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 27, 2022
QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class
May 10, 2022
QotD: When are professors not really professors? When they’re “adjunct” or “contingent” professors
When most people think about professors, they are thinking about tenured or tenure-track (TT) professors. In the USA, generally, tenure-track professors (those who will be eligible for tenure at some time in the future) have the job title of assistant professor. Academics with tenure are typically associate professors or full professors. What all of these have in common is that the professor’s salary and workload assume that they are being paid both for their primary teaching responsibilities, but also some amount of research or public outreach. It’s a whole package. How much teaching and how much research differs substantially institution to institution.
Then you have contingent or (more commonly) adjunct professors, who are not eligible for tenure. Mostly these are early career academics still looking to land a permanent tenure-track position. Now I want to be clear here: adjuncts almost always have PhDs – the days when it was possible for people to land even these jobs without a completed dissertation and a finished PhD are long over. Most students have no idea their instructors are adjuncts which – given how poorly many institutions treat their adjuncts – is often damned heartbreaking.
Universities have realized that “adjunct” has a negative ring to it, so they call these folks (which, as you may have grasped, includes me) all sorts of job titles designed to disguise that fact (mostly from prospective students and parents). The most honest of those (and, in my opinion, the best) is “Visiting Instructor” or “Visiting Lecturer”, but you’ll see all sorts of permutations of “visiting” or “teaching” faculty. In job postings, the most substantial of these positions (with a full teaching load) are often described as “Visiting Assistant Professor” (VAP) – but note that visiting in the front essentially invalidates the two words that follow it: a VAP is an adjunct, not an assistant professor. They’re just an adjunct with a full load (and maybe benefits, but often not).
Now, the exact arrangements for these sorts of contingent positions vary wildly, but as a rule (again, there are exceptions!) as a rule, adjuncts are paid for their teaching on a class by class basis, essentially as contract workers. They often don’t get benefits (like health insurance, or even an office in some places!) or any kind of job security – the positions are frequently year-to-year or even semester-to-semester. Crucially, while adjuncts are often expected to discuss their research during the hiring process and frequently aim – as I do – to continue with it during their adjunct job, they are not paid for the research they do and generally do not receive the sort of institutional support which would enable an active research agenda (funding, sabbaticals, etc). They are paid to teach classes and pretty much only teach classes. It is not an ideal system.
(I’m intending, probably as we get closer to summer, to do a short post-series covering the entire academic life-cycle, along with what exactly an academic historian does all day. The popular image that we’re all just hanging out, smoking pipes, drinking wine and having deep thoughts is not very accurate.)
Which brings us back around to the Patreon. I am currently (as I write this) teaching as a Visiting Lecturer, which is to say, an adjunct. Now, I want to be clear that I am not beating up on my current institution here. I actually think the department I am currently in has been very good with my appointment here – it was extremely useful for me (for reasons I won’t get into). But they aren’t paying me for my research or for this blog.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 13, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-12.
May 2, 2022
QotD: Online education
And that’s just college, which now more than ever is exactly what the sententious goobers on the faculty always said it was: A professional football team with a few classrooms attached. They’re memory-holed now, no doubt, but I recall a time over the summer when a few studies on the impact of online “learning” came out. They were worse than even I expected, and I’m cynical enough to give Diogenes wood. Some huge fraction of kids never even bothered logging on. At all. And, of course, they were promoted to the next grade …
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
April 30, 2022
“The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids”
Peter Jacobsen refutes the claim that the NFL Draft is like socialism:
Once we recognize that teams aren’t really business competitors, and insofar as there is athletic competition it’s tempered to maximize profit, the claim that the draft is socialism rings pretty hollow.
But, as if this weren’t enough, history also debunks the claim that the draft is a socialist institution.
In 1934, Minnesota Gophers’ senior running back, Stan Kostka, led his team to an undefeated season and made himself the top prospect for professional teams. As a result, teams engaged in a bidding war which ended in Stan going to the (no longer existing) Brooklyn Dodgers.
As a result of the bidding war, Kostka became the highest paid player in the NFL (with a $5,000 contract).
The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles was so mad about losing the bidding war that he proposed the idea of the draft to the NFL the following year.
So, in other words, the NFL draft started as a way for team owners to cooperate to keep player wages below where they would be if bidding wars were allowed.
To be fair, I haven’t read everything Marx wrote. But something tells me a system where capital owners cooperate to keep employer bidding wars from occurring isn’t praised in some obscure work he and Engels published. In fact, this is about as opposite to Marx as you can get.
In the modern day, players have formed unions to combat owner cooperation, but the point remains the same. The NFL is a highly sophisticated organizational structure that allows athletic competitors to cooperate in the goal of making money.
So, insofar as Americans enjoy the exciting games created by the draft system, they don’t have socialism to thank. Instead they should thank the cooperation facilitated by self-interest channeled through the free market.
The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids.
April 22, 2022
Lucy Worsely on The Jacobites & the Scottish Enlightenment
Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 22 Jul 2018A segment on the Jacobites and the Scottish Enlightenment that blossomed in the face of Hanoverian oppression.
April 18, 2022
QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj
There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”
Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.
Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.
In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.
Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.
April 17, 2022
QotD: How jobs differ from school
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it’s a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.
In fact John Smith’s life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more different it gets.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is location. […] If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.
And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company. But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s. You may not even be aware you’re doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.*
For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
* Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don’t be fooled by the surface similarities. You’ve gone from guest to servant. It’s possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say “authorized personnel only.” But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you’re not consciously aware of it.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 11, 2022
Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples
Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:
In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:
And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.
So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.
Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.
Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.
(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)
April 9, 2022
QotD: Temporary tattoos and cultural literacy
I was once at an art fair where there was a booth selling temporary tattoos. One of the tattoos was a Chinese character that was translated on the tattoo’s plastic label as “bitch”, an appealing bit of body art for the tough girls among us, I suppose. Except a far more straightforward and accurate translation of the character would be “prostitute”, or maybe “whore”.
Teaching students who fell in love with “Eastern philosophy” via our culture’s myriad Mr Miyagis is like being the one to tell someone her tattoo says “whore”. The tattooed will be better off knowing, but she won’t thank you for telling her. Pop-culture-induced orientalism usually does wash off, but the cleanup is far less alluring than wearing the myth. At least, I console myself, Kondo’s target market is the middle-aged, so maybe my young college students won’t show up with this particular “tattoo”.
Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.
March 6, 2022
QotD: The academic rat-race
Since only “scholars” who publish get tenure, and since journals only publish original “research”, the only way to publish consistently is to make shit up. Given that Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to get tenure in, say, English Literature is to argue that, properly “deconstructed”, the list of contents on a packet of beef jerky is just as valuable — indeed, more valuable — as a “cultural artifact” than anything the Bard, curse his CisHetPat White soul, ever wrote. Hence, the road to tenure takes only left turns.
Severian, “I Learned A New Word”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-23.
February 25, 2022
QotD: The lure of the forbidden knowledge
Forbidden ideas have an appeal that orthodoxy never does — just ask Martin Luther. In fact, the parallels between the rise of the alt-right and the Reformation are interesting. In Luther’s world the printing press had recently created new and difficult to control ways for people to share subversive ideas. Early forms of capitalism led to the rise of new social classes and fueled resentment against traditional elites and traditional forms of authority. There were even early forms of the meme. Long before Pepe the Frog was co-opted by the alt-right, drawing donkey ears on images of priests was a way of provoking the powerful.
It’s surely the case that some of the speech that activists and university administrators seek to suppress poses a much more direct threat to real people than does a debate about supply side economics or evolution, but it’s worth remembering that to the Church, the Lutheran heresy was a real threat too. It posed a mortal danger to the eternal souls of people who were deceived by its falsehoods and rejected orthodoxy. I doubt that the Inquisitors felt any more qualms about deplatforming Lutheran heretics than did the activists at Middlebury.
As the Church learned, simply suppressing heresy cannot guarantee that it will go away. If anything, meeting heretical speech with violence or disruption just adds to its allure, confirming in the minds of the already convinced that they are right and leading the fence sitters to take another, perhaps more sympathetic, look. Dismissing heretical speech because it falls into a category that is rejected by the orthodox is not that much more effective a strategy.
We can do a lot to keep things from getting to the sort of highly contentious encounters like the ones at Middlebury and Berkeley, just by addressing uncomfortable issues with evidence rather than just categorization in our courses. Next time you are tempted to sidestep contentious issues in your class or to dismiss a student’s question because it falls into a forbidden category, don’t.
In the long run we can’t win an argument by avoiding it.
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
February 13, 2022
QotD: Marx’s labour theory of value gets tenure
At last, we know the answer to the question almost no one was asking: What happens when Karl Marx’s labor theory of value gets tenure?
The labor theory of value is very popular on the Left, probably because it makes no sense. Marx — who never labored once in his entire life — proposed that “labor” has inherent value, that “if we disregard the use-value of commodities, they have only one property left, that of being products of labor.”
I assure you it sounds even stupider in the original German.
The short version is that “labor” determines a product’s value, not the competitive marketplace.
It’s a crackpot theory, easily demolished.
Take the example of a skilled pastry chef and … me.
Give a few dollars worth of flour, sugar, butter, etc., to that chef and after a couple of hours of his labors, he can sell you a gorgeous and tasty cake that you would be happy to pay a lot of money to buy.
I don’t bake and have no interest in baking. Let me labor on those same ingredients for the same two hours, and you’ll get a hot mess worth less than the value of the ingredients that went into it.
(Apologies: This is not my example, but I can’t find an online resource listing the original author. [I first encountered this in a Robert Heinlein novel, but he may have been paraphrasing someone else])
It’s not the “labor,” it’s the results.
Now we’re supposed to apply this same thinking to grading English papers.
We’re supposed to accept that one student’s craptaculently-written essay has the same value as another student’s beautifully written paper because they both put the same amount of labor into writing them.
What Inoue wants college instructors to do is apply crackpot Marxist theory to those who will be disadvantaged the most if they aren’t taught proper English.
Stephen Green, “Fight ‘White Language Supremacy,’ Prof Will Grade on ‘Labor’ Not Results”, Vodkapundity, 2021-11-10.
February 5, 2022
Why great NFL players rarely make good coaches
In his (mostly) weekly mailbag post, Severian at Founding Questions considers the latest NFL scandal and some of the insane requirements to be a really great NFL quarterback and how few can both play and coach at that high level. First, the Romney Rule scandal:
I see that some black coach has sued the NFL for racial discrimination, and I must say I hope he takes them for every cent they’ve got. From the very little I’ve seen, his case is airtight, because of the NFL’s astounding stupidity. For those who don’t know, the NFL has been using what’s called the “Rooney Rule” for at least two decades now. This states that whenever a head coaching job comes up, the team must interview at least one (and I think two are mandatory now) black candidate.
Since there’s a serious dearth of black coaches at all levels of organized football (we’ll psircle back to that in a minute), this means that the same three or four guys go through the same pro forma interviews every time. As far as I understand it, then (which is not very, admittedly), this particular coach was actually told to his face that this interview with whatever team was just pro forma compliance with the Rooney Rule; we’ve already got our guy, so just fly out here, we’ll buy you lunch, have a nice chat, and put you back on the plane lickety split.
That’s one part of his airtight case. The other is that whatever team he interviewed with also has a Diversity and Inclusion Officer — because of course they do — and the DIE Officer is on record as saying all kinds of typical sanctimonious virtue-signaling shit, e.g. “We are a systemically racist organization and have to do better,” blah blah blah. Put those together, and what else can you conclude except that this coach got screwed out of a job because of explicit racial animus?
But as to why there are so few black NFL coaches, part of it is due to the way young quarterbacks are trained — he discussed this in detail here — which very frequently diverts talented young black quarterbacks away from learning the skillset they would need to make it in the NFL. The other thing is that the skills you need to be a good coach don’t often appear in a person who has the physical ability to be a good player:
If you haven’t met any high-caliber pro athletes, think of professors. The third-rate knockoff cow college I went to had a pretty big league chemist on staff; if he hadn’t won the Nobel he was at least in the conversation, something like that. This guy was a terrible teacher, because he just couldn’t grok that other people couldn’t follow him. Your brain couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with his, and he couldn’t slow his down enough to let you catch up. The best chemistry teacher was still pretty smart — no dummies in Chem PhD programs, at least not back then — but because he was nowhere near the top guy’s level, he was so much better at explaining the nuts and bolts.
You could ask the low-end guy “What do I need to do to get better at chemistry?” and he could give you some solid, practical advice (I know, because with his help I squeaked out a C-). You asked that of the high end guy, and he’d reply “Be smarter”. (Not really, he was actually pretty cool, personally, but nonetheless that’s really all he could say).
Sports works the same way. While I was there, this same college also hired a former NBA player to coach basketball. Not a Hall of Famer, but a Hall of the Pretty Good-er; if you know basketball from the late 70s, you’ve heard of him. They thought having this guy as a coach would boost recruiting and ticket sales (he was a local notable, too), and it did … for a time, but under his stewardship the team got much worse, and for the same reason the Nobel-candidate chem wiz was the worst teacher. Billy Bigshot would tell his guys “Just go out there and do this and that” … but his guys couldn’t do this and that. Billy could, which is why he was a very good player at the highest professional level; but he couldn’t grok that not everyone could do the same genetic freak shit on the court he could, because they weren’t genetic freaks like him.
Psircling back to the NFL, if you want a race-neutral entry point for discussing this stuff, there you go. Good players are generally terrible coaches, because pretty much by definition good players are genetic freaks who have no idea how they do the things they do; they just do them. Good coaches, on the other hand, tend to be nerdlingers with people skills … another fairly rare combo, it must be said, but nowhere near as rare as a 6’4″ chess master with a big arm. If pro teams really wanted to start thinking outside the box, they’d start recruiting potential coaching candidates at video game tournaments … or straight from high school, where guys have to do much more with much, much less.
January 30, 2022
Fighting progressive illiberalism with populist illiberalism
In the free-to-non-paying-subscribers segment of this week’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan laments the ratcheting illiberal tactics of both the opponents and supporters of Critical Race Theory in American schools:
I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years concerned with left illiberalism, especially the replacement of liberalism with critical theory as the guiding principle of our republic. But at the same time, of course, right illiberalism has gone into overdrive, in a polarizing vortex. Being a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, is becoming close to impossible. And this week, as I pored over a mass of bills to ban the praxis, pedagogy and content of critical theory in public high schools, I felt as if I were being tossed between the blue devil to my left and the deep red sea to my right.
One core point: the illiberalism is real on both sides. Not always in equal measure, now or in the past, but definitely on both, feeding off each other. And in public education, once again a battleground in the culture war, it seems quite obvious to me that the left bears the burden of responsibility for the conflict.
Critical theory’s long march through the institutions reached its peak some time ago in higher education — and has gone on to capture media, corporate America, medicine, the federal government, tech, science, and every cultural institution. Over $14 billion have been spent on philanthropic “equity” initiatives since the summer of 2020 alone. Of course children’s education would be affected. What hasn’t been? And of course critical theorists aim directly at children. The woke, like the Jesuits, understand the value of instilling certain concepts at a very young age. How else to transform the world?
That’s why Ibram Kendi has bequeathed the world not just one but two books on how to rear “antiracist babies”. The publisher says the new one, Goodnight Racism, “gives children the language to dream of a better world and is the perfect book to add to their social justice toolkit.” My italics. Another recent book, Woke Baby, instructs toddlers to be “a good revolutionary”, and another one explains how “activism begins in the cradle”.
You truly think that in school districts where teachers are saturated in equity training, whose unions invite Kendi to be their keynote speaker, that this is all being made up? Just peruse through all the “equity” conferences, courses, syllabi, lesson plans and curricula that now dominate public ed. Many parents found out only because they overheard what their kids were being taught online during the pandemic. Or you can just surf the web as the woke dismantle schools for the gifted, abolish SATs, describe merit as racist, and lay waste to excellent schools merely because too many Asian-American kids are succeeding in them.
What we’re seeing now is the reaction to this left-wing power grab. And — guess what? — it’s a right-wing power grab. If the left has stealthily changed public education from above, the right has now used the only power they have to fight back — political clout in state legislatures. 122 separate bills have been introduced since January 2021, 71 in the last three weeks alone. They all regulate speech by teachers in public schools, but many are now also reaching into higher education — a much more fraught area — and outright book banning. The bills are rushed; some appear well-intentioned; others are nuts; many are very vague, inviting lawsuits to clarify what they can mean in practice. In most cases, if passed, they will surely chill debate of race and sex and history — and increasingly of gender, sex and homosexuality — in high schools. And that’s a bad thing for liberal education.
January 15, 2022
The futility of “ethical” divestment agitation
In C2C Journal, William McNally explains why activists are demanding that university investments be moved away from fossil fuel companies in favour of “green” investment, and why it won’t work the way they expect:
A recent press release announced that 100 faculty and other staff at three Ontario postsecondary institutions have petitioned the University Pension Plan (UPP) to divest from the fossil fuel sector. The UPP manages the pension funds for over 30,000 employees at the University of Toronto, Queen’s and Guelph. The press release was issued by Shift Action, an organization that helps activist pension members agitate for divestment from what it calls “high-carbon, high-risk fossil fuel investments” such as oil producers and pipeline companies, and shift investments to a “decarbonized” portfolio focused on climate solutions.
I highlighted the UPP petition to draw attention to its activist source, but it is not unique, as it reflects a broader trend of politically driven or, as proponents prefer, “ethical” investing. The motivating claim for divestment in the Shift press release is that we are experiencing a “worsening climate crisis”. That too is a common sentiment nowadays. Because it is a crisis, we have a moral duty to mitigate the threat. The underlying reasoning is that divestment will starve fossil fuel companies of capital and less capital means less production which, in turn, means less CO2 emitted and ultimately slower climate change.
All campaigns of this sort trigger some immediate questions, such as, why choose a strategy as indirect as divestment? Why not reduce fossil fuel use in one’s own backyard, in this case the universities? Looking more broadly, Shift’s argument is more wishful thinking than sound economic analysis. Investors should feel free to hold any portfolio they want, but they should do so without illusions. In particular, they shouldn’t expect divestment to influence climate change by starving oil and natural gas companies of capital.
The first thing wrong is the underlying motivation: there is no climate crisis. As well-known author Bjorn Lomborg states in his most recent book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet: “Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.” One of the clearest ways to see this is through climate economics. Scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that over the next 80 years worldwide GDP per capita will likely increase to 450 percent of today’s level.
Lomborg estimates that climate damages will reduce this anticipated increase to 434 percent. Climate change is a problem. Accepting all of the assumptions that went into this modelling, climate change is likely to leave us somewhat less well off than we otherwise would be, by modestly slowing humanity’s overall progress. But judging by these figures, it is not a crisis.
H/T to Robert at SDA for the link.
