Here’s an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s latest criticism of Critical Race Theory:

The 1619 Project is a case in point. It doesn’t just expose some of the hideous past we’d rather forget. It insists that “white supremacy” is the definition of the United States, that its true founding was therefore 1619, that its core principle from the get-go was not freedom but slavery, that slavery is the true basis for American wealth, that the police today are the inheritors of slave patrols, that only black Americans fought to end slavery, and so on. It insists that the Declaration of Independence was “false”, not merely imperfectly implemented, and designed to obscure the real project of racist oppression. And its goal is the dismantling of liberal epistemology, procedures, ideas and arguments in order to revolutionize what cannot by definition be reformed.

This is what makes CRT different. When it began, critical theory was one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them.

Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth. It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves. If a cis white woman were to make an argument, a Latino trans man can dismiss it for no other reason than that a white cis woman is making it. Thus, identity trumps reason. Thus liberal society dies a little every time that dismissal sticks.

Every time a liberal institution hires or fires someone because of their group identity rather than their individual abilities, it is embracing a principle designed to undermine the liberal part of the institution. Every university that denies a place to someone because of their race is violating fundamental principles of liberal learning. Every newspaper and magazine that fires someone for their sincerely-held views, or because their identity alone means those views are unacceptable, is undermining the principles of liberal discourse. Every time someone prefers to trust someone’s subjective “lived experience” over facts, empiricism and an attempt at objectivity, liberal society dies a little.

And every student who emerges from college who believes that what matters is whether you are on “the right side of history” rather than whether your ideas can be tested by the ruthless light of open debate is a student who does not have the ability to function as a citizen in a liberal society. The ability to respect and live peaceably alongside people with whom you vehemently disagree is a far harder skill than cheering on one of your own. And yet liberal institutions are openly demonstrating that it is precisely this kind of difficult toleration they will not tolerate.

I’m sorry but this matters. It’s not the only thing that matters right now, I know. But if we remove the corner-stone of liberal democracy — the concept of a free, interchangeable citizen using reason to deliberate the common good with her fellow citizens, regardless of any identity — then it is only a matter of time before it falls.

Read the whole thing. I don’t think he’s being unduly alarmist. An entire cohort of young people is being maleducated without, as he puts it, “the ability to function as a citizen in a liberal society”. It is already an issue and it is not limited to a handful of young people at a handful of schools. It’s everywhere including in our streets.

You might find this op-ed by Angus King and Mike Gallegher at the Wall Street Journal on the actions being taken by Congress to deal with cybersecurity interesting. That should be a free link—not paywalled. I won’t bother synopsizing it.

I think that Congress should be using a “carrots and sticks” approach to cybersecurity, e.g. incentives for cooperation and penalties for security failures, but I’m skeptical about the federal government’s ability to do much about cybersecurity. IMO it’s a form of asymmetrical warfare and the organization and predispositions of the federal government are pretty much the opposite of what’s needed. The digital equivalent of “special forces” is needed and IMO that can more easily be provided by the private sector than by government.

You might want to take a gander at this article at Foreign Affairs by Elizabeth Economy on some of the risks that China is facing. Here’s a snippet:

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, which assesses gender disparity across a range of economic, political, educational, and health criteria, ranks China 107th out of 144 countries—down from 69th in 2013, Xi’s first full year in power. Women’s participation in the labor force has also dropped precipitously. As a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics reveals, China’s gender gap in labor force participation increased from 9.4 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2020, and Chinese women earn approximately 20 percent less than their male colleagues. More than 80 percent of female college graduates report encountering gender discrimination in job searches; jobs not infrequently advertise for men only or require applicants to be married women with children, so their tenure will not be interrupted by pregnancy.

Another challenge is income inequality—China’s Gini coefficient is among the highest in the world:

The top one percent in China has a greater share of wealth than the bottom 50 percent, and a 2019 Chinese central bank report revealed that among 30,000 urban families surveyed, 20 percent held 63 percent of total assets while the bottom 20 percent owned just 2.6 percent. Across China, the top 20 percent earn 10.2 times what the poorest 20 percent earn. As a result, China’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality that ranges from zero to one) has reached 0.47, among the highest in the world and far beyond the level that Chinese officials themselves have claimed would be destabilizing.

International Monetary Fund analysis suggests that such inequality stems from educational disparities and continued limits on freedom of movement (as well as technological changes that have increased the wages of more skilled workers). The Stanford economist Scott Rozelle has detailed Beijing’s failures to put in place the educational opportunities—in terms of both access and quality—necessary for many in rural China to be able to participate effectively in the country’s rapidly emerging technological revolution. The long-term ramifications are significant: high levels of income inequality can limit economic growth and sustainability, weaken investment in health and education, and slow economic reform.

Other challenges include China’s “creative class”. Schumpeter’s hypothesis applies to China just as much as to the United States. She concludes:

If Xi does not course correct, his China dream may be on the cusp of becoming his nightmare.

Fifteen years ago I wrote about China’s biggest challenges. At the time I had pretty fair confidence that the Chinese authorities could take the steps necessary to deal with them. Over the intervening years they have done little about any of them and my confidence that they will do anything about them or the challenges identified by Dr. Economy is waning.

I genuinely appreciate people who look past the headlines and partisan squabbles to consider the implications of events. Consider this on the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 by Ian Birrell at UnHerd:

But what would it mean if the lab leak hypotheses proved correct? The result would be uncomfortable not just for the Chinese Communist Party, which would be guilty of overseeing arguably the biggest cover-up in history of an event that caused economic chaos, millions of deaths and misery around the world. It would shake science to its foundations for carrying out risky research despite clear warnings of the dangers, and then collaborating in an epic whitewash. And it would challenge a media that meekly accepted the establishment view rather than doing its job of asking difficult questions — a failure even more serious than the Iraq War intelligence debacle. Indeed, much of science and the media already look sadly tainted by their failures on this front, regardless of the outcome.

We still have no hard proof how this wretched pandemic emerged in that central Chinese city. We do know, however, that determined efforts in both China and the wider world to prove that Covid-19 had a natural zoonotic origin have failed so far to find an intermediate host animal that might have turned a bat virus into such a lethal, well-adapted pathogen for human beings, despite testing 80,000 samples. We know that Chinese officials were guilty of an initial cover-up that inflamed the impact of the disease with devastating global consequences, and that Beijing promoted false theories, smeared critics and expelled foreign reporters. We also know that the World Health Organisation’s collusion with the Communist regime has undermined its credibility.

Read the whole thing. I think that this assessment is about right:

No doubt there would be sanctions, sabre-rattling, some talk of consumer boycotts and loud demands for reparations — before the arguments drag on fruitlessly for many years. “China will do whatever it can to deny it,” said Lianchao Han, a leading dissident and former Chinese government official. “Xi will mobilise his massive propaganda machine to fabricate stories and facts to shake off his responsibility and liabilities. We already passed the point to depose him for mishandling the pandemic if it’s proved to a lab leak.”

But that just characterizes the repercussions for Xi. There would also be repercussions for China, science, and the media.

I’m still waiting for the inevitable civil law suits.

Read this post at Digg by Adwait Patil. The post is largely a repetition of 15 tweets by the CEO of Redfin, the online real estate site (annual revenue ˜$1 billion). I’ll just quote one of them (not retweet):

11 of 15: This migration to lower-cost areas may lead to lower workforce participation. For many families @Redfin has relocated, the money saved on housing costs lets one parent stop working. A wave of Redfin customers are retiring early.

It’s interesting. To whatever degree his observations are correct they comprise more evidence that the new normal will be quite different from the old one. Who works, where, how, and why are all changing.

Update

I can’t resist—here’s another one:

14 of 15: it’s not just income that’s k-shaped, but mobility. 90% of people earning $100,000+ per year expect to be able to work virtually, compared to 10% of those earning $40,000 or less per year. The folks who need low-cost housing the most have the least flexibility to move.

Kvetching about “equity” is not going to solve that problem. State and local governments are doing almost the opposite of what they need to be doing while the federal government is helping them to it. That will aggravate their problems rather than solving them.

I agree with the underlying sympathies behind Amanda Cage, Maureen Conway, Jeannine Laprad, and Sarah Miller’s post at The Hill:

The reality is that about half of America’s working population earns less than a living wage. It is past time to update federal policy and support all of our workforce in a way that matches its skills, talents and contributions to America’s success.

In the rebuilding year ahead, Americans need and deserve better jobs. Expanding the number of good jobs, and improving the quality of existing ones, must be an essential goal of the Biden administration.

Too little attention has been paid to the deteriorating wages and working conditions that have eroded economic stability and opportunity for a growing number of Americans. Some view low-wage jobs as an important entry point into the labor market, and one that enables hard-working people to advance quickly.

The research is clear. The size of the low-wage workforce and limited mobility in the labor market means that relatively few people are upwardly mobile.

While there is no single, comprehensive definition of a “good” job, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, the Aspen Institute, Gallup, the Urban Institute, and others have defined job quality not just based on pay and benefits, but also on working conditions, workplace culture, job design, supportive work environments, skill development and career advancement.

Improving job quality requires employers, social sector leaders, worker organizations and many others to step up to the plate.

I think they’re missing something. The number of jobs and the pay offered for those jobs are dictated by supply and demand. Laws, regulations, and agitation function more by limiting the number of jobs that pay low wages, don’t carry benefits, and require working in poor conditions than they do by fostering the creation of good jobs.

I agree that we aren’t producing good jobs to the degree that we should but I think that has several major reasons:

• Too slack a labor market
• Replacement of good jobs with bad jobs due to the slack labor market
• Globalization
• Excessive financialization of the economy
• Inadequate capital investment
• Increasingly high requirements to get a good job
• Deadweight loss of government regulation

not necessarily in that order. Unless those are addressed nothing the authors are proposing will do much to change the status quo.

I don’t know when I last read a post I disagreed with as much as this one at Big Think by Joseph Schulman, John Schaefer, and Henry Miller. It opens with an untruth:

The U.S. West suffers from severe — and worsening — water shortages.

and it premised on a misconception:

America does not have a water supply problem; it has a water distribution problem.

My contrasting claims would be that the U. S. does not have a water supply problem; it has a population distribution problem and the U. S. West suffers from severe overpopulation problems. Just to provide one example, when the Spanish arrived in the area that was to become Los Angeles County the population consisted of a few thousand people. That’s what the land would support. Now it’s home to 10 million people—far more than the land can support. The ecological consequences of that overpopulation of a fragile ecology are vast.

The authors want to create an Interstate Water System analogous to the Interstate Highway System with the mission of creating pipelines to move water from where it is plentiful, e.g. the North and East to where it is scarce, i.e. the West, particularly the Southwest. I think the Interstate Highway System was a costly mistake, only justifiable for reasons of national defense. Its original empowering legislation was the Federal Aid Highways Act AKA the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. It mandated that the interstates be designed in such a way that aircraft could land on them.

There is a little book I would recommend you read: Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It is a short history of hydrological policy in the American West. A notable quote: “water moves uphill to money”. The effect of the authors’ IWS would be to waste enormous amounts of money, benefiting the few, at the expense of the many. It would destroy the very reasons that the American West is attractive to people. Any empowering legislation for such a boondoggle should be called the California Housing Developers Subsidy Act.

I was amused by the editors of the Washington Post’s take on taxing Bob Dylan’s earnings from selling his catalogue:

BELATED HAPPY birthday to Bob Dylan! It’s hard to fathom that the skinny kid from Minnesota who revolutionized popular culture back in the 1960s became an 80-year-old man on Monday. In addition to longevity, Mr. Dylan has been blessed with a personal fortune measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s a reward that is both well earned, given his artistry, and ironic, given his beginnings as a penniless poet of social protest.

The unduly gentle taxation of some of Mr. Dylan’s winnings — and those of other wealthy veteran singer-songwriters — is no cause for celebration, however. In fact, it would make a pretty good subject for a present-day social-change anthem. Though not the most flagrant loophole in the tax code, it does epitomize a key issue: the gap between the top tax rate on long-term capital gains, 23.8 percent, and the top rate on “ordinary” — wage and salary — income, 37 percent. This differential treatment overwhelmingly benefits the rich, and the two biggest capital gains breaks alone cost the Treasury $211 billion in 2021, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).

Here’s the story: In 2006, music industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to let artists pay the capital gains tax rate on earnings from selling the rights to collections of their musical compositions, instead of the ordinary income rate, as they had done previously. The latter made more sense: Writing songs is labor, not investing, but the lobbyists said change was needed to equalize artists’ tax rates and those of their record companies. In any case, the JCT considered the bill’s likely cost too small to estimate, and it passed.

I think their view is reasonable, mild even. Not only would I tax royalties at the same rate as any other income, I would limit the duration of copyrights to 15 years, non-renewable and non-transferable. IMO the status quo impedes innovation and does not satisfy the constitutional mandate.

An interesting snippet from James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column:

Jim Tankersley reports in the Times that the paper has obtained Biden budget documents and that “the documents forecast that Mr. Biden and Congress will allow tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans, signed into law by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, to expire as scheduled in 2025.”

I have a vague recollection of the last president to reneg on a taxes pledge. Whatever happened to him?

I would recommend that President Biden take his own pledge not to raise taxes on the poor or middle income people seriously and until that report that has been the case.