Ignorance of basic facts is maybe *the* defining characteristic of modern America’s racial regime. Not difficult to understand why: it’s unpleasant to think about and many would feel, with justification, that they have been lied to their entire lives.
From the top down, there is probably an understanding about how destabalizing that knowledge would be for the young American nation that inherited this particular multi racial demography.
A disturbing number of future law students are apparently completely ignorant of basic facts about standardized cognitive tests that are well known to iSteve readers.
Scanning through the comments, they avoided mentioning the black elephant in the room to talk about sex differences. "Cries in Spanish" is as close as they got to race.
Why should lawyers know IQ gaps better than anyone else? Only reason I can think of is that Lawyers (like doctors) are often a rare case of a smart person who has to explain something important to a ...less smart person. You don't need to know that one group on average will send you more stupid clients. You can suss out each individual.
Hmm, having considered scores of such individuals as clients for decades, none has shown he was less of a screw-up than the last. Needless to say, I am not a sports lawyer.
DNA can be quite wrenching to individuals and larger groups of people. Working with what you have seems to be an important part of life here. Thankfulness for what we *do* have is also appropriate, IMHO.
Yep. Everyone will have some better traits and some worse traits and whatever luck you might had in one (wow I'm so lucky to be smart) will take up less mental space daily than your obsession with the few traits that went the wrong way (oh no, my hair!).
By middle age your life satisfaction will depend on your philosophy.
>For instance, if admitted only on academic talent, Harvard’s freshman class would be down around 1% black
To be fair, Harvard has probably *never* only admitted purely on the basis of academic talent, as Jerome Karabel detailed in The Chosen. It's always wanted to cultivate future business and political leaders, many of whom are...not overburdened with raw intellectual horsepower.
A good insight of Andrew Ferguson in CrazyU, a book you reviewed a while back, is that a decent fraction of elite college admissions is reserved for athletes+legacies+diversity cases. So, if you're just a normal, academically gifted student, getting into an Ivy is even harder than the imposing statistics make it seem.
The flipside of this is that anyone who gets into Harvard without checking one of those boxes is probably *exceptionally* smart.
It's completely reasonable for Ivies to want to cultivate future business and political talent. Moreover, if we add scientific leadership to the other 2 items - so that it reads "to cultivate future business, political talent and scientific leadership" - that's in essence what academic talent or IQ or whatever other metric of cognitive performance is for. To succeed in life BEYOND what would be randomly probable if these metrics were discounted.
I have a cousin whose opinion on those court cases simplified to Harvard should let in the best academic students. I asked him what he thought Harvard was trying to accomplish in its admissions process and the question didn't even make sense to him. 'Get the best students' was his response. Okay, but that's just begging the question, a tautology.
What would Harvard look like if they somehow admitted the top 500 smartest students each year? My guess is a good deal less interesting. People in this comment section are so used to defending IQ tests that we forget they are a pretty coarse measure. Yes, they are great for predicting who might be able to handle advanced math and science. Yes they might tell you who will never be able to hold a useful job. They might tell you something about average life outcomes.
But they don't tell you who is going to be rich, or the president, or the creator of the next paradigm, or the writer of your favorite show.
Since Harvard's entering class size is ~1650, it probably already does. However, to your point, the Ivies do produce leaders in many fields. (CEOs, less so, because many start in Sales where IQ is less significant, or Engineering, where the Ivies don't stand out.)
Sounds harsh but it's a good thing in the long run. Too many AA jobs are pure grifting and not even a pretense of productivity while a lot of otherwise productive blacks are replaced by illegals.
Blacks actually have a lot of talent. Maybe not so much in the analytical fields but there's a lot to go around in a healthy economy.
I don't think God gave some commandment that you have to be good at quantitave tests to be a full human being. Maybe we should quit looking at people that way.
The explosion of illegals from south of the border happened because of liberal's frustration over black performance so many decades post civil rights victory. A new psychological prop was required, less ornery and shooty. Hispanics were perfect.
And the Askenezai Jews have about as much an average delta over the average whites as the average whites have over the average blacks. There are always exceptional individuals at the high end, but they are more common in the higher average groups. The average African Americans are about half way between the average American whites and average African immigrants. I would note that I am very nervous about stating an average for Africans - there are a lot of tribes and I suspect that there are substantial variations between them. There are variations between the average intelligence of different ethnic origin whites as well. When I went to a city-wide selective high school well over 50 years ago the honors classes were filled with the children of the Holocaust. When my younger kids were in high school a decade ago the honors classes were filled with the children of educated East and South Asian immigrants.
I would not consider the situation on of ignorance in the public domain. It is worse. It is willful and intentional ignorance. Ignorance is easily corrected. Willful ignorance stays that way to the grave.
I wonder if IQ tests are just tests of the mental characteristics that are most appropriate for the modern technology based world. I further wonder if immigration to the US selects for the kind of people who would be most successful in the US at the time. So 1800s good farmers who can deal with harsh weather. 2000s weaker people with more g loaded brains?
It isn't surprising that a group of immigrants who pass through a filter (Indians, Chinese) would be better at current day Americaning than the average descendant of past immigrants, and that unfiltered immigrants (the huge wave of illegals from the south) would not.
Well, if you're going to bring Sharon Stone into it, I have to relate the time I burst out laughing while listening to SF sports radio. This was '07, and a long discussion about Barry Zito not earning his money, a staff member mentioned that the new issue of Playboy had some pics if Sharon Stone. The host, a white guy who had married a black woman 18 years younger, said, "who in the hell wants to see a 47-year old woman spread her legs!?
There was a line in the Netflix show "Love" about why they stopped making erotic thrillers..."I guess with the internet you don't need to go to the movies to see boobs".
This might not be totally relevant to Steve Sailer's post but I thought I'd post it. An Internet blog called the Baltimore Banner explained how Donald Trump's downsizing of the federal government is hurting Prince George's County and Charles County, Maryland. Our federal bureaucracy is made up of hundreds of thousands of specialized bureaucrats who do things like meeting plannings and personnel arrangements. Many of these bureaucrats are blacks and they live in suburban Washington DC in its Maryland suburbs. These black bureaucrats could not make so much money in the private sector but they live well as government bureaucrats. I heartily agree that the federal bureaucracy needs to be hammered back but many people with weak skills are going to be crushed.
It’s a great question and it goes well beyond just big government. If we were to implement Elon Musk’s Doge vision of super efficiency across the economy where would all the people who really do nothing go? Is it really a good idea to disrupt the apple cart when the major problems within the system are so much more complicated like huge trade deficits, unlimited purchasing of debt by the Federal Reserve, ridiculous private sector productivity mostly through globalization, technology developed by less than 10% of the population and free markets?
Manufacturing will never be more than 10% of jobs and that’s being generous. Cheap foreign labor without unions and other rules as well as machines with AI. Oh my!
No, that's not true. Manufacturing can be like 25% as in Germany or Japan. If you then add on people who do commercial R&D research, architects and people who code - all of these are actually in the wider range of manufacturing, not in service - you'll end up with above 30%.
But yes, you do need skilled, trained AND disciplined labor for such a task. If the schools don't provide skilled and disciplined native labor, it's their problem.
You also need people willing to do the monotonous and noisy labor for low pay. And you need the factories to be built. Neither of which will happen here. All the tariffs will do is crater the economy, and the jobs won't come back anyway since the demand for low prices means the tedious, low-I.Q. factory labor is largely going to be automated by the time our factories could be finished.
A PotUS who genuinely cared about low-I.Q. workers would focus solely on liberalizibg employment law, abolishing minimum wage, replacing our welfare system with a privatized UBI rather than the ponzi scheme that is Social Security, and the promotion of trades and apprenticeships rather than our psychotic get-everyone-through-school-at-any-cost approach. But DJT cares nothing for the plight of the low-I.Q. Nor of anything aside from consolidating his dictatorship.
Or tariffs might be a negative sum move. The jobs might not “move back” to the US; they might simply be destroyed. The stock market crash of 1929 caused a recession, what they used to call a “panic.” Recovery was proceeding normally when Smoot-Hawley was implemented, resulting in corresponding foreign tariffs, a decade long depression, and a brutal war. Trump’s support for tariffs is utterly retarded.
Almost all economists have abandoned the idea that Smoot Hawley was a significant cause of the great depression. That might be shocking. Kids of my generation and earlier were taught the opposite.
Akshuelly, someone posted a link to a counter analysis here or at iSteve during the recent kerfuffle. S-H was a renewal of existing tariffs, few were much worse than the existing rates, and many products were exempt (about half of imports IIRC). Hoover & Congress doubling income tax rates to max 50% did a lot of damage but is forgotten. Post war free traders left that out of the history books.
Weird how the same people were fine with punitive peacetime income tax rates (90%).
Ok, Erik and Ralph, if I was wrong about S-H then I’m wrong. It is what I learned in school, but that could be wrong. Any additional reading would be welcome.
By the way, I do agree that all the other policies were bad. I’m certainly not arguing for zero tariffs and 75% marginal tax rates. I’d like to shrink the size of government and reduce taxes accordingly.
IIRC, my single college econ. course really had little to say about tax rates in 1978, when their effect should have been obvious. Even many Democrats voted for lower rates.
Tariffs were the Feds' sole source of income throughout the 19th century, so that couldn't be the timing. There's evidence that the economy had started to recover, but FDR's Socialist tear, doubling taxes, introducing so-called Social Security, threatening to pack the Supreme Court, etc. killed market confidence, putting the economy back into a tailspin.
Bad news for Grievance Studies majors who have been "working" in a DEI department. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet who said the people pretended to work and we pretended to pay them. Only here it is the federal employees pretended to work and we paid them way above market wages.
"where would all those people go" makes me think of the people who cry "but who will pick our produce". i have done menial jobs there is nothing wrong with manual labor, it just happens to pay less. if we purport to live in a free market economy then why don't we believe supply and demand can't sort out such "problems"?
Back in the 1990s everyone suddenly agreed that welfare should not be a career. If you want jobs for your less capable fellow citizens some of them have to be make-work and/or government jobs.
Over the past decade you see a lot of internet chatter about "bullshit jobs". I don't know if that really is a new phenomenon but if it is, perhaps it's a natural response to this. Lot's of unexceptional but otherwise pleasant people, lots of government fiat currency floating around, lots of manager whose self image depends on their number of 'direct reports' and the problem solves itself.
This was a mistake. Some people are in fact a net negative no matter where you stick them. Others might be useful, but are priced beyond their usefulness thanks to minimum-wage law.
Agree this is why minimum wage is a mistake. instead of asking employers to pay people at a minimum wage it would be better to have government subsidize employers hiring such employees at some rate making up the gap between their value and their pay.
First, we are not Germany. We haven’t built our economy around small sized manufacturing nor our education system to facilitate technical training. We also don’t sit in the middle of worlds largest free trade zone and we don’t specialize in machine manufacturing that Chinese have bought to build their factories. Germans also have immense good will because of the reputation of their auto manufacturers. The US not so much except for Tesla (which democrats are actively trying to destroy) and huge pickups which don’t export well. All that being said, Germanys manufacturing employment percentage is only 17%. No where near 30%. What do you think will happen after EVs become standard and not the mention the rise of India?
When my wife worked at the Environmental Protection Agency long, long ago, her whole section spent a weekend on retreat at a place called Camp Ferguson in suburban Prince George's County. I had gone to Camp Ferguson as a sixth-grader circa 1972.
My wife told me the great secret of bureaucratic spending. If Bureaucracy X spent $ 3 million on a program in 1994, they would have to spend $ 3.1 million in 1995 to justify the program even if the extra spending wasn't needed.
Awareness of Africans racial characteristics has swung back and forth in roughly 50 year cycles in America. For example, following the exuberance of the publication in 1852 of the wildly popular and hugely idealistic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 followed by Reconstruction, when armed troops impelled Africans to vote and hold public office, the Jim Crow laws did not reimpose segregation between the races m until 1890 through 1910 time frame. These were repealed about 50 years later. We may be reentering a similar period of racial realism.
Northern whites resegregated through "white flight." When a suburb becomes 10 % black, the sucking sound begins but it is little noticed. And then when the suburb becomes 20 % black, the sucking sound begins to be noticed. Then when the suburb becomes 30 % black, there is an explosion and all the whites but a few fuddy-duddies stream out.
True, and white flight did not represent a cultural/political challenge but was rather an inevitable outcome of the idealistic repeal of the Jim Crow laws. As more people realize, with help from journalists like Steve, that the temporary insanity of the George Floyd cult and the victim-blaming of whites attacked by the likes of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Armaud Avery in Atlanta, GA, and now Karmelo Anthony in Frisco, TX, resulted more from the failed containment of African thugs than individual prejudice against them, we may see their return in some shape or fashion.
Brilliant, Steve. I'm still wondering how all those rapacious lawyers out there are willing to sit on their hands instead of suing huge, wealthy companies, colleges and universities, cultural institutions, and on and on for outright racial discrimination in employment and admissions. When and where there's big money to be made, there are generally people willing to do what is necessary to collect it. But not in this particular area of invidious American inequity. Curious.
Remember they make money regardless of which side of the table they are sitting on. They've been making bank doing quota enforcement so something is going to have to make that position less lucrative before they'll switch.
Our national leadership, defined broadly, simply does not have the intelligence or sensitivity to confront the realities Steve describes.
Our "elite" universities have become coveted brand names...the equivalent of the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton handbag, providing education to a few dedicated STEM students but otherwise providing dangerously narrow indoctrination and fancy framed certificates written in Latin that none of the recipients have studied.
Today I will walk from my hotel in London to the National Gallery to sit quietly and enjoy examples of excellence in human achievement. Then I will walk on to St Paul's, where JMW Turner rests. Excellence isn't easy. Our leadership pretends it is.
I think you are right and a little bit of his own ego. But he will never get any support on this from the other side. His political enemies will actively root for China to win this trade war. I don’t think this strategy was well thought out out.
He’s unable to articulate that the trade off is worth it in the long run. Wall Street will tighten the leash and he doesn’t have the opinion polling to fight back. When has Wall Street ever lost this type of battle?
Is he smart? I like the opening salvo, first against neighbors who you want to negotiate with first, then against the world. But he has revealed too much to china by stating the tariffs will come down.
What he is negotiating with MX and CA, border policing on their end, is not materially worth a once in a century chance to risk our relationships with them and not get something more materially advantageous for the long term.
Trump goes hard at first but gasses out quick and other nations will begin to notice this.
Ignorance of basic facts is maybe *the* defining characteristic of modern America’s racial regime. Not difficult to understand why: it’s unpleasant to think about and many would feel, with justification, that they have been lied to their entire lives.
From the top down, there is probably an understanding about how destabalizing that knowledge would be for the young American nation that inherited this particular multi racial demography.
That’s likely true although the evidence has gotten much stronger in the past twenty years.
I suspect it cannot forever be hidden - the internet and changing demography will see to that. We’ll find out just how destabilizing it is, I guess.
We have one generation to figure out a soft landing on this.
On the law school admissions subreddit, there was a popular post recently on demographic gaps in LSAT scores:
https://www.reddit.com/r/lawschooladmissions/comments/1kbqnnb/discussions_here_got_me_curious_about_who_exactly/
A disturbing number of future law students are apparently completely ignorant of basic facts about standardized cognitive tests that are well known to iSteve readers.
Scanning through the comments, they avoided mentioning the black elephant in the room to talk about sex differences. "Cries in Spanish" is as close as they got to race.
Why should lawyers know IQ gaps better than anyone else? Only reason I can think of is that Lawyers (like doctors) are often a rare case of a smart person who has to explain something important to a ...less smart person. You don't need to know that one group on average will send you more stupid clients. You can suss out each individual.
Hmm, having considered scores of such individuals as clients for decades, none has shown he was less of a screw-up than the last. Needless to say, I am not a sports lawyer.
Really? All your clients are equally stupid? Could be once someone is 2 std dev dumber than you, your ability to discriminate fails.
No, you misread my comment.
Because they become judges who have to parse concepts like "disparate impact".
DNA can be quite wrenching to individuals and larger groups of people. Working with what you have seems to be an important part of life here. Thankfulness for what we *do* have is also appropriate, IMHO.
Yep. Everyone will have some better traits and some worse traits and whatever luck you might had in one (wow I'm so lucky to be smart) will take up less mental space daily than your obsession with the few traits that went the wrong way (oh no, my hair!).
By middle age your life satisfaction will depend on your philosophy.
>For instance, if admitted only on academic talent, Harvard’s freshman class would be down around 1% black
To be fair, Harvard has probably *never* only admitted purely on the basis of academic talent, as Jerome Karabel detailed in The Chosen. It's always wanted to cultivate future business and political leaders, many of whom are...not overburdened with raw intellectual horsepower.
A good insight of Andrew Ferguson in CrazyU, a book you reviewed a while back, is that a decent fraction of elite college admissions is reserved for athletes+legacies+diversity cases. So, if you're just a normal, academically gifted student, getting into an Ivy is even harder than the imposing statistics make it seem.
The flipside of this is that anyone who gets into Harvard without checking one of those boxes is probably *exceptionally* smart.
It's completely reasonable for Ivies to want to cultivate future business and political talent. Moreover, if we add scientific leadership to the other 2 items - so that it reads "to cultivate future business, political talent and scientific leadership" - that's in essence what academic talent or IQ or whatever other metric of cognitive performance is for. To succeed in life BEYOND what would be randomly probable if these metrics were discounted.
I think one Harvard professor described it as “Well you have to have a bottom half of the class.”
I have a cousin whose opinion on those court cases simplified to Harvard should let in the best academic students. I asked him what he thought Harvard was trying to accomplish in its admissions process and the question didn't even make sense to him. 'Get the best students' was his response. Okay, but that's just begging the question, a tautology.
What would Harvard look like if they somehow admitted the top 500 smartest students each year? My guess is a good deal less interesting. People in this comment section are so used to defending IQ tests that we forget they are a pretty coarse measure. Yes, they are great for predicting who might be able to handle advanced math and science. Yes they might tell you who will never be able to hold a useful job. They might tell you something about average life outcomes.
But they don't tell you who is going to be rich, or the president, or the creator of the next paradigm, or the writer of your favorite show.
Since Harvard's entering class size is ~1650, it probably already does. However, to your point, the Ivies do produce leaders in many fields. (CEOs, less so, because many start in Sales where IQ is less significant, or Engineering, where the Ivies don't stand out.)
What is a way to accomplish admitting those "interesting" people at scale? Should we have a more diverse array of standardized tests? Personal essays?
No idea but one could argue that in the middle of the 20th century Harvard figured it out.
Sounds harsh but it's a good thing in the long run. Too many AA jobs are pure grifting and not even a pretense of productivity while a lot of otherwise productive blacks are replaced by illegals.
Blacks actually have a lot of talent. Maybe not so much in the analytical fields but there's a lot to go around in a healthy economy.
I don't think God gave some commandment that you have to be good at quantitave tests to be a full human being. Maybe we should quit looking at people that way.
The explosion of illegals from south of the border happened because of liberal's frustration over black performance so many decades post civil rights victory. A new psychological prop was required, less ornery and shooty. Hispanics were perfect.
None of this will matter in 10 years or so when the Indians take over.
The new least enjoyable sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
I like it, a wholly remade first-world fueled by Hindu-impelled corruption!
And the Askenezai Jews have about as much an average delta over the average whites as the average whites have over the average blacks. There are always exceptional individuals at the high end, but they are more common in the higher average groups. The average African Americans are about half way between the average American whites and average African immigrants. I would note that I am very nervous about stating an average for Africans - there are a lot of tribes and I suspect that there are substantial variations between them. There are variations between the average intelligence of different ethnic origin whites as well. When I went to a city-wide selective high school well over 50 years ago the honors classes were filled with the children of the Holocaust. When my younger kids were in high school a decade ago the honors classes were filled with the children of educated East and South Asian immigrants.
I would not consider the situation on of ignorance in the public domain. It is worse. It is willful and intentional ignorance. Ignorance is easily corrected. Willful ignorance stays that way to the grave.
I wonder if IQ tests are just tests of the mental characteristics that are most appropriate for the modern technology based world. I further wonder if immigration to the US selects for the kind of people who would be most successful in the US at the time. So 1800s good farmers who can deal with harsh weather. 2000s weaker people with more g loaded brains?
It isn't surprising that a group of immigrants who pass through a filter (Indians, Chinese) would be better at current day Americaning than the average descendant of past immigrants, and that unfiltered immigrants (the huge wave of illegals from the south) would not.
Flynn Effect supports your first pondering.
Well, if you're going to bring Sharon Stone into it, I have to relate the time I burst out laughing while listening to SF sports radio. This was '07, and a long discussion about Barry Zito not earning his money, a staff member mentioned that the new issue of Playboy had some pics if Sharon Stone. The host, a white guy who had married a black woman 18 years younger, said, "who in the hell wants to see a 47-year old woman spread her legs!?
Sharon was still pretty, until she chopped off most of her hair, for some reason.
When an older woman chops her hair, you know that's she's given up trying to be attractive to men.
I have always felt that when you girlfriend cuts her lovely long hair, its a sign your relationship - and her passion for you - is on the wane.
You are probably right.
Older hair is more fragile. It's hard to keep it long and healthy looking.
Sharon Stone was after my time, and I had to look her up in Wikipedia to know who you folks were talking about. She used to be pretty exciting, I see.
There was a line in the Netflix show "Love" about why they stopped making erotic thrillers..."I guess with the internet you don't need to go to the movies to see boobs".
Kirsten Bell was good in that series.
This might not be totally relevant to Steve Sailer's post but I thought I'd post it. An Internet blog called the Baltimore Banner explained how Donald Trump's downsizing of the federal government is hurting Prince George's County and Charles County, Maryland. Our federal bureaucracy is made up of hundreds of thousands of specialized bureaucrats who do things like meeting plannings and personnel arrangements. Many of these bureaucrats are blacks and they live in suburban Washington DC in its Maryland suburbs. These black bureaucrats could not make so much money in the private sector but they live well as government bureaucrats. I heartily agree that the federal bureaucracy needs to be hammered back but many people with weak skills are going to be crushed.
It’s a great question and it goes well beyond just big government. If we were to implement Elon Musk’s Doge vision of super efficiency across the economy where would all the people who really do nothing go? Is it really a good idea to disrupt the apple cart when the major problems within the system are so much more complicated like huge trade deficits, unlimited purchasing of debt by the Federal Reserve, ridiculous private sector productivity mostly through globalization, technology developed by less than 10% of the population and free markets?
IF tariffs come in stronger than they are now, there will be more domestic manufacturing with job openings. Some will pay very well, others won't.
Manufacturing will never be more than 10% of jobs and that’s being generous. Cheap foreign labor without unions and other rules as well as machines with AI. Oh my!
No, that's not true. Manufacturing can be like 25% as in Germany or Japan. If you then add on people who do commercial R&D research, architects and people who code - all of these are actually in the wider range of manufacturing, not in service - you'll end up with above 30%.
But yes, you do need skilled, trained AND disciplined labor for such a task. If the schools don't provide skilled and disciplined native labor, it's their problem.
You also need people willing to do the monotonous and noisy labor for low pay. And you need the factories to be built. Neither of which will happen here. All the tariffs will do is crater the economy, and the jobs won't come back anyway since the demand for low prices means the tedious, low-I.Q. factory labor is largely going to be automated by the time our factories could be finished.
A PotUS who genuinely cared about low-I.Q. workers would focus solely on liberalizibg employment law, abolishing minimum wage, replacing our welfare system with a privatized UBI rather than the ponzi scheme that is Social Security, and the promotion of trades and apprenticeships rather than our psychotic get-everyone-through-school-at-any-cost approach. But DJT cares nothing for the plight of the low-I.Q. Nor of anything aside from consolidating his dictatorship.
Or tariffs might be a negative sum move. The jobs might not “move back” to the US; they might simply be destroyed. The stock market crash of 1929 caused a recession, what they used to call a “panic.” Recovery was proceeding normally when Smoot-Hawley was implemented, resulting in corresponding foreign tariffs, a decade long depression, and a brutal war. Trump’s support for tariffs is utterly retarded.
Almost all economists have abandoned the idea that Smoot Hawley was a significant cause of the great depression. That might be shocking. Kids of my generation and earlier were taught the opposite.
Akshuelly, someone posted a link to a counter analysis here or at iSteve during the recent kerfuffle. S-H was a renewal of existing tariffs, few were much worse than the existing rates, and many products were exempt (about half of imports IIRC). Hoover & Congress doubling income tax rates to max 50% did a lot of damage but is forgotten. Post war free traders left that out of the history books.
Weird how the same people were fine with punitive peacetime income tax rates (90%).
Ok, Erik and Ralph, if I was wrong about S-H then I’m wrong. It is what I learned in school, but that could be wrong. Any additional reading would be welcome.
By the way, I do agree that all the other policies were bad. I’m certainly not arguing for zero tariffs and 75% marginal tax rates. I’d like to shrink the size of government and reduce taxes accordingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MckCZ9iLAyI
It was news to me, too.
IIRC, my single college econ. course really had little to say about tax rates in 1978, when their effect should have been obvious. Even many Democrats voted for lower rates.
Tariffs were the Feds' sole source of income throughout the 19th century, so that couldn't be the timing. There's evidence that the economy had started to recover, but FDR's Socialist tear, doubling taxes, introducing so-called Social Security, threatening to pack the Supreme Court, etc. killed market confidence, putting the economy back into a tailspin.
Tariffs were the sole source of revenue when federal government spending was like 3% of GDP. Get it back to that level and we can talk.
I do agree that all of Roosevelt’s semi-socialist policies were bad. And still are bad, even if entrenched.
Bad news for Grievance Studies majors who have been "working" in a DEI department. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet who said the people pretended to work and we pretended to pay them. Only here it is the federal employees pretended to work and we paid them way above market wages.
Problem Russia still hasn’t recovered.
"where would all those people go" makes me think of the people who cry "but who will pick our produce". i have done menial jobs there is nothing wrong with manual labor, it just happens to pay less. if we purport to live in a free market economy then why don't we believe supply and demand can't sort out such "problems"?
Back in the 1990s everyone suddenly agreed that welfare should not be a career. If you want jobs for your less capable fellow citizens some of them have to be make-work and/or government jobs.
Over the past decade you see a lot of internet chatter about "bullshit jobs". I don't know if that really is a new phenomenon but if it is, perhaps it's a natural response to this. Lot's of unexceptional but otherwise pleasant people, lots of government fiat currency floating around, lots of manager whose self image depends on their number of 'direct reports' and the problem solves itself.
This was a mistake. Some people are in fact a net negative no matter where you stick them. Others might be useful, but are priced beyond their usefulness thanks to minimum-wage law.
We could build a movie set and hire actors to play managers and give these people fake jobs.
Agree this is why minimum wage is a mistake. instead of asking employers to pay people at a minimum wage it would be better to have government subsidize employers hiring such employees at some rate making up the gap between their value and their pay.
First, we are not Germany. We haven’t built our economy around small sized manufacturing nor our education system to facilitate technical training. We also don’t sit in the middle of worlds largest free trade zone and we don’t specialize in machine manufacturing that Chinese have bought to build their factories. Germans also have immense good will because of the reputation of their auto manufacturers. The US not so much except for Tesla (which democrats are actively trying to destroy) and huge pickups which don’t export well. All that being said, Germanys manufacturing employment percentage is only 17%. No where near 30%. What do you think will happen after EVs become standard and not the mention the rise of India?
If only things could change.
That makes sense. According to Wednesday's Doge meeting, huge portions of the federal budget were recently devoted to parties and blowouts.
When my wife worked at the Environmental Protection Agency long, long ago, her whole section spent a weekend on retreat at a place called Camp Ferguson in suburban Prince George's County. I had gone to Camp Ferguson as a sixth-grader circa 1972.
Agencies were using unspent appropriations money to rent out entire stadia.
My wife told me the great secret of bureaucratic spending. If Bureaucracy X spent $ 3 million on a program in 1994, they would have to spend $ 3.1 million in 1995 to justify the program even if the extra spending wasn't needed.
I expected a comment on last week’s NYT article about the angst at Amherst over the prospect of a nearly blacks-free campus.
Awareness of Africans racial characteristics has swung back and forth in roughly 50 year cycles in America. For example, following the exuberance of the publication in 1852 of the wildly popular and hugely idealistic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 followed by Reconstruction, when armed troops impelled Africans to vote and hold public office, the Jim Crow laws did not reimpose segregation between the races m until 1890 through 1910 time frame. These were repealed about 50 years later. We may be reentering a similar period of racial realism.
It took about 50 years for the political class to realize punitive tax rates were counterproductive.
Northern whites resegregated through "white flight." When a suburb becomes 10 % black, the sucking sound begins but it is little noticed. And then when the suburb becomes 20 % black, the sucking sound begins to be noticed. Then when the suburb becomes 30 % black, there is an explosion and all the whites but a few fuddy-duddies stream out.
Yup, 30% is THE number, point of no return. Been through it twice, there won't be a third time for me.
True, and white flight did not represent a cultural/political challenge but was rather an inevitable outcome of the idealistic repeal of the Jim Crow laws. As more people realize, with help from journalists like Steve, that the temporary insanity of the George Floyd cult and the victim-blaming of whites attacked by the likes of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Armaud Avery in Atlanta, GA, and now Karmelo Anthony in Frisco, TX, resulted more from the failed containment of African thugs than individual prejudice against them, we may see their return in some shape or fashion.
Isn't the "diversity" rationale for affirmation action still in force?
Look up the number of segregated graduation ceremonies, dormitories, and student organizations.
Brilliant, Steve. I'm still wondering how all those rapacious lawyers out there are willing to sit on their hands instead of suing huge, wealthy companies, colleges and universities, cultural institutions, and on and on for outright racial discrimination in employment and admissions. When and where there's big money to be made, there are generally people willing to do what is necessary to collect it. But not in this particular area of invidious American inequity. Curious.
Seems the gazillion lawyers we have today only represent part of the country, with a few exceptions of course.
If the companies do not administer IQ tests or IQ-aligned tests, they can't be sued. Every time they don't collect data, they can't be sued.
Remember they make money regardless of which side of the table they are sitting on. They've been making bank doing quota enforcement so something is going to have to make that position less lucrative before they'll switch.
I didn't expect Steve to admit his career is just a flash in the pan.
Our national leadership, defined broadly, simply does not have the intelligence or sensitivity to confront the realities Steve describes.
Our "elite" universities have become coveted brand names...the equivalent of the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton handbag, providing education to a few dedicated STEM students but otherwise providing dangerously narrow indoctrination and fancy framed certificates written in Latin that none of the recipients have studied.
Today I will walk from my hotel in London to the National Gallery to sit quietly and enjoy examples of excellence in human achievement. Then I will walk on to St Paul's, where JMW Turner rests. Excellence isn't easy. Our leadership pretends it is.
How did it get to this? Was it just 60 years of liberal brainwashing and wishful thinking?
Trump’s “blowing up” of the economy seems at least partially to be a well-intentioned effort to bring lower-skilled, well-paying jobs back to the US.
I think you are right and a little bit of his own ego. But he will never get any support on this from the other side. His political enemies will actively root for China to win this trade war. I don’t think this strategy was well thought out out.
He’s unable to articulate that the trade off is worth it in the long run. Wall Street will tighten the leash and he doesn’t have the opinion polling to fight back. When has Wall Street ever lost this type of battle?
The entire press is against him, for sure. The UAW actually seems happy with the tariffs. He’s smart to get all this stuff done so soon.
Is he smart? I like the opening salvo, first against neighbors who you want to negotiate with first, then against the world. But he has revealed too much to china by stating the tariffs will come down.
What he is negotiating with MX and CA, border policing on their end, is not materially worth a once in a century chance to risk our relationships with them and not get something more materially advantageous for the long term.
Trump goes hard at first but gasses out quick and other nations will begin to notice this.