What’s Wrong with the World

Back in March, in response to a discussion that unfolded here at W4, as well as a typically thoughtful essay written by Jim Manzi and published in the dead-tree and digital editions of National Review (though not NR Online), I postulated that the intersection of globalization and our cultural superstitions and taboos about intelligence and education was precipitating a legitimation crisis, in which the downward mobility of the below-average, average, and even many of the above-average would collide with fabulist visions of universal upward mobility in the New Economy. Among other things, I wrote that

As regards the new economy of services, high finance, and god-king CEOs, highly remunerative compensation ultimately correlates with cognitive ability - this was the primary thesis of The Bell Curve, for those who remember - and this fact, operating in tandem with deindustrialization and globalization, both increases the rewards accruing to the cognitive elite and decreases returns to the average, who increasingly find themselves in competition with the average masses of nations at much lower levels of economic development. Education can do nothing to alter this reality, inasmuch as cognitive ability is only marginally malleable under environmental influences, if at all. An emphasis upon educational reform in this connection could actually have perverse effects, such as the devaluation of credentials, leading to market demands for ever more credentialization as a condition of employment, and the erection of additional financial barriers to economic advancement, as the demand for higher education drives up the cost, relentlessly. (Snip)

In the end, the circle cannot be squared, and the dilemmas of globalization still hold. Structural factors dictate the exacerbation of the new inequality, with all that this entails, and this because those structural factors have essentially marketized heritable qualities not amenable to amelioration; simultaneously, those structural factors have developed concurrently with an increasing pursuit of efficiency through arbitrage and labour substitution.

Continue reading "The Cognitive Elite and the Legitimation Crisis" »

It took a thousand years (give or take) for Western civilization to ascend from this:

to this:

Continue reading "Declinist Thoughts" »

It's because g-ddamn Charles Murray always seems to say all that needs saying about everything that really matters to me before I can get my posterior in gear to say it myself.

I'm looking for something to add to his essay on the utter insanity of "No Child Left Behind": "The age of educational romanticism" - and, perhaps, in due course, I'll come up with a relevant anecdote or two, since I was working in the trenches of the public schools, while he observed from on high.

But, in the meantime, all I can say is: read the whole thing.

Continue reading "Why I'm not Needed" »

It is impossible not to be sympathetic to the idea that when someone does manifest damage to the commons, he ought to pay for that damage. Environmental regulations can of course be a subterfuge, a political tool used on false pretenses to sieze power for other purposes. But the fact that a thing can be misused does not dismiss it from public discourse tout court. When the damage to the commons is particularly acute and particularly manifest, it seems to me that it is not unreasonable to place the cost burden for that damage on those who, through their own deliberate and free choices in pursuit of their own benefit, do violence to what is not their own but rather belongs to us all.

For that reason, I suggest that divorced people should pay higher taxes - say a 5% kicker on top of their income taxes - than those who are childlessly single and those who are married to their first spouse. If fault is found in a particular divorce the higher tax rates could apply to the at-fault spouse. If the divorce is no-fault, the higher tax rates could apply to either or both spouses: to whomever chose to pursue the divorce.

How long should the higher tax rate last? Ideally it would last for as long as the damage inflicted on the commons lasted. But given the realities of life in this fallen and mortal world, we are unable to levy taxes on the dead.

I am a 1978 graduate of Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. Soon after I returned to the Catholic Church in May 2007, I was invited by Gorman's Faith Formation Committee to speak to the school's students, parents, teachers and administrators about my spiritual journey. I will be giving that talk next Wednesday on May 7, 2008 at Gorman's new campus in Summerlin (a suburb of Las Vegas). Information about the talk can be found here.

If you are in the Las Vegas area, I encourage you to attend. It is free and open to the public.

This is as good a time as any to announce that I have signed a contract with Brazos Press to publish a book about my pilgrimage. I am just about finished with the nearly 65,000 word manuscript. It will be released in November 2008, with the tentative title, Confessions of a Vain Philosopher: Reflections on My Return to the Catholic Church.

Following up on the previous post, I should note that Morning's Minion of Vox Nova takes aim at John McCain's health-care proposals, and that on grounds virtually identical to those I cited in opposition to genetic screening as a condition of coverage:

As Ezra Klein notes, this is health insurance for people who don’t need health care. It relies on the idea that insurance should be based on actuarial principles, tying cost to individual risk. Therefore the private market (with products like health savings accounts) can be a very good deal to the young and the healthy, but does very little to those in most need of health care. It is a classic example of where the free market simply does not work, and can be highly unethical. Instead of actuarial insurance, we should strive for social insurance, which is basically risk pooling: the young and healthy subsidize the old and sick, secure in the knowledge that they will be taken care of in a similar situation.

There are, of course, complexities, and Zippy has reminded us, in the preceding thread, of the multivocality of the term "insurance":

Part of the reason genetic testing is controversial is because by providing greater information granularity it is detrimental to 'insurance' understood under one voice (that of providing low-cost health care to people who otherwise could not afford it) and yet beneficial to 'insurance' under other voices (that of providing on-average-more-expensive care but with protection from catastrophic loss, sometimes employing diagnostic/preventive measures).

The trouble with the majority of health-care reform proposals, as with the use of genetic testing as a screening mechanism (let's call it the medical gauntlet), is that, while both senses of 'insurance' are vital to a well-managed system, they end up downplaying or undermining the former sense as a profit-maximizing measure, and emphasizing the latter. And it is precisely the former sense in which health insurance and health provision are natural commons. The attempt to argue around this, to structure policies as though this were not so, and to extend the disciplines of the market into spheres not entirely suited for them, is where, I believe, this policy dispute meshes with a larger narrative.

The Senate has passed legislation ostensibly banning discrimination on the basis of genetic testing results. I suppose that the devil will lie in wait in the details, as always, but I must confess to some degree of bafflement at Richard Spencer's reaction:

The fact is, genes affect susceptibility to disease, and genetic testing can help pinpoint just how and to what degree and thus help insurance companies design specific regimes for specific clients. Washington’s banning of testing simply means that we’ll all be paying higher premiums in order to account for the added risk companies bear due to their taking on certain patients who could easily have been put on different plans.

Reihan Salam had an interesting discussion of the slowly-emerging crisis of genetic testing and the business models of contemporary health-insurance outfits some months ago, though I cannot recall where, precisely; but since risk-sharing is the fundamental premise of insurance, well people paying somewhat more to subsidize the costs of caring for the unwell, as a hedge against uncertainty in their own lives, is just part of the package. We're no longer debating the whether, but rather the how; and the increasing precision of genetic testing augurs a future in which this no longer obtains, in which the genetically blessed pay for risk-management they will not need, while many cannot afford insurance because they are not so blessed, genetically-speaking. Many people will not be placed on different plans, so much as priced out of the market, period. The market rations services by means of the price mechanism, and many of the sick, and those with chronic conditions, will be excluded.

As I've suggested, this will defeat the rationale of insurance in principle, and increasingly in practice; let's say that this shift will constitute an ideal which increasing precision will enable us to approach. Now, as I've also suggested in numerous discussions, we're not about to go all Dickensian, abolishing all forms of social provision and solidarity (at least, I won't bet on it), and if the 'private' insurance industry prices large percentages of the population out of its services (and there is no way that genetic testing will not do this), pressures for political provision will mount, as they are presently, even in the absence of widespread anxiety over genetic testing. This legislation may be horridly crafted, for all I know; I might even wager on that. However, something like it may be a bulwark against the eventual imposition of socialized medicine, in this case an explicit dual system, such as exists in Britain: private physicians for the well-to-do and well, public clinics for the poor and ill.

Genetics cannot be banned; neither will the advance of the science be halted. However, neither can every human good, and every aspect of human fate, be subjected to the unmediated discipline of market mechanisms, as Karl Polanyi would say. The attempt to do so would not only cause enormous suffering, but would actually increase pressures for overtly socialistic measures, which will... cause suffering. Some goods are at least partly public, in other words, and this reality cannot be expunged. It is only the sick who need a physician, and not the healthy.

Five years ago this day, President Bush executed a landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, following the exploit with a speech delivered before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished". The speech proclaimed the end of combat operations.

In commemoration of this august occasion, Clark Stooksbury treats the reader to a selection of delectable quotes, which adjudge Bush to be one of our greatest Presidents, and express the hope that other similar deeds of world-historical greatness will be performed throughout the Near East. It wasn't, though, merely the Respectable Right which swooned that day, but the media much more generally, as Leon Hadar reminds us. Kool-Aid was an exceedingly popular commodity in those days, which demonstrates that the hubris and hegemonism the left would like to pin on Bush and the Republicans is a bipartisan phenomenon, the veritable world-image of the establishment.

Only the far left (and this perhaps incidentally; in politics, one can begin with dodgy premises and yet arrive at the correct conclusions) and the so-called unpatriotic conservatives possessed both conviction and prescience, the latter ridiculed at the time as the oldthought of those who could not grasp that Bush's bold policies created their own realities. Frum himself was shortly to retreat from the implications of his own malodorous effusion, effectively defining a lack of patriotism down into mere defeatism, a euphemism meaning 'skepticism concerning the wisdom and prudence of administration policies, and their prospects of success.' There was something inadvertently prophetic in that elision, something all too characteristic of what the Respectable Right became in the Bush years, when one's loyalty to, and love of, country could be deconstructed because one opposed government policy; government and country were identified; no, more than this, country and president were identified.

That carrier landing was profoundly symbolic, not only of the world-historical folly of an administration, but of the entire atmosphere of those times, in which support for the policies of one man (and the machiavels advisors behind him) could be made a synecdoche for the country. What is disquieting is the realization that present distempers may not be due to the recognition of the folly of such things, but rather to the dispelling of the illusion. We relish that Kool-Aid, and resent mornings-after for coming.

Compare and contrast, that is, two comics originating from opposite ends of the sociological and ideological spectra, that nonetheless manifest a curious dispositional similarity: Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Inhospitable Political Environments, a graphic novel detailing the exploits of Choice Girl (perhaps Mark Shea's coinage; I''ll not be purchasing a copy for verification...) against fundamentalists and other anti-abortion retrogrades, who are portrayed as stereotyped African natives (select images at Shea's blog), and this, er, classic of Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry, which lingers over the damnation of all those Christians who have not trusted in the proper verbal formulae.

Numerous are the ways in which these two specimens could be analogized and disanalogized to one another. I'll just mention their longing for a sort of Summing Up, a Great Reckoning, at which the reprobate will be requited with the damnation that is theirs - a will to eschatological finality, and the belief that one already possesses the understanding thereof. It is an atmosphere alien to fine literature of orthodox Christian extraction.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male has long passed into story and legend as one of the ultimate crimes perpetrated by the American White Racist Establishment against African-Americans.

And it's a story and legend that has been in the news, lately, since the very Reverend Jeremiah Wright likes to cite Tuskegee as evidence that the U.S. government would be willing to do almost anything to hurt African Americans - like, for instance, inventing the AIDS virus in a CIA laboratory and then siccing it on the black community.

Wikipedia offers the standard narrative.

Continue reading "The Truth about Tuskegee" »

I have a modest collection of comparatively modest mechanical timepieces, having been fascinated by them since childhood, when, at that early age, my interest in them prompted me to reflect upon the goods of craftsmanship, the wastefulness of the disposability/planned obsolescence culture, and the impermanence of material things generally. Yes, I did think about this stuff in elementary school. Yes, I was a weird kid, something impressed upon me by my peers, and ratified by the adults in my world, who occasionally remarked that I was growing up before my time. Hence, my interest in this story about a $300,000 watch that doesn't tell time, and therefore isn't really a watch.

What’s most impressive about the Day&Night is its complexity, given its absolute uselessness. The watch features two tourbillons — devices that overcome the ill effects of earth’s gravity on a watch’s accuracy — connected by a differential mechanism. Instead of hands, the watch has a “contemplative tourbillon operation whereby the ‘Day’ tourbillon operates for 12 hours to symbolize working life, while the ‘Night’ tourbillon takes over afterward to represent an individual’s private time.”

Continue reading "Baubles of the Meritocracy" »

English departments, hotbeds of fashionable schools of literary criticism, are slowly emptying out, and William Deresiewicz, examining some of the proximate causes, suggests that the discipline lacks a survival instinct. Conservatives conversant with the bitter struggles over the literary canon and the various theoretical fads that have buffeted the discipline might indulge in a few reveries tinged with schadenfreude, consoling themselves with the thought that perhaps the relativists and radicals are finally receiving their just due; perhaps, however, the causes are more mundane. Perhaps no one really cares anymore:

...the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.

Continue reading "Why Bother?" »

Apparently, Senator Hillary Clinton thought well enough of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in February 2006 to have him mention in his Pastor's Page in his Church's Sunday Program that her office was looking for a legislative assistant. (You can find it here; scroll down to page 9). Here is how the announcement reads in the program:

LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT POSITION WITHIN SENATOR CLINTON'S OFFICE Senator Clinton's office is looking for a Legislative Assistant to handle education, labor, housing, women's and children's issues, including the effect of media on children, child welfare and reproductive rights. This person will be Senator Clinton's lead staff person for the education and labor issues that are considered by the Senate HELP Committee. He or she will be responsible for developing legislative proposals and implementing strategies to get them enacted, staffing the Senator in meetings, responding to constituent requests, and writing talking points and speeches. Please send resumes to kyla_pollack@clinton.senate.gov

Yet, this is what she said in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on March 25, 2008:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made. "He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

You also choose what church from which you want to recruit legislative assistants. Apparently, in February 2006, those who sat under the Rev. Wright's theological tutelage were considered promising prospects to assist the New York senator on legislative matters concerning the common good.

I did my own sleuthing on this one.

Lydia has an interesting post up about the seeming oddity in corporate life, in which with few exceptions every employee in a large firm is required to have a 'development plan'. At most large corporations, at least in the white collar world, you (and sometimes your supervisor) are penalized if you don't change jobs often enough.

I don't think this is a result of a distortion of market forces and capitalism though: I think it is intrinsic. I've argued before that I think that PC tyranny has been adopted by corporations because it is profitable to do so, and I think a similar observation applies here.

Continue reading "Work is a treadmill, and the speed doubles every ten years" »

(For whatever that's worth).

Suppose you take your kids to a performance of Tchaikovsky's *Swan Lake* by cutting edge European or American performers, in the hopes of interesting them in "culture."

If you're lucky, you might encounter something like this:

...where the dancing is at least reasonably competent, and the "transgressive" element is limited to the cygnets being all male.

Continue reading "Why China will Inherit the Earth" »