It's always interesting to see Hayek's words, followed by a timestamp. Similar, although less recent at nearly 25 years ago, is this Peter Thiel video discussing the illusion of multiculturalism in 1996 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722.
The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework.
The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."
Meanwhile, in the United States, the black and white wealth gap continues completely unchanged for over 50 years, despite having addressed "racism". Wealth disparities have increased to levels not seen in generations. Your income remains tightly coupled and correlated to your parents income. Etc Etc Etc.
So basically, from any actual social scientific perspective, meritocracy always has been the bullshit fantasy of charlatan "economists" dolling their philosophy of human nature in the disguise of econometric models and regression equations.
Get back to me when you have evidence to support your claims and not just whining about "but muh SJWs", until then you can decide who felt this way about landlords
"The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth."
Anger at these things obscures the ability to find a solution. When you say "the black and white wealth gap continues completely unchanged for over 50 years', I get that is hyperbole, but surely it has changed in some ways, if not on aggregate then in specific locales, in the curve of the distribution... in SOME way.
Given that lots of other things have changed in society, if this gap has stayed the same as an average or median on the whole, that is speaking to something deeper. So what, exactly?
Thomas Sowell makes the point that average ages vary by race: https://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html and there must be other factors, like where races live. Asians being based in San Francisco pre Silicon Valley's boom has surely had a positive affect on their collective income and wealth.
I really wish there was a clear cut answer, but there self evidently isn't one, unless we believe that every change in society in the last 50 years was made for cynical reasons. So there must be all sorts of answers in the data, sliced properly, that could lead us to a more equitable future.
> that is speaking to something deeper. So what, exactly?
the lingering effects of hundreds of years of overt oppression of both the individual and systemic sort.
this whole thing is like telling a bunch of contestants in a race that they have to start a minute late and aren't allowed to practice and then pretending like that's not going to be a factor in their finish times.
That does not undermine the thesis that the society is basically a meritocracy - it rewards everyone proportional to their contributions, it's just that some people are poised by birth to be able to contribute more than others.
If US weren't a meritocracy, they would promote incompetent people to positions of power. This for to a large degree does not happen - for example, you can't get a $500k FAANG job just because you have an uncle there. On the other hand, if you were born in a family with right values, have the right genes and worked your ass off in school, you are a powerhouse in terms of your ability to contribute and will get that job (simplification, of course).
"If US weren't a meritocracy, they would promote incompetent people to positions of power. This for to a large degree does not happen - for example, you can't get a $500k FAANG job just because you have an uncle there."
I think you'll find that a large and potentially growing number of americans disagree profoundly with this statement. Higher-paid = works harder/produces more is pretty much at the core of this disagreement
Specifically your claim that the US (or the west more generally) doesn't promote incompetent people to positions of power would be completely laughable to pretty much everyone I know (and I don't even mean anything regarding the government). Of course my peers are generally young, and university educated like myself, and I am from europe, not NA, but even my right-wing friends don't hold it self evident that a person in a position of power is automatically competent. We've all worked with and under far too many frustratingly underqualified or straight-up clueless people to give such a notion any credit at all.
Well-connected parents get you into well-connected schools, which get you into well-compensated jobs. I'll take your FAANG example and raise you all of Wall St.
This is nitpicking the basic fact that the wealth gap between white Americans and African-Americans is basically unchanged. Go take a look at the graphs yourself!
>The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy
A little-known fact about the word "meritocracy"[0] is that it's a recent invention, coined by Baron Young of Dartington[1] in his satirical work[2] outlining how dystopian a society organised as a meritocracy would be.
> The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism.
I'm super curious to know where you are getting this from because I went to a public state school surrounded by cornfields in the midwest and this wasn't my experience in any way shape or form. I cannot recall any my friends changing their political stances, but then again, we didn't talk politics really. I do know quite a few though that came in republican, left republican, and voted for trump.
> Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class.
I cannot ever recall having had a single conversation in college about any of this.
> The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."
I'm probably unique in this case as I took multiple economics classes and read probably a dozen more textbooks in my spare time and the answer to this became quite obvious with just basic econ. It's a shame some/more (my highschool incidentally did require one consumer economics class) economics isn't a required course.
> Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter.
do you have any hard evidence if this?
> people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions
People are skeptical of markets because of various factors:
1. That the rich get richer, so to speak, and inequality grows, leading to increasing numbers of people not being able to afford basic rent.
2. That government is captured by markets and corporate welfare is rampant, while welfare programs for the poor are cut
3. People are not LLCs and we don’t want them to just go bankrupt and run out of resources because they can’t earn enough to cover basic needs. This is becoming especially pertinent with automation and outsourcing reducing demand for local labor.
4. That traditionally valued activities such as a homemaker raising kids have zero market value now that both sexes work
and so on.
Non-market solutions such as a single payer for universal health insurance, universal education etc. are considered essential in any modern democracy. This is called social democracy.
Here's a different take on markets from a commie pinko liberal:
Open markets are just a tool for determining price between many parties. When well designed and regulated, open markets can be efficient at that task.
Closed markets, like single payer healthcare, are a viable alternative when the players decide that price isn't the most important factor. Meaning they're optimizing for other factors. With single payer, maximizing public health is deemed most important.
Rigged markets give all markets a bad name. aka winner-takes-all, late stage capitalism, oligarchy, laissez faire, Freedom Markets™ (my own pejorative).
> The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense
Similarly, the degree to which market advocates, themselves, exhibit skepticism about the market mechanism vis-a-vis their own intellectual products is so immense, in fact, that the idea that ideas achieving widespread adoption within the marketplace of ideas do, indeed, have vastly greater value than those with inferior adoption is simply met with comparably-inarticulate derision.
Ideas aren't a great place to push free market ideals; especially because so many ideas are basically anti-freedom and anti-market. How often does anyone come up with "let people sort it out themselves, bearing the costs and consequences" as a new idea? When it is suggested it is rare to see someone championing it with enthusiasm and to wide acclaim. Compare that to the "Lets order people to [activity]" style ideas that are common and suggested in many forms.
Using market forces to measure the value of an idea is not clever. Ideas that are to be put into practice should be assessed primarily by whether they are grounded in evidence or not, and secondarily by whether people are willing to cope with the consequences of the idea going wrong.
An idea being popular or gaining popularity does not make it a valuable idea (or indeed a good idea). That stands in stark contrast to economic forces which measure resource creation and destruction with a cruel accuracy.
The Aspen Summit a few years ago had a forum where someone pushed for major news outlets to promote more intellectual, nuanced content, and one rep from a major network pushed back. They pointed out that the consumer of that sort of content is going to the ballet, or trying the new restaurant by some named chef, or attending the Aspen Summit, not staying at home watching 24-hour news. That sophisticated audience is out doing interesting things, they might watch occasionally, but aren't a consistent enough news audience to shape content. "We run the market test against PBS every night."
Best thing I can imagine is that policy wonks writing in low subscription specialty journals are a bit like arthouse films. Sure, the indie films lose in the market to blockbusters, and wonky policy journals don't get a tiny fraction of the eyeballs of 24 hour news. But it's more likely for important new ideas to be born in the niche, experimental market than vice versa. They're losing the market test, but contributing a lot of positive externalities by influencing the influencers, they're just not able to capture all those returns.
I think this is called by many “postmodernism” and it is found on the right and on the left - though far more on the left. Foucalt was a big proponent. He rejected the label but others ran with it:
Although postmodernism isn’t as strictly defined as other philosophical movements, one can still clearly say what it doesn’t represent. Postmodern philosophy is typically associated on the internet as feminism/multiculturalism/Cultural Marxism, although it is none of that at all. It may have some loose ties by influencing some feminists and critical theorists through some scholars such as Foucault and Deleuze, but you can’t really mash all of them into a same philosophical movement.
Some of my FB friends are climate change denialists invoking postmodernism whenever they need to disagree with scientific consensus. People on the right also invoke postmodern ideas when they don’t want to have evolution being taught in their schools and so on.
The premise of that video is wrong when applied to Peterson. It misrepresents Peterson in the first minute by taking Peterson's discussion about pomo neomarxism to be his proclaimed understanding of postmodernists. He isn't talking about postmodernists in the video, he is talking about a group of people that apply both neomarxist and postmodern ideas at the same time.
Cuck philosophy forwarding Judith butler in the video description as a credible source is damaging to his reputation. Other of his videos have been debunked before.
>Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter.
To be fair parental income is the best indicator of child income and those things you list are proxies for parental income. That said I do agree with your point, though I think market skepticism is largely a separate issue from forced multiculturalism and identity politics. The market is generally dysfunctional for the working class and people want to blame something for it. On the other side the dysfunction is blamed for different things.
This hurts me particularly as over-correction w.r.t race/social class has made it very hard to attend school despite good grades and extracurricular performance.
This study explores whether or not intelligence tests' scores predict individual differences in scholastic achievement irrespective of SES factors such parents' income and education. The variables of interest are analyzed considering three independent samples of participants comprising a total of 641 children. The participants belonged to a Brazilian School characterized by broad and representative ranges in intelligence, scholastic achievement, and SES factors. The results indicate that SES factors do not predict children differences in scholastic achievement, whereas children's intelligence tests' scores predict their scholastic differences. These results underscore personal intelligence as a genuine predictor of individual differences in scholastic achievement.
> Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class.
Personally, my experience is that a lot of these individuals outright dismiss class inequality altogether, and put an unwarranted level of importance on gender/race as the defining factors of someone's life. For them, it seems like it doesn't matter if some white man is dirt poor working a terrible job in an area with no economic prospects, merely being male or white is somehow being 'privileged'.
The skepticism about markets and market value is definitely a worrying trend though. As is the general disdain towards capitalism and everything associated with a free market, which feels like people misunderstanding both of those things. Corporate corruption and poor regulations are certainly issues, but that doesn't mean the underlying concept is bad too.
Do you realize that what you are complaining about has the same problematic root as what you think are good ideas?
They are all pseudo-scientific ideology. Hayek and neoliberalism just as much as the radical left ideology...
>
In short, literally none of this stuff is actually new. Indeed, as Oliver Traldi has pointed out, the entire contemporary debate around ‘free speech’ and ‘political correctness’ bears an uncanny likeness to 1990s controversies on these same topics. Perhaps George Santayana was right when he declared that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Um, how far ago does the author think the 90s are? Yes, many of the same arguments from the 90s are happening now. It's not because people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's because a large number of people were alive in the 90s and now and are having the same debate still.
There are a lot of "regular people" out there interested in these issues who were too young to have been involved in the '90s. Maybe the tone is off but I certainly appreciated the history lesson.
I don't disagree with the piece, but it is quite biased.
The institutionalization of non-scientific (that is, there is no clear criteria of what constitutes the truth in knowledge) "crap" is much more wider phenomenon, and not just some aberration of "the left". Nor is it confined to universities.
Here are other examples:
- Neoclassical economics, especially the macroeconomics. (It's ironic they quote Hayek, who significantly contributed to its rise.) If you want a similar article with this example, look at Steve Keen's Debunking Economics.
- String theory in physics. This example shows that it doesn't have to be related to politics and society at all.
- Various project management methodologies, lately the Scrum and Agile craze.
The truth is probably that in many institutions, there is some atrophied department that mostly lost its useful function in favor of defending some internal dogma.
That is an awful lot of words for "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy". Put aside the possibility that the reason elites disagree is because they know something that the author doesn't. Even if one disagrees with a prevailing philosophy or even if it is objectively wrong but the idea catches on doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.
That a rant from the 70s sounds like one today says more about the source than it does the target really - given ongoing processes one would expect the complaints to differ more substantially as the changes either "succeed" and are embraced as the norm or "fail" and are discredited. I use quotes because it is a matter of perception more than if they are actually good ideas.
To be frank it seems to be pure projection of the "eauality feels like oppression to the privledged" sort.
"It was largely a grassroots campaign. It was very deliberate, but also decentralized — with actors from different backgrounds and interests, concerned with different causes, working different institutional levers — learning from, and building upon, the work of one-another over time."
That... seems like about as far from a vast conspiracy as you can get whilst still describing a group of people with a common goal and set of beliefs.
Here is another statement which you can characterize as "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy."
> Republicans have been making concerted efforts to stack US courts with conservative judges.
Accusing someone of promoting a conspiracy theory is to accuse someone of making creating an unfalsifiable story, which does not seem to be the case in either my example statement or the original post. Specifically, there are no claims that "evidence to the contrary is fabricated" or "lack of key evidence is due to deliberate suppression." Now it may be the case that the author would respond in this way when presented with contrary evidence, or when pressed for some key supporting evidence, but as it stands there is no cause to levy the "mere conspiracy theory" charge at the author.
I’m not an American so I’m not directly involved in the US political process, but my question is why shouldn’t US Republicans appoint conservative judges? Why is this seen as a conspiracy? Isn’t this the reason why they were elected? Should they appoint liberal judges? But then what type of judges should the Democrats appoint? And in today’s political climate it doesn’t look like there’s truly a “neutral” judge, so to speak, one is either liberal or conservative.
The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.
Somebody named Rudi Dutschke[1] is responsible for a 50-year-long conspiracy to take over American culture in order to make the author unpopular in college.
I've never understood where the criticism was for American Universities having a somewhat more "Leftist" culture among social sciences is coming from. Once you learn how to speak the "leftist" language, it's extremely easy to get high grades. Read and understand a Foucault and De Beuvoir work, coast on easy A's through these "grievance" studies courses. I did 1/10th the amount of work for a graduate level gender studies course as I did in a graduate level programming class.
I certainly don't like the idea of not knowing the political orientation of a professor before I write an essay (as it is eminently important for my grade, no matter how impartial one pretends to be), and a radical left cannon means that I can write like I'm Marx and get a free pass into the Academy. The people on HN who don't like this simply don't know how to play the game.
I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, publish or perish, etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".
The rise of social justice is the evolution of our society from red/orange through high orange to a green society on the Spiral Dynamics model of psychological / spiritual evolution.
We're seeing the limits and the ugliness of unhealthy/low orange in the environment, politics, culture, et al.
The transition to green will be painful and violently resisted by orange/red portions of our society, but it is necessary for our survival and for rescuing the ecology of the Earth from the excesses of unbridled stage orange capitalism.
I'm so curious what our economic systems and culture will look like in stage green, but it'll likely not happen in my lifetime, which I just have to accept ...
Did you recently get laid off from the TSA? The only purpose your "threat level" categorization of social issues serves is to marginalize viewpoints you disagree with under the brush stroke of "progress at any cost." There are conservative values that are deeply necessary for a free society to function and that afford people the privilege* of criticizing their freedoms in the first place. (*well actually a right but rejecting civil rights in favor of 'wokeness' is so hot right now)
I'm not saying that conservatives are unhealthy, I'm saying there are unhealthy levels of conservatism just as there are unhealthy levels and limits to liberalism.
The reason that it can be said that unity rather than adversary is higher in development is that conservatism tends to be resistance to the fundamental impermanence of reality. All things must change. Reality and consciousness are evolving. The world is becoming globalized and we are moving towards unity.
And it's not about who's bad or good, better or worse, it's about what level of development are you at, how high is your awareness, how well do you understand reality.
Demonizing a second grader for not reading at a high school level doesn't make any sense, just as telling a retiree he is lazy for quitting work doesn't make any sense.
I'm trying to help people see the thing they are defending when they react violently. What is it in you that gets so angry when you read what I wrote? Worth examining.
Edit: Also worth reading about Spiral Dynamics and seeing how it applies to Life and to politics.
The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework.
The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."