to do some interesting things, whether it’s George Orwell or the Duke of Wellington, that does implicitly ask the question, why not you?” Success never seems far away, and often you’re regaled with tales about the time your beak caught a famous actor smoking, or how awful a pupil a noted academic once was. Neither does service, particularly when you pass the memorial boards for the First World War (as you do daily on the way to chapel): 1157 Old Etonians died, and 37 Old Etonians have won the Victoria Cross – 17 more than any other school.

In your final years, it’s fun to try and work out who’s going to be most successful after leaving, and – it never seems too outlandish – who among you could be a future prime minister. The people you consider are never confined to a particular group – it’s not “one of the debaters” or “one of the Rugby XV” – in fact, it’s often those who you can’t seem to categorize, or transverse the groups that are most magnetic. To get into Eton, you have to do well in the infamous “List Test”, composed of a computerized assessment and an interview with one of the beaks. For an eleven year old, it can be brutal (one boy left crying midway through our test), particularly as you don’t know what they want: they’re not looking for candidates that fit a particular box. Potential is valued more than current ability, and the greatest asset is that of being interesting. With only one in five getting an offer (odds stiffer than Oxbridge), and after five years of being expected to perform at the highest level, it’s unsurprising that students end up so successful.

Ivo Delingpole, “Boris and the Spirit of Eton”, Die Weltwoche, 2020-01-29.

February 28, 2025

Taking money from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains how government foreign aid is quite literally anti-democratic (which is why it’s rare for governments to allow the voters any input about the subject):

Obviously we need to start with the observation of Peter, Lord Bauer — foreign aid is nicking money off poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries. As the sort of people who rule us went to school with those who rule the poor countries — I did, with the President of the Philippines, Bongbong, for example. V different year but still — it’s people nicking our money to spend on making themselves look good to their peer group.

You know, elite virtue signalling.

Yes, of course 0.7% of GDP should be spent upon Official Development Aid. ODA is very important, dont’cha kno’? Every chav in Britain should have near 1% of everything they do collected up and sent off to Ol’ Bongie. Obviously. Couldn’t face an Old Boys dinner without that now, could I?

Now of course that’s not actually quite how it’s put even if that is what it actually is. But just the sometimes the truth slips out from those corridors of power.

    The former head of the Foreign Office has warned Rachel Reeves not to cut Britain’s international aid spending, amid signs the chancellor is willing to raid the development budget to help pay for higher defence spending.

    Simon McDonald, the former lead civil servant at the Foreign Office, said it would damage Britain’s global reputation if Reeves chose to reduce aid as she looks for savings across Whitehall in this year’s spending review.

Reputation? Among whom? Among those who attended Pembroke?

    He told the Guardian: “At times of financial need, development assistance is an easy target for trimming because international assistance is not generally voters’ priority”.

Remember folks, democracy is that we the people decide. We’ve even those out there insisting that all economic decisions must be made via democratic means — that true economic democracy which is to be the new socialism.

But when democracy — in the form of “We don’t give a shit about that” — bumps up against the elite desire to look good at the state banqueting table guess what? Democracy has to git to buggery and the elite get to spend our money their way all the same.

No, really. Look what he’s saying. Voters don’t care. But they must be forced to pay all the same. So much for that vaunted democracy.

January 27, 2025

Davos is so over, even the high-priced escort girls are giving it a miss this year

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson enjoys a nice, rich dish of schadenfreude as the “elite” of the Davos gab-fest dimly begin to realize that their high times are over:

It was a great ride while it lasted, hey, lefties? But it’s over now. You have been left in the screech forward of history. That stink? It’s the burning wreckage of your “ideas”. All you weasely little people like the slender tight-mouthed beta-males at the Biden White House, or the cross-dressing central banker Mark Carney who is laughably trying to be Prime Minister of Canada after bankrupting not one but TWO countries, are history. Like Rory Stewart, the regime apologist in the U.K., who says things like “there’s something really dark and nasty behind the right“. Like Macron, Jacinta Ardern, Trudeau, like the nasty little snake people at Davos right now trying to extract yet more blood and treasure from us. KNEEL and take your SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS OR YOU ARE RACIST.

You sold your birthright for power. You sold us for power. You sold the future for power. When you get to heaven this is what you should say: I failed, I ruined three generations. I need to be broken down into my component parts and remade into a new being, with a new soul. The old one is stained with the killing of innocents. Like the thousands dead from your obsession with psychopathic primitive Muslims, like the child migrants in cartel sex slavery.

All your projects are in ruins. All your toys lie broken. Your failure is one for the Ages. It will be discussed in heaven and hell for millennia. You have bankrupted the world. Even the freaking oligarchs abandoned you. Even the central bankers decided they badly needed growth or they and their heirs will be living underground for the next five hundred years, hunted like the ghastly little demons they worship. Trump means growth. Big big growth.

You probably don’t know who Rory Stewart is, but he is useful as an example. Not for him, the careful measured sentimental meaningless pap that comes out of every leftie politician’s mouth. Nope, he’s a gabber. He loves attention, in fact, he never ever shuts up, so he is their interlocutor, their dark shrunken snobbish soul.

Stewart is a “writer” and a Westminster gadfly, “much loved” in the British way of saying, “he’s so cute”. He advises, he hangs out with Afghan warlords, he speaks at gatherings of the great and the good. He runs for office, he writes editorials. He is a product of the British elite educational system, and the administrative left, which is to say the outfit that until Monday ran the world. And he has an ego the size of his big stretchy mouth.

This is what he had to say about Trump on Monday. Imagine a rich spoiled debutante drawling this and you’ll get his character.

“He’s so lowering.” By which he means he brings down the tone. Like for instance, the interviewer says Trump tweeted at Gavin Newsom they day after the fires, “Congratulations Gavin New Scum.”

Now, of course, that is how I think of Newscum.

[…]

“We need ideas”

“We need a plan for growth”

“We need to explain how we’re going to sort out the economy”

“and society”.

Buddy, your lot has been in power since Thatcher.

Someone said recently that the reason the English do absolutely NOTHING about those raped, sodomized, beaten little girls is that the upper classes view the lower as less than human, so they don’t care. They don’t care about the freezing old ladies in council houses, the fact that women can’t walk down streets safely, or the farmers not being able to feed people.

For these benevolent rulers protected in their rural retreats and policed neighbourhoods, the multicultural ideal is more important than their fellow citizens.

These are the people who have taken the ideas of Marxism, merged them with predatory capitalism, and from their offices and through countless conferences and meetings a year, try to distribute goods “fairly”, as they determine. Which country shall rise, which shall be invaded, whose resources do we want next? What delicious war shall we start?

That’s what they mean when they say “our democracy”. It’s theirs and nobody else’s.

For more than half a century they have focused on impoverishing middle America. Not the upper middle class, no, they’re fine. Like western Europe, they were broken early and are happy servants, mouthing legacy media propaganda like good little serfs with nice houses and a chance for their children to join the betas taking their orders from the grim oligarchs behind the scenes.

September 24, 2024

Trust, once lost, is very difficult to re-gain

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

Public officials and legacy media often complain about the public’s significant decrease in trust for once highly trusted organizations, yet rarely seem to realize that they’ve done everything they could to destroy the public’s confidence in them and their actions:

Dr. Jay Varma, 21 April, 2021.
Photo by the New York City Health Department via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t want to be a cynic.

While I don’t think anyone should blindly trust anything or anyone who hasn’t earned it, I don’t want to blindly distrust everything and everyone, either.

However, there are areas where distrust is warranted.

Over the weekend, a number of stories popped up in my various feeds that sort of illustrated the point pretty well from a number of different angles.

Let’s start with partying in the time of COVID.

    New York City’s former COVID czar was caught on a hidden camera boasting about having drug-fueled sex parties mid-pandemic — and admitting New Yorkers would have been “pissed” if they had found out at the time.

    Dr. Jay Varma — who served as senior health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and was tasked with running the Big Apple’s pandemic response — made the confession in secretly recorded conversations with a so-called undercover operative from conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s “Mug Club“.

    “I had to be kind of sneaky about it … because I was running the entire COVID response in the city,” Varma was filmed telling the unidentified woman on Aug. 1 in what appears to be a restaurant.

    The edited clips of the hidden camera footage, which were all recorded between July 27 and Aug. 14 in New York, were released by Crowder on Thursday. The Post has not reviewed the full, unedited recordings.

Now, let’s remember that Varma admits to doing the exact opposite of what he was telling everyone else to do. He was part of the government and part of the effort to shape New York’s response to COVID-19.

And the city is large enough that their response was likely to inform other communities.

Meanwhile, he’s out partying it up while everyone else is sitting at home, trying to figure out how to survive.

Remember how our current problems stem from this time. People like Varma told us we all had to stay inside. Most of us couldn’t go to work, couldn’t go to bars or restaurants, couldn’t go out to the movies or to take part in activities. As a result, people suffered and the economy suffered. Stimulus plans were put in place to flush trillions of dollars into the economy, only to remain there as more and more got pumped in later, creating inflation and making the economy worse in the long run, but that time locked up was essential because we had to stop the virus.

And this twit is out sexing it up while the rest of us were shut inside trying not to go nuts.

He wasn’t alone, either. A number of folks from various institutions were part of the “rules for thee but not for me” crowd, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to dinner at The French Laundry — which is the dumbest name for a restaurant ever — during the lockdowns or Austin’s mayor telling everyone to stay inside while he went to Mexico.

Of course, bad public officials are nothing new. We’ve all seen them over the years.

But our media is also failing us.

August 23, 2024

Woman with three multi-million dollar homes tells the rest of us we need to cut back our expectations

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

Sometimes it’s hard not to be cynical:

We often use the word “need” a little more than we probably should. We need to go see this movie when it’s in the theater or we need to get that new gadget. Often, we use it to describe a very strong desire, and I get it.

I mean, I do it too.

The truth is that our needs are much more basic than that. We need clothing, food, shelter, etc.

And that worries me because Michelle Obama thinks that taking more than we absolutely need is a problem.

    I can’t even …

    Yesterday I wrote about how shamelessness is a superpower, and I have to say that it is a wonder to behold.

    As the Democrats gather in Chicago to experience the religious ecstasy of being surrounded by each other and sniffing their own farts, they are treated to speeches from elite hypocrites who pretend to be perfectly normal people.

    Last night was the ol’ HOPENCHANGE shtick, with Michele and Barack Obama babbling on about things they don’t believe while Obama sycophants babble on about how their “spiritual voids” were filled by the Lightbringer.

    An emotional high point was, apparently, Michelle’s speech in which she blathered on about how very normal her family was and how they were egalitarians who were suspicious of rich people.

To be accurate, she said, “suspicious of people who took more than they need”.

I find this fascinating because, well, the Obamas own three homes. The least amount they paid for a home was $1.65 million, and that was in 2005.

I’m always amazed at how people who spend their lives working in the public sector and for non-profits can amass so much wealth, but apparently, that’s just what they need.

Let’s understand that most of us are living with far more than we absolutely need to survive. We also have a lot of things that simply provide comfort, such as smartphones, televisions, computers, and so on.

So if we’re to be suspicious of people who took more than they need, should we be skeptical of the person looking back at us in the mirror?

Who decides what one needs? To what level are we ascribing the term “need” anyway?

Does anyone need $750,000 for an hour-long speech?

August 21, 2024

QotD: Cyclists at “Flyover State”

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Compared to your average college town cyclist, Ed Begley Jr. is a paragon of humility. I’ve never understood it, but for so many of my fellow “Americans”, there seems to be this all-purpose Asshole License you can issue yourself. It’s kinda like the “White Privilege” card, in that no one has ever seen one, but unlike “White Privilege”, the people who imagine themselves possessors of the Asshole License use it, every minute of every day. Did the seventeen year old in your life just read The Fountainhead or The Catcher in the Rye? Then you know what I mean — that kid just issued himself the Asshole License. Obviously getting dreadlocks (if you’re White) or existing (if you’re black) grants you the Asshole License, as does “passing a Gender Studies course” or “realizing that Israel’s actions don’t always match up with its rhetoric”.

But, my friends, the easiest way to obtain an Asshole License is to take up cycling. It must be something about those doofy helmets — anyone willing to wear what looks like a giant athletic supporter jammed down over his eyebrows has to be some kind of douchebag to begin with, and since nut-squashing lycra pants must squeeze out whatever residual testosterone they had left, it’s no wonder that cyclists are such bitches.

Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.

July 19, 2024

Airline Food During the Golden Age of Air Travel

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 9, 2024

Back before airlines could compete with lower prices, they competed with the quality of atmosphere, service, and, of course, food.

I’d be happy to have this pot roast on the ground, let alone on an airplane. The meat is so tender that it falls apart, the vegetables and herbs give it wonderful flavor, and you get the added bonus of it making your house smell awesome as it simmers.
(more…)

May 4, 2024

Process optimization can definitely be taken too far

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer considers systems that have been overoptimized to the detriment of most users and the benefit of a small, privileged minority:

I know a guy who used to make his living as an eBay reseller. That is, he’d find something on eBay that he thought was underpriced so long as the auction didn’t go above X dollars, buy it, then resell it for more than he paid for it Classic imports-exports, really, a digital junk shop. Eventually he got to the point where, with some items, he didn’t ever have physical possession of them; he had figured out a way to get them directly from whoever he bought an item from to the person he had sold the item to, while still collecting his bit of arbitrage along the way. This buying and selling of items on eBay, looking for deals, was sufficient to be his full-time job and pay for a mortgage. But the last time I saw him, a few years ago, he had gotten an ordinary office job. He told me that it had become too difficult to find value; potential sellers and buyers alike had access to too many tools that could reveal the “real” price of an item, and there was little delta to eke out. He’s not alone. If you search around in eBay-related forums, you’ll find that many longtime sellers have reached similar conclusions. The hustle just doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t suppose there’s any great crime there — it’s all within the rules. And there does appear to still be an eBay-adjacent reselling economy; it’s just that, as far as I can glean, it’s driven by algorithms and bots that average resellers simply don’t have access to. It appears that some super-resellers have implemented software solutions to identify underpriced goods and buy them automatically and algorithmically. They have optimized the system for their own use, giving them an advantage, putting other sellers at a disadvantage, and arguably hurting buyers by eliminating uncertainty that sometimes results in lower-than-optimal-to-sellers prices. This is all in sharp contrast to the early years, when my friend would keep listings for lucrative product categories open – in separate windows, not tabs, that’s how long ago this was – and refresh until he found potential moneymakers. That sort of human searching and bidding work stands at a sharp disadvantage compared to those with information-scraping capacity and automated tools. It’s a good example of how access to data has left systems overoptimized for some users. One of the things that the internet is really good at is price discovery, and these digital tools help determine the “optimal” price of items on eBay, which results in less opportunity for arbitrage for other players.

My current working definition of overoptimization goes like this: overoptimization has occurred when the introduction of immense amounts of information into a human system produces conditions that allow for some players within that system to maximize their comparative advantage, without overtly breaking the rules, in a way that (intentional or not) creates meaningful negative social consequences. I want to argue that many human systems in the 2020s have become overoptimized in this way, and that the social ramifications are often bad.

Getting a restaurant reservation is a good example. Once upon a time, you called a restaurant’s phone number and asked about a specific time and they looked in the book and told you if you could have that slot or not. There was plenty of insiderism and petty corruption involved, but because the system provided incomplete information that was time consuming to procure, there was a limit to how much you could game that system. Now that reservations are made online, you can look and see not only if a specific slot has availability but if any slots have availability. You can also make highly-educated guesses about what different slots are worth on the market through both common sense (weekend evenings are the most valuable etc) and through seeing which reservations get snapped up the fastest in an average week. And being online means that the reservation system is immediate and automatic, so you can train a bot to grab as many reservations as you want, near-instantaneously, and you can do so in a way that the system doesn’t notice. (Unlike, say, if you called the same restaurant over and over again and tried to hide your voice by doing a series of fake accents.) The outcome of all this is that getting a reservation at desirable places is a nightmare and results in a secondary market that, like seemingly everything in American life, is reserved for the rich. The internet has overoptimized getting a restaurant reservation and the result is to make it more aggravating and less egalitarian.

As has been much discussed, nearly the exact same scenario has made getting concert tickets a tedious and ludicrously-pricy exercise in frustration.

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