Wednesday Potpourri

First, some fun facts in the realm of brain science. From Wesley Yang:

Autism diagnoses in Silicon Valley are 2x the baseline level because of high concentration of engineering brains. Transgender child diagnoses in Hollywood are 1000x the baseline level because of high concentration of narcissistic personality disorders.

Figure that one out. Transmania is 1000 times more prevalent in Hollywood. Apparently, in some circles it’s a social contagion. Who knew?

Second, from Molson Hart, a review of the mess that American education has become.

The most underdiscussed problem in the USA right now is education. Kids born between 2001 and 2020 are a lost generation. 

1. Distracting cell phones in school 

2. Never learned to use computers because they came of age post-iPhone 

3. Lockdowns; for 2 years many simply did not go to school 

4. And now, artificial intelligence. Why do your homework when you can snap a picture and ask ChatGPT? Why learn to read or write with AI and speech to text? 

It’s in the data. And I don’t think it’s getting better. It’s getting worse. People with the means to are increasingly homeschooling or sending their kids to private, which makes public education worse. And now the kids who got a bad education themselves, who oftentimes don’t believe in the country, are teaching their younger peers (if you were born in 2000, you’re old enough to be a teacher in 2025!). 

I’m not criticizing people for putting their kids in private. I’d do the same. And I’m not saying solving these problems is easy, from unions to underpaid teachers to cell phones being needed because of school shootings. 

What I am saying is that we need to try. Because we’re not. And if we don’t, in 10 years, 10 years of educated boomers will be replaced by 10 years of kids who can’t read and write and our country is going to be an even bigger mess than it is now.

To be fair, we have been following this story in these pages.

Third, from famed Democratic pollster Mark Penn, about whom we can certainly affirm that he is an honest man. Opining on the state of the Democratic Party, especially the AOCs and Jasmine Crocketts:

“Let’s not confuse social media leaders with real leaders. These are not the real leaders of the Democratic Party. They’re saying outlandish things. So they get on social media, and then they get picked up over here. There’s no real leader of the Democratic Party right now, in all honesty. There’s no platform. There’s no program,” Penn said.

“Maybe the Democrats will get Congress back,” Penn added. “Trump was kind of dipping a bit, but I really think he’s coming back quite strongly now because he took a risk, and that risk seems to be paying off in big ways. So I think he’s gone back to being a very formidable leader.”

Fourth, speaking of pedagogical trainwrecks, public school education in New York City is a calamity. New York’s children are among the worst performers on the SAT test.

The New York Post has the story:

New York City students scored far below the rest of the state and country on the SAT — producing the lowest average scores in at least seven years, troubling new data show.

Public school students in the Big Apple scored an average 473 on the math portion of last year’s standardized test, which is widely used for college admissions in the US. It was a whopping 71 points below the average for the rest of New York, and 32 points below that of the rest of the country.

As many have said, this is not going to get better until we ban teachers’ unions.

Fifth, Claire Cain Miller, a trustworthy source, explains in the New York Times that American boys and men are in some serious trouble. We recall that Christina Hoff Sommers identified the same problem many moons ago, in her book about the war against boys.

So, now the situation is so serious that it has made the New York Times. Miller writes:

Boys and young men are struggling. Across their lives — in their educational achievement, mental health and transitions to adulthood — there are warning signs that they are falling behind, even as their female peers surge ahead.

In the United States, researchers say several economic and social changes have combined to change boys’ and men’s trajectories. School has changed in ways that favor girls, and work has changed in ways that favor women. Boys are often seen as troublemakers, and men have heard that masculinity is “toxic.”

Young people themselves tend to agree that girls are now at least equal to — and often doing better than — boys. Many young men say they feel unmoored and undervalued, and parents and adults who work with children are worried about boys. It’s not just a feeling: There’s a wealth of data that shows that boys and young men are stagnating.

Sixth, meanwhile back in Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, successor to Mayor Lori Lightweight, has been leading his city into a ditch. There is no nice way to describe it. 

Ted Dabrowski explains:

Chicago is stuck in a vicious spiral, where too much spending has led to too much debt, including massive pension debts. Taxes, as a result, have become increasingly punitive. Pile on top of that failing schools and crime, and that’s chased out people and businesses, driving down job creation and investment. Based on the data, minorities are paying a big price relative to their peers in other big cities.

At the core of Chicago’s failure is a lack of economic growth. The metro area’s GDP, after adjusting for inflation, has grown only 4% since 2019. That’s the worst economic growth among the nation’s 15 largest metro areas. 

It’s quite the opposite for cities with pro-growth, pro-business policies. The economies of booming metros like Dallas, Seattle, Miami and Phoenix have all grown 17% or more. That’s more than four times the growth rate of Chicago.

Seventh, among those who have most vigorously opposed the Trump tariff policy is Lawrence Summers. Now that Trump has shown some flexibility about the policy, Summers is cheering, on Bloomberg:

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers applauded the Trump administration’s walk-back from what he characterized as overly aggressive trade protection measures, singling out Scott Bessent in particular for his weekend work with China.

“Many of the biggest failures in US history come from an unwillingness to pull back in the face of a mistake and to double down on the infeasible — that’s what Vietnam was about,” as well as US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Summers said on Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week with David Westin. “When you make a mistake, when you’ve done something imprudent, it’s a good idea to salvage what pride you can and to retreat.”

Now, we await the Summers admission that he was wrong about the Trump policy. Similarly, as he applauds the fine work done by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, he should mention that perhaps he was wrong to suggest that Bessent ought to resign.

Finally, I now have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.