I want to call an interview at Politico by Marc Novicoff of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to your attention. In the interview Dr. Haidt blame practically everything, from the election of Donald Trump to rising prevalence of mental illness, particularly among young women, to general societal chaos on social media on smartphones. This passage particularly caught my attention:

A healthy democratic society requires some degree of shared facts and some degree of trust in institutions and some degree of trust in each other. And all of that is declining for many reasons, but one of them is the rise of social media. The social construction of reality turns into a million tiny fragments on social media.

When 9/11 happened, Americans generally came to the conclusion very quickly that al Qaeda had attacked us. But if that happened tomorrow, we would not come to such a conclusion. We’re no longer able to agree on basic facts about what is happening or what happened. Now, none of this is the fault of Gen Z. This is happening to people of all ages. But if you are raised to political consciousness in a fragmented world where you can’t believe anything, where the Russians are messing with us and trying to get us to believe that we can’t believe anything, it’s going to make it tougher to become vibrant, engaged democratic citizens.

How about his own kids?

With your kids, what do you restrict and what do you allow?

I had a firm rule against social media in middle school. And it’s an ongoing negotiation in high school.

In comments a regular commenter remarked:

People succeed on their own, with (IMHO) three attributes: 1) connections, 2) perseverance and 3) a combination of purely intellectual smarts and (intuitive) street smarts. In my own experience (read: me, and so many others I have known. Don’t underestimate that amorphous thing called intuition. Its a highly underrated aspect of intelligence. Perhaps decisive. )

Any connections I might have had died with my dad. As I’ve mentioned before my father died young and unexpectedly. His connections had died when first his father and then his grandfather died when he was just a kid. As sole heir he was able to pay for college and law school, pay his own and his mother’s living expenses through the Depression, and, finally, spend a year in Europe after graduating from college and law school.

Other than show business my mom had no connections. Barely even a family.

I rejected my only connection through my dad shortly after he died. A wealthy woman, a client of my father’s, offered to pay my way through college and law school on the condition that, having graduated from law school, I become her lawyer. I was present when she made that very generous offer to my mom. It was politely rejected.

Perseverance I have. I put myself through college and grad school on the basis of scholarships, loans, and working full time. Smarts I have of both kinds. I gained my “street smarts” literally on the streets. The neighborhood I grew up in was one in which fighting was the regular, expected pastime after school. The challenge my parents faced was in stopping me from fighting. There was a bar and a brothel on the corner a half block from our house and the lady next door ran numbers. A young man down the block sold drugs out of his garage. For me that was just our neighborhood. My siblings were lucky to have little memory of that neighborhood—they grew up in a much nicer place.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as successful. I think I just muddle along. Perhaps if I’d cared more about material success I would have had more of it.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Garry Kasparov declaims:

Paranoia is my birthright, as it is for anyone born in the Soviet Union. But the official Kremlin story line is already a shambles. In one of the most surveilled cities on earth, where you can be arrested in 30 seconds for whispering “no war,” the terrorists continued their attack for more than an hour and then simply drove away.

The FSB, Russia’s state security service, claims to have arrested four suspects near Ukraine, at one of the most fortified borders in the world. Or did the suspects actually drive to Russian ally Belarus, as that nation’s ambassador to Russia said? Considering the amount of materiel and preparation required to do so much damage to a venue the size of a small village, it’s odd that the terrorists would suddenly turn into bungling amateurs by carrying their Tajik passports and heading to a militarized border.

Every official statement from the Kremlin and its propagandists will be a lie, with a few half-truths tossed in. It’s a control reflex of the security state of which Mr. Putin is a product. As I often say, I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB.

He then asks a very interesting question:

How did the U.S. know? Was it sources in ISIS-K or, as I suspect, moles in the FSB?

and suggests a “false flag” operation on the part of the FSB.

He does raise a good question. Why should we trust American intelligence’s explanation? They’ve lied with some regularity to Congress, the American people, and the president over the period of the last 70 years. As Mr. Kasparov suggests it appears to be “a control reflex of the security state”.

At this point I have seen the following explanations for the terrorist attack in Moscow:

• ISIS in Khorasan
• Ukraine (both official and rogue operation)
• a “false flag” operation by the FSB
• the CIA or MI6

Who do you trust? Who do you believe?

Mr. Kasparov goes on to lament:

It’s a cowardly new world order. The White House is busy telling Ukraine where it can’t shoot and telling Israel where it can’t hunt terrorists. Instead of providing leadership to unite democratic allies against dictators, Mr. Biden’s administration puts limits on America’s allies to protect America’s enemies. You don’t have to wonder what Taiwan and China make of America’s descent into passivity.

Republican obstruction of aid to Ukraine is despicable, but Mr. Biden can’t use it to excuse his own politicking and inaction. America has the largest military arsenal known to man, but it rusts in warehouses while Ukrainians die. Harry Truman had to face down Stalin and said the buck stopped with him. Mr. Biden says the buck stops with Speaker Mike Johnson. Donald Trump threatens isolationism in speeches and social-media posts; Mr. Biden is making isolationism a reality by refusing to stand up to dictators or to his own domestic opposition.

Mr. Biden retreated from Afghanistan, and Russia invaded Ukraine. He retreated from Ukraine, and Hamas launched a war against Israel. Weakness invites aggression.

concluding by asserting that Putin is “suspect #1” for the terrorist attack.

What bothers me is the extreme confidence with which our media are asserting that they know just what happened. At this point I honestly have no idea.

Update

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are confident that the attack was perpetrated by ISIS-K:

To all the other security risks in the world, you can add the return of Islamic State as a killing machine. Russians were the victims on Friday as gunmen attacked civilians at a Moscow concert venue, killing at least 133. ISIS suicide bombers killed more than 80 in Iran in January, and no one should doubt that the jihadists are looking to target Americans sooner or later.

Pandora Dewan in an article in Newsweek notes that the mortality rate of working age Americans is higher than those in other high-income countries:

Over the past three decades, most high-income countries have seen a significant decline in midlife mortality between the ages of 25 to 64. However, according to researchers at Oxford and Princeton Universities, mortality declines in the U.S. for this age bracket have been significantly slower than in other countries, and have even reversed in recent years.

Using data from the World Health Organization Mortality Database between 1990 and 2019, the team concluded that by 2019, all-cause midlife mortality rates in the U.S. were 2.5 times higher than the average rates in other high-income countries. The study, which was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on March 21, did not evaluate data during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other high-income countries widened even further.

I wish the author had provided some conjectures on why that might be. The United States is different from other high-income countries in innumerable ways. I’m sure that some will rush to conclude that the difference is the availability of insurance but health care insurance has been widely available in one form or another for a decade or more and that is not evident in the mortality statistics.

The original study is here. It appears to me that a considerable amount of the differences are due to high and rising suicide rates and deaths due to alcoholism and other substance-related deaths.

At Big Think Ross Pomeroy reports on another study of the monetary value of a college education. Here are the results:

Zhang and his co-authors also pored through 2009–2021 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Specifically, they compared the incomes of 2.9 million individuals with college bachelor’s degrees, ages 18 to 65, to the incomes of 2.9 million individuals with only high school diplomas.

“The earnings gap between college and high school graduates is around $14,000 annually,” Zhang told Big Think. “This gap is initially lower, then increases to about $20,000, and slightly decreases as they near retirement.”

Knowing the cost of attending a four-year university and the considerable income bump that comes with it, the researchers were then able to calculate the value of a college degree. They found that investment in a college education yields a return of about 9.1% for men and 9.9% for women. The higher rate for women is because female high school graduates earn far less than males. Over a 40-year career, these rates of return translate into millions of dollars of extra income.

While prepared to believe that graduating from college provides monetary value, I wish the article provided more information about the study. Unfortunately, the study itself appears to be restricted. Among my questions are:

• Did they calculate total income net of the cost of attending college? Or did they just compare incomes?
• Did they consider the extra years of income for those not attending college?
• Did they exclude individuals who went on after obtaining a four year college degree to attend medical school? A top law school? Get an MBA from a top school?

There are others.

This

Together, they estimated the total cost of attending a four-year college, using data from 1,160 public, 480 private nonprofit, and 230 for-profit institutions. Grant awards, tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, and opportunity costs from not working were accounted for in the tabulations. This brought the overall cost of college to roughly $140,000, Zhang told Big Think in an email.

makes me think they did consider the first two in their study but I’m not sure.

Any of those issues could render the study meaningless or at best change the results drastically.

Early in my career my college degree got me very little if anything and my having graduated from an elite school got me literally nothing. Bizarrely, no one cared about my post-graduate degree until recently.

At Brussels Signal Gabriel Elefteriu has harsh words for those NATO members advocating direct military intervention in the war between Russia and Ukraine:

The collective flight of reason triggered by Emmanuel Macron’s bombshell suggestion last month about a possible Western military intervention in Ukraine is only gathering more pace. After prominent Dutch, Lithuanian, Estonian, Czech and Polish officials and leaders quickly endorsed the idea, the Finnish and Latvian foreign ministers have also recently joined the push to normalise this utterly irresponsible notion.

Commendably, some countries including the US, UK and Germany have ruled out deploying troops to Ukraine. But even in their ranks there are voices, such as that of former UK defence secretary Ben Wallace, who are on board with it all.

and

In summary, there is no such thing as a “non-combat” deployment in Ukraine and direct engagements with Russian forces are all but guaranteed, with further escalation from there.

The idea that this can be done on some “coalition of the willing”-basis by just some NATO countries acting separately from the Alliance itself, is worse than a bad joke: it betrays a petrifying deficit of understanding and lapse of judgement regarding the political realities around Article 5.

I think the intent of this coalition of the gung-ho is direct U. S. military intervention in that war, i.e. “boots on the ground”. Here’s why any NATO countries joining the fray would end NATO:

All the other allies – including, quite likely, the United States – who declined to join the mad dash into Ukraine, but now would be asked to help, would quite reasonably say, “no, thank you”.

He concludes:

The current narrative being artificially built up around Europe, suggesting that we need to fight Putin in Ukraine, otherwise we’ll have to fight him on NATO territory, only serves to discredit the Alliance. It is also an insult to the intellect of any thinking person.

There is a reason why there is a NATO border that separates those who are in from those who are not: it marks the limit to which an adversary who wishes us harm can stretch its power – yes, even through conquest – before the rules of the game change and the might of the entire alliance comes into play.

By trying to erase these limits and wipe out any distinction between NATO membership and non-membership, Macron and his followers are weakening the Alliance and doing European security a great disservice.

That’s also why admitting Poland in particular to the alliance was an error. Poland has ongoing territorial disputes with Russia. Do we really expect the U. S. to pursue those claims on behalf of Poland? Of course not.

Adding Ukraine to NATO would similarly be an error. As George Kennan pointed out some time ago, it would be like the Soviet Union admitting Pennsylvania to the Warsaw Pact.

I think that U. S. economic and munitions support for Ukraine is right and proper because I am anti-invasion but that’s where I think our support should end. And the U. S. government has a fiduciary responsibility which it is not presently satisfying to ensure that our aid actually gets to the Ukrainian military and is used appropriately. The limitation of our commitment I support is not because I am pro-Putin or pro-Russian but because I am not pro-Ukrainian. I am pro-American and our national interests in Ukraine are very limited.

I don’t have a great deal of time to comment today but I did want to remark on this. It appears that the Chicago referendum to raise property transfer taxes will go down to defeat. Supporters of the measure are unbowed. Some, including the mayor, say that the measure was defeated because Trump supporters voted against it.

No, your honor. It wasn’t just Trump supporters. In my neighborhood, the area with which I’m most familiar, 70% of the voters voted against it and you don’t see a lot of MAGA hats here. It’s a lot more than Trump supporters.

I don’t oppose a graduated property transfer tax or oppose paying higher taxes on principle but I voted against this particular measure because it was a poorly crafted piece of legislation with adverse run-on effects. It even had the possible consequence of increasing the number of homeless people in Chicago. Before increasing taxes or imposing a graduated real estate transfer tax they should consider ending Chicago’s status as a “sanctuary city”. We’re presently spending millions housing thousands of migrants. The City Council knew that if Chicago’s “sanctuary city” status had been put on the ballot it would have gone down to defeat. Opposition to it is widespread and not just among Trump supporters.

The measure wasn’t put on the ballot in the general election because they knew it would be defeated then and hoped that the lower turnout in the primary election would allow it to prevail. They miscalculated.

I think that 42nd War Alderman Brendan O’Reilly was closer to the mark when he said “I think the Mayor got a report card last night and he did not pass”.

The mayor’s take, blaming it on Trump supporters, illustrates what’s wrong with our politics. There’s a lot more than Trump supporters vs. Biden supporters. Not every voter is willing to accept every piece of progressive claptrap.

I genuinely don’t know what to make of the chaos surrounding Texas’s SB 4. Here’s a report at NBC News from Rebecca Shabad and Kyla Guilfoil:

Judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared unreceptive to arguments by Texas’ solicitor general Wednesday that the state’s new immigration law should take effect because it “mirrors” federal law.

A three-judge panel of the court had ruled 2-1 late Tuesday that the measure, known as Senate Bill 4, should be temporarily blocked while the judges hear the case. Earlier Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court said that it could take effect.

“Texas has a right to defend itself,” state Solicitor General Aaron Nielson said, adding that the district court had acknowledged that “sometimes those associated with the cartels cross over the border with malicious intent.”

As flip as it sounds I don’t think that Texas’s argument is entirely without merit. Does the federal government have the right not to defend Texas and to prevent Texas from defending itself? That doesn’t sound reasonable, either.

I suspect the question is not whether there is a line but where the line should be.

I wanted to take note of one passage in William A. Galston’s Wall Street Journal column on Chuck Schumer’s Israel speech:

The majority leader also misreads Israeli public opinion. Like many U.S. politicians, he seems unaware of the vast changes in Israeli sentiment since the collapse of the Oslo accords in 2000. The gravamen of his speech was the familiar call for a two-state solution, which Jewish Israelis reject by a margin of about 2 to 1, even if accompanied by U.S. security guarantees and a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. “Call me an optimist,” Mr. Schumer said in his speech. Others would be less generous.

Israeli sentiments about the war in Gaza are no less challenging for American liberals. Nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis favor extending military operations to Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold, where more than a million Gazans have taken refuge. Two-thirds of Jewish Israelis polled in February opposed more humanitarian aid for Gaza “at this time,” even if delivered through organizations unrelated to Hamas or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The U.S. should disregard this sentiment, but our leaders should try to understand why it has taken hold.

A slight majority of Jewish Israelis polled in February even favored expanding hostilities to include a northern front against Hezbollah, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has urged. In this respect, Mr. Netanyahu has been a moderating influence.

Would we prefer that the Palestinians weren’t dominated by radical Islamists? Sure. But they are. Would we prefer that Israelis weren’t responding by becoming more militant? Sure. But that’s not what’s happening. I don’t think we should like either group very much.