You've Never Had It So Good

You have been barraged with stories about disinformation. Now, get ready for misperception. According to Adam Mastroianni things are nowhere near as bad as we think. If we think ill of today’s conditions, we are misperceiving. Things have never been better. If you don’t like it, tough.

Now, this mode of thinking pretends that, what with the Enlightenment, we have overthrown religious dogma and superstition, thus that we live in a brave new world where kindness reigns. The only thing that prevents us from enjoying it is our misperception-- we think that things are worse than they are.

Of course, this is Panglossian optimism, enshrined by Voltaire’s famous character, who intoned that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Then again, it’s all very dubious. First, and most salient is the fact that there are two Enlightenments. The Scottish-British variety is radically different from the continental variety. The continental variety, which emerged in the eighteenth century in France and Germany, ultimately led to the Third Reich, fascism and communism. If you thought that dispensing with religion would produce a new golden age of kindness, think again.

Mastroianni finds ways to measure the level of social kindness. For example:

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

And on the other side, lab rats suggest otherwise:

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.

Dare we say that there are other ways to measure human kindness. Take the phenomenon of trans mania, the systematic efforts to mutilate children in the service of an ideology. These forms of human sacrifice seem to have broken out in Europe, even though in many countries they are being dialed back.

Even in Great Britain, the home of empirical reasoning, people have latched on to this mania.

The following is an intervention in a recent British debate about transgenderism:

I am standing up for the 12-year-old allowed to use pronouns at school who is being sold a story that she can be something that she never can. I am thinking of her after her transition, when she wakes up one morning when she is 25 and realises that she can no longer have children. She is growing facial hair, her health is generally poor, her bone density is down, her voice has broken, she has no real friends, and she has probably fallen out with mum, who is now broken for letting her take those puberty blockers and hormone replacement tablets. I am thinking of that girl sold a lie by the influencers who have now moved on to another ideology to make them money.

Now, we find American judges refusing to outlaw these practices. And we find American states that want to mutilate children without even telling parents.

And then there is the prevalence of depression among American teenagers.

Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.

The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.

Now, you can attribute this to misperception, but still, when a third of the teenage girls considered suicide two years ago, this does not tell us that the country is better off psychologically than it was in the past. One might even conclude that things are getting worse.

So, the polls suggest that Americans believe that the country has suffered a moral breakdown. Mastroianni writes:

Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.

As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.

Oh really. It is good to have scientists telling us what we should or should not think. Anyone who thinks that Americans are basking in the glow of patriotism has been smoking the wrong cigarettes. Too many people hate the country. Too many think that national pride is an outmoded concept. Teachers teach schoolchildren that the nation is an organized criminal conspiracy. And then, the same teachers tell their pupils that they need to do penance for America’s sins. We will not even mention the declining test scores, the simple fact that children who missed two years of schooling have been rendered terminally ignorant and asocial. 

This is not an illusion. It is not going to be fixed by counting our blessings. We should begin by respecting the opinions of the general population. If an expert thinks that you have never had it so good and if a third of teenage girls want to kill themselves, which one do you think deserves more credence?

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Europe in Decline

I was blissfully unaware of this story. Perhaps you have also missed out on it. According to the Financial Times Europe is becoming an also-ran in the clash of civilizations. 

Over the course of the past fifteen years the European economy has gone from being on a par with America to being an also-ran. From being somewhat larger than America’s economy, Europe has gotten to the point where the United States economy is nearly a third larger:

As Jeremy Sha­piro and Jana Puglierin of the European Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions point out: “In 2008 the EU’s eco­nomy was some­what lar­ger than Amer­ica’s: $16.2tn versus $14.7tn. By 2022, the US eco­nomy had grown to $ 25tn, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn. Amer­ica’s eco­nomy is now nearly one-third big­ger. It is more than 50 per cent lar­ger than the EU without the UK.”

Europe is now losing out when it comes to technology, energy and military hardware. It no longer even dreams of autonomy. It increasingly depends on the United States.

The US eco­nomy is now con­sid­er­ably richer and more dynamic than the EU or Bri­tain — and the gap is grow­ing. That will have an impact well bey­ond rel­at­ive liv­ing stand­ards. Europe’s depend­ence on the US for tech­no­logy, energy, cap­ital and mil­it­ary pro­tec­tion is stead­ily under­min­ing any aspir­a­tions the EU might have for “stra­tegic autonomy”.

In 2008, the EU and the US eco­nom­ies were roughly the same size. But since the global fin­an­cial crisis, their eco­nomic for­tunes have dra­mat­ic­ally diverged. As Jeremy Sha­piro and Jana Puglierin of the European Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions point out: “In 2008 the EU’s eco­nomy was some­what lar­ger than Amer­ica’s: $16.2tn versus $14.7tn. By 2022, the US eco­nomy had grown to $ 25tn, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn. Amer­ica’s eco­nomy is now nearly one-third big­ger. It is more than 50 per cent lar­ger than the EU without the UK.”

When it comes to technology, Europe has lagged. In truth, it seems incapable of doing anything beyond regulating and punishing the great American tech firms. It has none of its own. Dare we mention that China is hard at work competing against America in technology.

The European tech­no­logy land­scape is dom­in­ated by US firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. The seven largest tech firms in the world, by mar­ket cap­it­al­isa­tion, are all Amer­ican. There are only two European com­pan­ies in the top 20 — ASML and SAP. Whereas China has developed domestic tech giants of its own, European cham­pi­ons are often acquired by Amer­ican com­pan­ies. Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011; Deep Mind was bought by Google in 2014. The devel­op­ment of AI is also likely to be dom­in­ated by Amer­ican and Chinese firms.

With the exception of Great Britain, the world’s great universities are not in Europe:

The lead­ing uni­versit­ies that feed the pipeline of tech start-ups in the US are lack­ing in the EU. The Shang­hai and THE rank­ings of the world’s top uni­versit­ies both have only one EU insti­tu­tion in the top 30. (Bri­tain does bet­ter — cour­tesy of Cam­bridge, Oxford, Imper­ial and oth­ers.)

Compare and contrast the work of building semiconductors. Europe lags both America and China. Note that China is building many more facilities than we are:

In 1990, Europe made 44 per cent of the world’s semi­con­duct­ors. That fig­ure is now 9 per cent; com­pared with 12 per cent for Amer­ica. Both the EU and the US are rush­ing to build up their cap­ab­il­it­ies. But while the US is expec­ted to see 14 new semi­con­ductor plants come on stream by 2025, Europe and the Middle East will add just 10 — com­pared with 43 new facil­it­ies in China and Taiwan.

When it comes to energy, we have plentiful supplies, but Europe does not. 

Unlike Europe, the US also has plen­ti­ful and cheap domestic sup­plies of energy. The shale revolu­tion means that Amer­ica is now the world’s largest pro­du­cer of oil and gas. Mean­while, energy prices in Europe have soared. The Ukraine war and the loss of cheap Rus­sian gas mean that European industry typ­ic­ally pays three or four times as much for energy as their Amer­ican com­pet­it­ors. Gloomy European bosses say this is already lead­ing to fact­ory clos­ures in Europe.

Europe still leads the world in one area. Call it luxury goods, from LVMH to fashion brands to wine and cheese and tourism.

Europe does out­per­form in “life­style” indus­tries. Almost two-thirds of the world’s tour­ist arrivals are into Europe. The lux­ury goods mar­ket is dom­in­ated by European com­pan­ies. Foot­ball, the world’s most pop­u­lar sport, is dom­in­ated by European teams — although many of the biggest clubs are now owned by Middle East­ern, Amer­ican or Asian investors.

Europe’s dom­in­ance of life­style indus­tries under­lines that life in the old con­tin­ent is still attract­ive for many. But per­haps that is part of the prob­lem. Without a greater sense of threat, Europe may never sum­mon the will to reverse its inex­or­able decline in power, influ­ence and wealth.

So, Europe is losing power, influence and wealth. But, it is hard at work promoting green energy. Could it be that Europe, for turning away from capitalism and toward socialism, is now paying a price for its dereliction? Anyway, for those who seek a consoling thought, Europeans seem to have better work/life balance.

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Teachers' Unions Damage Children's Minds

Yesterday, we all celebrated Juneteenth, the day that slaves were liberated. It brings to mind an old Urban League slogan-- the mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that led us to start thinking of how many minds of how many black children have been wasted by pandemic school shutdowns.

If these policies had been advanced by Republican politicians and by right-leaning unions, the issue would be a national scandal. As it happened, they were  implemented by people on the left, by Democratic politicians and leftist teachers unions. 

Thus, the media has tended to ignore them. Exception given for an excellent piece that appeared in The New Yorker yesterday.

Alec MacGillis tackles the issue of pandemic-induced learning loss, problem that afflicted minority children disproportionately. 

It was very bad indeed. And it did not not just show children as having lost two years of learning, but as having lost the ability to socialize, to act appropriately in social contexts-- like classrooms.

Writing about Richmond, Virginia, MacGillis explains:

Research released by Harvard and Stanford last fall found that Richmond’s fourth through eighth graders had lost two full years of ground in math and nearly a year and a half in reading. Even more apparent was their difficulty with basic interactions—fifth graders hadn’t been in person since third grade; second graders, since kindergarten. “Socialization with each other was huge. How to be around each other—those are building blocks for ages six to ten,” Wright said. “There was a whole retraining—what does it look like when you and another student disagree? They had missed that, not being in the building.”

Whatever excuses people have come up with, the truth seems clearly to be that closing schools was a catastrophic for minority children:

Researchers have pointed to a number of causes, including the trauma experienced by children who lost family members to COVID, but the data generally show that the shortcomings are the greatest in districts that were slowest to reopen schools. They also show that the falloff was far greater among Black and Hispanic students than among whites and Asians, expanding disparities that had been gradually shrinking in recent decades. 

Some people naively think that this problem can be easily rectified. Credit to MacGillis for quoting a Stanford economist who explained that the children in question will suffer the consequences through their lives:

“This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, said, at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in February. He presented findings demonstrating that the economic consequences of pandemic-related learning loss could be far greater than those of the Great Recession.

As for the evidence of learning loss, here it is:

Tracy Epp, the district’s chief academic officer, reminded the board just how dire the educational setback was shaping up to be. She presented the latest data on early-elementary students, which showed a large increase in the number of children who were considered at high risk of struggling to read, especially among Black and economically disadvantaged students. More than half of all first graders were at risk, up fourteen points from the previous year. “The science is clear about what it takes,” Epp said. “There’s a lot we can do during the school day, but, when we look at fifty per cent not being on track, we’ve got to find more time to tackle these literacy issues.”

Some administrators have proposed that the schools try to make up for the learning loss by extending the school year. It makes some sense, but, guess which group is militating against it. You guessed it: the teachers’ unions.

Recently, I asked Rizzi, who is now the chair of the board, about the change, and she said that her vote in the spring of 2021 was not to approve a year-round calendar but simply to study it further. She had doubted that it would actually happen, given resistance from teachers and their union, the Richmond Education Association. “I knew that the R.E.A. was mobilizing against it, and that there was going to be a lot of pushback, and teachers wouldn’t want it,” she said. “It wasn’t that we would definitely support it next year, it was that we would return to discuss it.”

Other districts in other cities added time to the school day. Again, the teachers’ unions were having none of it. They worked to undermine the programs, and succeeded in doing so in some cities. In others, like Dallas, the problem took effect, to the advantage of the children who participated:

Atlanta added thirty minutes to the school day. Los Angeles added four days to the school year, which it said would be optional for both students and teachers, with extra pay for teachers who took part; the teachers’ union objected, saying that it fell outside their contract agreement, and participation by students ended up being very low. Dallas had more success: it gave schools the option of adding up to twenty-one days for selected students, and forty-one schools, roughly one in eight, decided to do so. Five others opted for an extended-year calendar for the whole school. Hopewell, which is half an hour south of Richmond and has a majority-Black student population of slightly more than four thousand, became the first district in the state to institute a sweeping year-round calendar, in 2021. In Dallas, the schools with the added days showed slightly larger learning gains; Hopewell has reported lower rates of teacher turnover now that there are more breaks throughout the year.

Again, the obstacle was the teachers’ union:

Recently, I spoke with a newly elected member of the executive board of the Richmond teachers’ union, Melvin Hostman, who said that it was hard to agree to Kamras’s push for additional instructional time when there were so many other problems that needed to be addressed: lack of toilet paper, school buses arriving late, and widespread absenteeism among them. He added, “The whole thing about learning loss I found funny is that, if everyone was out of school, and everyone had learning loss, then aren’t we all equal? We all have a deficit.” When I noted data showing that the loss had had racially disproportionate impacts, he said, “Of course—because our society is inherently unequal.”

Figure out that one. Everyone has lost something, so everyone is equally stupid. And besides, the schools are running out of toilet paper. Also, the teachers themselves believed that they had better work/life balance when the schools were closed.

In Richmond, about 1,000 of the district’s 22,000 children will participate in the program. So, the teachers’ unions have won. Not only did they damage children’s minds, but they have successfully militated against real efforts to try to rectify the situation.

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Do Colleges Prepare Students for Jobs?

The authors of this Harvard Business Review article tell us that employers are making a short-sighted mistake by hiring college graduates. Just being a college graduate does not mean that you have the skills necesssary to do a real job.

Unfortunately, they do not, within the confines of their article, distinguish between students who have majored in physics or engineering and students who have majored in critical race theory.

At that point, we have trouble following their arguments. After all, hiring the products of an engineering school is not the same as hiring students who have majored in Women’s Studies.

Besides, we hasten to emphasize a point we have made in the past, the tech staff at Silicon Valley companies is invariably Chinese. And that means, they have been educated in China. 

And we add that companies nowadays are suffering from an insufficiency of staff with the right technical skills to work in a high tech business.

The authors explain that companies should stop hiring college graduates and should open their minds to other educational paths. Obviously, this depends on the job and it depends on the student’s major. The authors do not specify any of this, so you start wondering why the HBR published this tissue of empty generalizations.

They write:

In an age of ubiquitous disruption and unpredictable job evolution, it is hard to argue that the knowledge acquisition historically associated with a university degree is still relevant.

Again, it depends on which degrees we are talking about. If a candidate needs skills in physics or engineering or multivariable calculus, a high school diploma, coupled with technical training, will not be very useful.

If you have enough patience and you read further you will discover that many college graduates are suffering from a lack of what are called soft skills. They do not know how to interact productively with co-workers and therefore have difficulty fulfilling any management duties.

Now, if the authors had thought at all about the question, they might have observed that college students, in many cases, do best at getting along with people who are roughly of the same socioeconomic class. Soft skills work best when people have more in common.

You might think, as I believe, that class differences matter. We might agree that college students tend to come from similar privileged backgrounds, and therefore, that they can relate to people who have more in common. But then, the argument about the absence of soft skills seems to be inaccurate. Unless you question the authors' assumption and discover that the rage toward diversity has produced student populations that are starkly divided on the grounds of academic ability and ethnicity.

Anyway, the authors want to promote more diversity. As you might have guessed:

Many universities do select students on meritocratic grounds, but even merit-based selection is conflated with variables that decrease the diversity of admitted applicants. In many societies, there is a strong degree of assortative mating based on income and class. In the U.S., affluent people are more likely to marry other affluent people, and families with more money can afford to pay for schools, tutors, extracurriculars, and other privileges that increase their child’s likelihood of accessing an elite college education. This, in turn, affects the entire trajectory of that child’s future, including their future career prospects — providing a clear advantage to some and a clear disadvantage to others.

Now, diversity in such circumstances is not a strength. It makes it more difficult for people to get along. When famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam researched the level of social interaction in highly diverse neighborhoods, he discovered that people did not get along with each other. They tended to avoid those who were of different ethnicities. 

The authors might be semi-correct to suggest that today’s workers do not know how to get along with other workers, but the solution to the problem obviously does not involve more diversity. Here, diversity is the problem, not the solution.

And yet, the criticism of the absence of soft skills surely has validity. Perhaps it is true, as they assert, that good workers are not necessarily college graduates. But, does that not suggest that these education mills are not doing their job? Does it not suggest that colleges are damaging young minds? Does it not suggest that colleges have given themselves over to indoctrination in radical leftist ideology.

One might imagine, it does not take too much imagination, that college students, having lived through the mind-deadening efforts of many of today’s professors, end up incapable of doing most jobs and end up incapable of relating to other human beings. If you learn in college to watch your language, lest you fall afoul of the thought police, you are going to have unlearned any capacity you might have had to relate to other human beings, to exercise your soft skills.

To be fair and balanced, you might get a job in marketing at Anheuser-Busch and go to work destroying the brand reputation of their best-selling beer.

The authors suggest that universities should be teaching people soft skills. One might suggest that anything would be better than the current diet of radical leftist thought. And one might suggest that the effort to admit candidates who have not made the grade on standardized testing has produced too much of an aptitude disparity to be overcome by classes in etiquette.

Having said that, universities could substantially increase the value of the college degree if they spent more time teaching their students critical soft skills. Recruiters and employers are unlikely to be impressed by candidates unless they can demonstrate a certain degree of people-skills. This is perhaps one of the biggest differences between what universities and employers look for in applicants. 

Heaven knows what they really mean by people skills. Perhaps they are preparing for the day when the Supreme Court bans affirmative action admissions. Then, clever college administrators will be obliged to find new criteria for admissions, criteria that have nothing to do with the ability to do college level work, but that emphasize empathy and personality.

All told, the HBR essay fails on many levels. Sad to see it in an otherwise estimable publication.

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The Absence of American Leadership

In a highly sophisticated analysis of international geopolitics Niall Ferguson observes that Europeans are losing faith in American leadership. One would like to say that this is shocking, considering what is happening in Ukraine, but it is not even close to surprising.

In one week the president of the United States chose, through his justice department, to have his leading political opponent indicted. Said president is barely capable of speaking in coherent sentences. His vice president is a certifiable imbecile, as is his press secretary. And one leading young Democratic politician, who goes by the initials AOC, is a pathetic twerp.

Ferguson is far too intelligent to raise such issues, but when people evaluate the virtues of democracy, they certainly ask themselves who the voters elect to public office. If the current crowd inspires confidence, you have blinded yourself to the obvious.

Ask yourself how it looks to other nations. The powerful American military is promoting dissension in the ranks. It is seeking to rid the forces of white supremacists and it is willing to pay for gender reassignment surgery. The leader of the space force drones on about trans rights. And, until now, at least, the military seems to believe that its greatest enemy is the weather. It has gone to war against the weather. 

Sign to fight the climate and save the world, it's the new slogan. Do you really believe that htis is going to inspire anyone anywhere to accept American leadership.

As for Ukraine, it might be making our military equipment look good, but, as Ferguson points out, most Europeans think that the Ukraine war is over and that Ukraine has lost.

As for the larger question, how the world sees us, our military is increasingly being led by women. What passes for a defense establishment is increasingly being led by women.

Now, the problem with that is perception. If your enemies size you up they are going to evaluate your leaders. If they see women in charge they are going to assume that you are weak, for obvious reasons. This does not mean that women weaken the military, but it does mean that your enemies are more likely to attack an opponent that they consider to be weak. Remember the Spanish Armada?

And then there is the mania over diversity. Let’s say that you hire people, for the military or for the government, on the grounds of skin color. Because you want your administration to look like America. Again, these might be the most capable people, but the ranting and railing about diversity suggests otherwise. 

People in foreign countries, being less enlightened than we are, will look at the absurdity of making diversity hires and will conclude that these people are less than competent. Hiring for diversity and inclusion creates the impression that the government is being run by a bunch of incompetents. I am not saying that the people in question are necessarily incompetent, but if our adversaries conclude that most of them are likely not up to their jobs, they will behave accordingly.

Perception might not be decisive, but it certainly matters when your opponent is sizing you up and deciding how many risks it wants to take.

And now, if Ferguson is a trustworthy barometer, Europe seems to have concluded that America is not up to the task of providing international leadership. 

And let us not forget the horrors of the Biden administration immigration policy. The administration has opened the nation’s southern borders to people from south and central America. These illegal migrants are uneducated and doubtless have very low IQs. Many of them do not even speak Spanish, no less English. They might be able to work on farms picking apples, but that is probably their limit-- except for crime.

A country does not gain strength by opening its doors to uneducated masses of people and putting them on the national dole. Beneficient charity does not create wealth or resolve.

As for where we are today, globalization has broken down and other nations are working to take up the slack of failed American leadership. The BRICS nations are first among them, and we note that the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has announced that he will be attending the next Brix meeting. 

Like it or not Macron is not a fool. He is diversifying his nation’s investments.

The notion that the free world, led by America, is going to take the lead internationally, seems to be an ever more distant dream. Surely, no one expects that our demented president will be capable of leading anyone anywhere. Heck, he can barely make it off the stage without tripping over himself.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, Forgetting who he is and what time it is, Joe Biden tossed his Irish heritage aside yesterday and closed his speech with this: “God save the Queen.” And some people still think that Joe is clear and cogent.

Second, not to be outdone in the cerebral impairment derby, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman said this at a committee meeting:

 "I uhm - I'd like to - the 95, 95, 95...You know you're pretty much preoccupied with - with 95, and I certainly am too."

This tells us why the Democrat party attracts so many intellectuals.

Third, in the BudLight death watch, sales have continued falling and fewer and fewer people would dare be caught with a Bud Light beer in their hands.

And yet, Garth Brooks, who apparently no longer has friends in low places still wants to serve Bid Light in his new Nashville bar. Unfortunately, after Brooks called beer drinkers asholds, he lost three of his biggest investors and had to postpone the opening of the bar. The bar’s future is in doubt.

Fourth, Fox News is facing its own boycott. Ratings have cratered for most Fox News shows, and now, Tucker Carlson has put his monologues on Twitter, garnering a monstrously large audience.

Apparently, this hurt the feelings of the people who are running Fox News, so they sent Carlson a cease and desist order, explaining that his contract required him to shut up. He defied the order, and, in a recent monologue pointed out, perhaps intentionally, that Fox News was now being run by “women.” I am not sure what he meant, but I report it anyway.

Fifth, Johns Hopkins University, a highly esteemed establishment, declared that lesbians were non-men who were sexually attracted to non-men. They did so just in case you imagined that the women were wrong in thinking that the trans movement was erasing women.

Anyway, the howls of derision were so loud that they even reached Baltimore. Saner minds prevailed at Hopkins and they revised their definition of lesbian.

Sixth, I cannot find the source for this quote, but it feels right anyway:

Nearly 1 out of every 5 offices in the United States are vacant right now. In San Fransisco, this just hit a record 31% and vacancies are rising. Office spaces are empty and retail stores are disappearing due to theft. Meanwhile, over $1.5 trillion in commercial debt will mature by 2025.

Seventh, Lincoln Brown wrote about the death of civility in PJ Media. One cannot help but cheer his analysis.

Increasingly we have become a nation of people who look at one another and demand, “What will you do for me?” People seek accommodation, not cooperation. Living with one another means catering to the demands of whoever can wail the loudest. Not only does this make for an uncivil society, but it also becomes one that is easy to subdue. It becomes easy to shift from an uncivil society to an infantilized one.

Eighth, and now for some real news. Chicago has a new mayor, one Brandon Johnson. People noted that he is more radical than Lori Lightweight, and he may also be more incompetent. As of now, crime has increased by 38% on his watch. They voted for it.

Ninth, meanwhile back at Fox News, a producer put up a chyron declaring Joe Biden to be a wanna-be dictator. His name was Alexander McCaskill. According to Carlson he was immediately fired by the women who now run Fox News.

Tenth, meanwhile, over in Great Britain, a new government report concludes that the pandemic policies were mindless and thoughtless.

From, the Telegraph:

National lockdowns were given “very little thought” ahead of the pandemic and there was a failure to consider the “potentially massive impact” that restrictions on civil liberties would have, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

And, of course, the report also concluded that no one had given any thought to the impact that school closings would have on children’s educational opportunities. Strangely enough, Britain was not the only place where such considerations were ignored.

Count major American cities in that category.

As it happens, most nations around the world did not make the same mistake. 

As you might recall, my blog did report the dangers in school closings well before the thought traversed the national consciousness. Now, because we are a great country, we are going to tear ourselves to shreds trying to figure out who is to blame for it. And we are going to pretend that we cannot make up for the learning loss.

Eleventh, God only knows what they were thinking. The top brass of the Los Angeles baseball team decided to honor a group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They did not quite understand that insulting religion is not a good look. It is in fact appalling to make a mockery of religion at a sporting event.

Anyway, demonstrators showed up en masse at Dodger Stadium and basically shut the place down. Good for them. Go woke, go broke.

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Men and Women at Work

Generally speaking, the Harvard Business Review publishes articles that are sane and sensible. Exceptionally, then, it has published a screed that tries to explain why companies do not have a proportional number of more women executives.

Being as the authors have already been indoctrinated in woke opinions, they conclude that the problem is bigotry. By their metrics women and men do the same work. And yet, men get promoted more often.

Of course, they skew the statistics to produce the conclusion that they believed from the onset. And besides, the issue should be framed in terms of what produces better leadership and more profitability, more effective and efficient corporate management.

The authors do not care about any of the above, because all they care about is showing that women do not get ahead because the world is bigoted against them.

So, the authors lay out their bias from the onset:

Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men. Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to differences in men and women’s behavior.

The authors collected data showing how often women communicated with senior management, for example. This is of some limited value, largely because it does not examine the content of the communication. Just because you talk more or because you have equal access to upper management, does not mean that you are contributing anything more. You might just be flapping your lips:

Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.

Dare I mention that nothing about this study evaluates the quality and effectiveness of communications. The authors might have noted that if women have full access to senior management and are afforded the same number of assignments, perhaps they do not do as well at it. The authors fail to consider this possibility.

We found that the amount of direct interaction with management was identical between genders and that women were just as central as men in the workplace’s social network. The metric we used for this is called weighted centrality. Centrality can be thought of, at a simple level, as how close someone is to decisions being made, other employees, and the other “power connectors,” or individuals with a high number of contacts. Weighted centrality takes into account how much time employees spent talking to different people, which we used as a proxy for how strong the relationship is.

And then the authors conclude that the only possible reason for women not having achieved proportional representation is: bigotry.

Gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.

Since they do not consider the quality of the interventions or the quality of the work product, all they have shown is that women have an equal opportunity to impress others with their skills. And this does not lead to more promotions.

Anyone with the least number of little gray cells might consider that women are less invested in their jobs because they are more invested in child rearing and homemaking. The authors consider this possibility. They draw a typically mindless conclusion:

At this company, women tend to leave the workforce in the middle of their seniority, after having been at the company for four to 10 years. This timing presents another possible hypothesis: Perhaps women decide to leave the workplace for other reasons, such as wanting to raise a family. Our data can’t determine whether this is true or not, but we don’t think this changes the argument for reducing bias.

This is frankly idiotic. The authors do not seem to understand that the roles of husband and wife, of father and mother are different. Obviously, the more we insist that people use the squishy term, partner, the easier it is to get confused and to consider that men and women should have exactly the same functions within the home and within a marriage.

If men and women are equal stakeholders in a family, they should presumably be leaving the workforce at the same rate. But this isn’t happening. According to McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s 2017 gender report, women with a partner are 5.5 times more likely than their male counterparts to do all or most of the housework. However, women are not advancing, while men are. Previous research has also shown that men are perceived as more responsible when they have children, while women are seen as being less committed to work.

This represents a conceptual failure at the highest level. For failing to understand a woman’s role within the home, the authors arrive at a specious conclusion, one that they had decided upon before they even began their study.

Nothing about this should be mysterious. None of it bespeaks bigotry, except in the sense that it fails to acknowledge the choices that women make when they bear the primary responsibility for making homes and for raising children. Refusing to accept the difference between men and women produces a poor study, one that people will no doubt refer to in pretending that America’s corporations are hotbeds of sexist bigotry.

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