It drives me up a wall that 's', 'd', and to a lesser extent 't' are very close to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. Other typos, the spell checker will catch. But often switching one of these letters for another one transforms one valid word into another. And because the transformed words (spend, spent, spends) all look alike in visual weight, it takes careful proofreading the detect the error.
Sure, current generation of academics personnel is quite good, and people from all over the world come to learn. But they don't stay, and we don't bother to attend our own institutions as often as we should. What happens when the current intellectuals die, and most of the people who they've trained to replace them are foreigners living abroad?
Of course any thinking person has the capacity to work with large numbers and make comparisons. But in doing so, they still seem awfully abstract. Yes, the GDP of the United States could purchase 700 million or so Ford F150s. It's still an abstract comparison.
On the other hand, casting numbers in immediately accessible per-capita figures gives one an immediate intuitive appreciation of the costs involved, and I believe making comparisons easy --- instead of merely possible --- leads to better decision-making.
It's no surprise that as car companies come into this country, they go more to the South and a wide swath away from the unions. I believe Mercedes-Benz opened a plant in Alabama in the 1990s for this reason.
I'm no auto industry expert, but as I understand it, newer automakers are somewhat advantaged because they're not burdened by pensions for their older employees. That $80/hr figure for GM includes having to pay for the retirement of previous workers.
Also, the south wasn't attractive because it lacked unions: instead, it was attractive because labor was cheap. Newer automakers actually pay wages on par with their union counterparts to the north in a largely successful bid to not give their workers the temptation to unionize. Were it not for the unions, wages would be lower across the board.
Walmart also is anti-union; when a man up in Canada started a union in a store up there, Walmart shut it down rather than deal with the possible spread of unions throughout its workforce and as a warning.
And? Of course companies resist unionization. It's bad for profits! That doesn't mean it's bad for society as a whole.
My friends wanted to do a convention in Philadelphia in 2008. But, because of unions (and not just location), renting the pretty medium hall would have cost 100K. So they held just outside Philly, for the same size hall, it came to 12K. Nearly 10% of the cost.
I'm quite skeptical of this claim. Everything space-related is more expensive inside a city than outside it, and for reasons that have less to do with unions than with real scarcity. I'm going to have to see some evidence for this one.
And yes, there is a pay disparity in the America's top corporations.
Oh, and it's telling that history education in high school (or at least my high school) stops after World War II. Basically, the message is "we won and lived happily ever after."
Ostensibly, the curriculum stops there because time needs to be set aside to prepare for the New York reagents exam. But that's a flimsy excuse: we could have simply spent less time on the rather less important 1870-1890 reconstruction period. Really, the apprehension surrounding the idea of teaching politically-sensitive history was palpable, and I'm sure everyone was relieved to not have to delve into Vietnam.
I'm 25. Yes, yes, our history is full of all sorts of calamities and embarrassing transgressions. But after World War II, we'd addressed most of them. We had a recessions here, and red scare there. There were the civil rights battles, and various minor wars. But for the most part, society was stable and relatively prosperous. Income inequality was low, scientific progress rapid, and social mobility high. We were respected throughout the world. The late 1970s saw stagflation, but that was the result of an exogenous supply shock, not domestic mismanagement.
The shit hit the fan around 1980, when our Gini coefficient (which measures concentration of wealth) shot through the roof. The average take-home income stagnated; two incomes become required to achieve the standard of living that could be achieved before with one. Then, finally, our political process became shrill and infantilized, and we lost the ability to respect effective to public crises.
We squandered a system that worked and replaced it with something that resembles, on paper, what we had in 1929: largely unregulated markets dominated by oligarchs with a parasitic banking sector that corrupted the political process.
Unfortunately, we weren't lucky enough to get a second FDR.
At least we make it a point to read Shakespeare in its original form, albeit with modernized spelling.
As for the rapidity of change, it is interesting. It took hundreds of years for English to diverge from this, and we can still understand most of it:
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (so priketh hem nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of engelond to caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
On the other hand, in ancient Rome, educators were complaining about "Vulgar Latin" (which would later become the romance languages) only a century after the empire got going. The speed of change seems highly variable. I'm sure someone better educated in linguistics could tell me all about it.
As far as public finances go, part of the problem is that the numbers involved are literally incomprehensible. A million dollars, I can imagine. I can visualize how much space it would take up. I can carve it up in my head for various purposes. I can assign it a personal worth.
But a billion? That's much harder to juggle. A trillion? That's just an abstract figure I can perform arithmetic on. It's no more "real" to me than 3i+5.
In policy discussions, it might be more productive to talk about budget numbers as a cost per citizen. For example, $100 million in aide to Haiti sounds like a vast gift. But casting that as $0.33 per citizen sounds much more reasonable --- just as it should.
You're confusing breadth with depth. We certainly have a higher overall literacy rate now, and that's admirable. It's probably due to a greater focus on rural and special-needs education.
But literacy is non synonymous with the kind of education that leads to prosperity and innovation. It's a prerequisite for success, sure, but alone is insufficient. I think you discount the possibility that in making education more accessible, we've also made it shallower, more mechanized, and less helpful for those on the right side of the bell curve, who are the ones who actually move society forward.
We keep delaying the onset of maturity, pushing what used to be high school curricula into undergraduate schools, and what used to be in undergraduate programs into graduate ones. As a result, we've made higher education increasingly expensive and inconvenient.
You make a good point: the variable here isn't necessarily independent of other hidden, local factors. But this story isn't an isolated anecdote: experts have been ringing the educational alarm bell for decades now, which is suggestive of the Waterloo problem being symptomatic of a larger decline.
As for the irrelevance of the rest: here, you're assuming independence when I don't think that's warranted. Grammatical ability is a good proxy for emphasis on education in general. Perhaps the correlation disappears at the margins, but basic linguistic ability is a prerequisite for all kinds of advanced knowledge. There are no scholarly papers written in txt.
(Well, outside the humanities journals: I wouldn't put anything past those rags.:-) )
Obviously, I'm eliding "it" before "would". That last part of the sentence forms an a clause independent of the preceding one, and so can be offset by a comma. I'll admit that many people omit the comma in that case, but there is a grammatical justification for it.
One particularly tragic aspect of our decline, and of the decline of civilizations generally, is that you don't need elaborate conspiracy theories to explain them. The interaction of reasonable people making decisions in their own self-interest leads to a collective clusterfuck.
What's sad about this state of affairs is that it's very difficult to address the problem. If we were the victim of some grand conspiracy theory, solving the problem would be easy! We'd just have to get rid of the conspirators!
But that ain't so: our decline is an impersonal effect of sociological forces far larger than any of us, and it seems as intractable as the weather. If we want to make a difference, we need to stop scapegoating. We do the politically Herculean work of bending individual incentives so they line up with the common good.
If that happens, great. But I wouldn't count on it.
And don't you think it's in your interest to live in an educated society? Education is intellectual infrastructure.
Are you the kind of person who would oppose a highway because some big-government bureaucrat would take your hard-earned tax dollars and plan the route without you?
You make a valid point, but sometimes things really do get worse. Conversely, they sometimes actually improve: but in that case, we're all too quick to acknowledge the change.
You're indulging in denialism. Look at our international standardized test score rank. Look at the fraction of foreign students in our universities. Look at the strength and depth of our public debate. Then compare what you saw to the documented evidence of the past 50 years.
Then, after seeing all that, pause and ask yourself, "can I really explain all that away by saying we're wearing rose-colored glasses?"
I am an American, you neanderthal. How likely is it that I'm just spewing anti-American "propaganda" for propaganda's sake? It's rather telling that you'd rather hear good news than reality: when you see that happen, you know a company or organization or country is not long for this world.
I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering, and that I'm around to see morons like you squander what should have made us the happiest, wealthiest, most enlightened people to have ever lived.
True, but from what I've seen, Canadians are only in marginally better shape than the US. Britain is in much the same boat too, actually, with its rampantly anti-intellectual youth culture and nascent police state. It's a problem, really, that seems to afflict the entire English-speaking world. (Or maybe the entire West, but I'm not qualified to say.)
Sure, language in itself is arbitrary. But our orthography, syntax, and vocabulary are very good proxies for our education and intelligence, and decision-makers quite rightly use our communicate skills to judge these traits.
Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility.
But no, that's not why we write like that: instead, it's because we're a nation of fucking imbeciles who hold education in contempt, and think of intelligence as a threat.
Me: "I wonder whether $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE would be interested in working with us. This $THING we're creating is something they'd be interested in." Partner: "Let me see whether I know anyone who works at $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE." Me: "What about the front fucking door? We can just go through normal channels."
At this point, is our decline even reversible? I could draw some parallels with history (as I have in past posts) --- but what would be the point? We'll just have more people argue that education is worthless, or say how it's all the fault of teachers' unions, or argue that we need more charter schools.
So, we point fingers, scream, and ape talking points while our society crumbles around us. What's the point?
We're already the laughingstock of the world; the next generation actually looks worse than the boomers do, and that's an accomplishment. Screw this: I'm getting out. There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.
Define "solved". We know how to reprocess the fuel. We know how to bury it securely enough for any possible risk to be local and slight.
The problem is that in the minds of critics of a certain age, the waste problem isn't "solved" until it turns itself into sugar-free gummi bears. For free. Immediately.
We don't hold other kinds of industrial waste to nearly the same standard we hold nuclear, despite that waste remaining more danger for a longer time. (Ever hear of dioxin?)
Now, you can have a coherent position that involves no pollution whatsoever. As a side effect, it'll make our way of life impossible, and as such, I'll reject it. But at least it's a coherent position.
On the other hand, you can adopt my worldview, in which a tiny bit of pollution is acceptable, and we should rationally choose technology that results in the least pollution with respect to coal.
But this notion many people have, that nuclear is a special category, and can't be evaluated using the same intellectual framework we treat the rest of our civilization, is incoherent and irrational. It's clearly the emotional byproduct of growing up during the cold war. It's not something one can rationally argue. It's a belief absolutely impervious to evidence, and is costing us billions each year we delay switching away from coal due to the fear of the nuclear waste boogeyman.
Our hatred of these projects is a recent thing too. The Hoover Dam wasn't met with this kind of derision. The Apollo Program wasn't met with this kind of derision (not until its last years, when the Norquist cancer started to metastasize).
As for China --- it's an autocratic capitalist systems. Of course autocracies are more efficient than democracies. The problem is that they tend not to stay that way. Give China a generation or two, and assuming it doesn't transition to democracy in the meantime, we'll see a set of weak, ineffectual leaders who feel entitled to use their positions for personal gain.
Unions didn't cause the decline of our manufacturing sector. Germany and Japan have strong manufacturing sectors with high wages.
The real problem is wealth disparity. More and more wealth is concentrated at the top, where instead of circulating in the real economy and increasing demand and creating jobs, it goes into dubious investments where it creates bubbles over and over again.
Well, most of it: some of that money goes into campaign finance, and into convincing people like you to vote against their own interests. The labor union is one of the very few mechanisms we have to move wealth back into the real economy. Progressive taxation is another. People like you oppose both.
Instead of demanding a decent wage for yourself, as you deserve (wages after inflation haven't increased in 30 years), you simply begrudge a few industries farsighted enough to still have unions for earning a decent living. It's masochistic.
Yes, America is an unrecoverable tailspin, and unwittingly, you demonstrate why.
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It drives me up a wall that 's', 'd', and to a lesser extent 't' are very close to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. Other typos, the spell checker will catch. But often switching one of these letters for another one transforms one valid word into another. And because the transformed words (spend, spent, spends) all look alike in visual weight, it takes careful proofreading the detect the error.
It's maddening.
Posts about language are cursed to contains errors. :-)
Sure, current generation of academics personnel is quite good, and people from all over the world come to learn. But they don't stay, and we don't bother to attend our own institutions as often as we should. What happens when the current intellectuals die, and most of the people who they've trained to replace them are foreigners living abroad?
Of course any thinking person has the capacity to work with large numbers and make comparisons. But in doing so, they still seem awfully abstract. Yes, the GDP of the United States could purchase 700 million or so Ford F150s. It's still an abstract comparison.
On the other hand, casting numbers in immediately accessible per-capita figures gives one an immediate intuitive appreciation of the costs involved, and I believe making comparisons easy --- instead of merely possible --- leads to better decision-making.
I'm no auto industry expert, but as I understand it, newer automakers are somewhat advantaged because they're not burdened by pensions for their older employees. That $80/hr figure for GM includes having to pay for the retirement of previous workers.
Also, the south wasn't attractive because it lacked unions: instead, it was attractive because labor was cheap. Newer automakers actually pay wages on par with their union counterparts to the north in a largely successful bid to not give their workers the temptation to unionize. Were it not for the unions, wages would be lower across the board.
And? Of course companies resist unionization. It's bad for profits! That doesn't mean it's bad for society as a whole.
I'm quite skeptical of this claim. Everything space-related is more expensive inside a city than outside it, and for reasons that have less to do with unions than with real scarcity. I'm going to have to see some evidence for this one.
Repeat after me: progressive taxation.
Oh, and it's telling that history education in high school (or at least my high school) stops after World War II. Basically, the message is "we won and lived happily ever after."
Ostensibly, the curriculum stops there because time needs to be set aside to prepare for the New York reagents exam. But that's a flimsy excuse: we could have simply spent less time on the rather less important 1870-1890 reconstruction period. Really, the apprehension surrounding the idea of teaching politically-sensitive history was palpable, and I'm sure everyone was relieved to not have to delve into Vietnam.
I'm 25. Yes, yes, our history is full of all sorts of calamities and embarrassing transgressions. But after World War II, we'd addressed most of them. We had a recessions here, and red scare there. There were the civil rights battles, and various minor wars. But for the most part, society was stable and relatively prosperous. Income inequality was low, scientific progress rapid, and social mobility high. We were respected throughout the world. The late 1970s saw stagflation, but that was the result of an exogenous supply shock, not domestic mismanagement.
The shit hit the fan around 1980, when our Gini coefficient (which measures concentration of wealth) shot through the roof. The average take-home income stagnated; two incomes become required to achieve the standard of living that could be achieved before with one. Then, finally, our political process became shrill and infantilized, and we lost the ability to respect effective to public crises.
We squandered a system that worked and replaced it with something that resembles, on paper, what we had in 1929: largely unregulated markets dominated by oligarchs with a parasitic banking sector that corrupted the political process.
Unfortunately, we weren't lucky enough to get a second FDR.
At least we make it a point to read Shakespeare in its original form, albeit with modernized spelling.
As for the rapidity of change, it is interesting. It took hundreds of years for English to diverge from this, and we can still understand most of it:
On the other hand, in ancient Rome, educators were complaining about "Vulgar Latin" (which would later become the romance languages) only a century after the empire got going. The speed of change seems highly variable. I'm sure someone better educated in linguistics could tell me all about it.
As far as public finances go, part of the problem is that the numbers involved are literally incomprehensible. A million dollars, I can imagine. I can visualize how much space it would take up. I can carve it up in my head for various purposes. I can assign it a personal worth.
But a billion? That's much harder to juggle. A trillion? That's just an abstract figure I can perform arithmetic on. It's no more "real" to me than 3i+5.
In policy discussions, it might be more productive to talk about budget numbers as a cost per citizen. For example, $100 million in aide to Haiti sounds like a vast gift. But casting that as $0.33 per citizen sounds much more reasonable --- just as it should.
You're confusing breadth with depth. We certainly have a higher overall literacy rate now, and that's admirable. It's probably due to a greater focus on rural and special-needs education.
But literacy is non synonymous with the kind of education that leads to prosperity and innovation. It's a prerequisite for success, sure, but alone is insufficient. I think you discount the possibility that in making education more accessible, we've also made it shallower, more mechanized, and less helpful for those on the right side of the bell curve, who are the ones who actually move society forward.
We keep delaying the onset of maturity, pushing what used to be high school curricula into undergraduate schools, and what used to be in undergraduate programs into graduate ones. As a result, we've made higher education increasingly expensive and inconvenient.
You make a good point: the variable here isn't necessarily independent of other hidden, local factors. But this story isn't an isolated anecdote: experts have been ringing the educational alarm bell for decades now, which is suggestive of the Waterloo problem being symptomatic of a larger decline.
As for the irrelevance of the rest: here, you're assuming independence when I don't think that's warranted. Grammatical ability is a good proxy for emphasis on education in general. Perhaps the correlation disappears at the margins, but basic linguistic ability is a prerequisite for all kinds of advanced knowledge. There are no scholarly papers written in txt.
(Well, outside the humanities journals: I wouldn't put anything past those rags. :-) )
Obviously, I'm eliding "it" before "would". That last part of the sentence forms an a clause independent of the preceding one, and so can be offset by a comma. I'll admit that many people omit the comma in that case, but there is a grammatical justification for it.
Pedant.
One particularly tragic aspect of our decline, and of the decline of civilizations generally, is that you don't need elaborate conspiracy theories to explain them. The interaction of reasonable people making decisions in their own self-interest leads to a collective clusterfuck.
What's sad about this state of affairs is that it's very difficult to address the problem. If we were the victim of some grand conspiracy theory, solving the problem would be easy! We'd just have to get rid of the conspirators!
But that ain't so: our decline is an impersonal effect of sociological forces far larger than any of us, and it seems as intractable as the weather. If we want to make a difference, we need to stop scapegoating. We do the politically Herculean work of bending individual incentives so they line up with the common good.
If that happens, great. But I wouldn't count on it.
And don't you think it's in your interest to live in an educated society? Education is intellectual infrastructure.
Are you the kind of person who would oppose a highway because some big-government bureaucrat would take your hard-earned tax dollars and plan the route without you?
You make a valid point, but sometimes things really do get worse. Conversely, they sometimes actually improve: but in that case, we're all too quick to acknowledge the change.
You're indulging in denialism. Look at our international standardized test score rank. Look at the fraction of foreign students in our universities. Look at the strength and depth of our public debate. Then compare what you saw to the documented evidence of the past 50 years.
Then, after seeing all that, pause and ask yourself, "can I really explain all that away by saying we're wearing rose-colored glasses?"
The answer is no.
The strength of your argument is overwhelming.
The first was a typo, but I'll admit to it. Sure.
As for the second two critiques: you're the one who doesn't understand the purpose of the comma.
I am an American, you neanderthal. How likely is it that I'm just spewing anti-American "propaganda" for propaganda's sake? It's rather telling that you'd rather hear good news than reality: when you see that happen, you know a company or organization or country is not long for this world.
I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering, and that I'm around to see morons like you squander what should have made us the happiest, wealthiest, most enlightened people to have ever lived.
Fuck you.
True, but from what I've seen, Canadians are only in marginally better shape than the US. Britain is in much the same boat too, actually, with its rampantly anti-intellectual youth culture and nascent police state. It's a problem, really, that seems to afflict the entire English-speaking world. (Or maybe the entire West, but I'm not qualified to say.)
Sure, language in itself is arbitrary. But our orthography, syntax, and vocabulary are very good proxies for our education and intelligence, and decision-makers quite rightly use our communicate skills to judge these traits.
Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility.
But no, that's not why we write like that: instead, it's because we're a nation of fucking imbeciles who hold education in contempt, and think of intelligence as a threat.
A recent exchange I had:
Me: "I wonder whether $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE would be interested in working with us. This $THING we're creating is something they'd be interested in."
Partner: "Let me see whether I know anyone who works at $PROMINENT_INTERNET_SITE."
Me: "What about the front fucking door? We can just go through normal channels."
A business degree is like a lobotomy.
At this point, is our decline even reversible? I could draw some parallels with history (as I have in past posts) --- but what would be the point? We'll just have more people argue that education is worthless, or say how it's all the fault of teachers' unions, or argue that we need more charter schools.
So, we point fingers, scream, and ape talking points while our society crumbles around us. What's the point?
We're already the laughingstock of the world; the next generation actually looks worse than the boomers do, and that's an accomplishment. Screw this: I'm getting out. There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.
Define "solved". We know how to reprocess the fuel. We know how to bury it securely enough for any possible risk to be local and slight.
The problem is that in the minds of critics of a certain age, the waste problem isn't "solved" until it turns itself into sugar-free gummi bears. For free. Immediately.
We don't hold other kinds of industrial waste to nearly the same standard we hold nuclear, despite that waste remaining more danger for a longer time. (Ever hear of dioxin?)
Now, you can have a coherent position that involves no pollution whatsoever. As a side effect, it'll make our way of life impossible, and as such, I'll reject it. But at least it's a coherent position.
On the other hand, you can adopt my worldview, in which a tiny bit of pollution is acceptable, and we should rationally choose technology that results in the least pollution with respect to coal.
But this notion many people have, that nuclear is a special category, and can't be evaluated using the same intellectual framework we treat the rest of our civilization, is incoherent and irrational. It's clearly the emotional byproduct of growing up during the cold war. It's not something one can rationally argue. It's a belief absolutely impervious to evidence, and is costing us billions each year we delay switching away from coal due to the fear of the nuclear waste boogeyman.
Our hatred of these projects is a recent thing too. The Hoover Dam wasn't met with this kind of derision. The Apollo Program wasn't met with this kind of derision (not until its last years, when the Norquist cancer started to metastasize).
As for China --- it's an autocratic capitalist systems. Of course autocracies are more efficient than democracies. The problem is that they tend not to stay that way. Give China a generation or two, and assuming it doesn't transition to democracy in the meantime, we'll see a set of weak, ineffectual leaders who feel entitled to use their positions for personal gain.
Oh, not this right-wing crap again.
Unions didn't cause the decline of our manufacturing sector. Germany and Japan have strong manufacturing sectors with high wages.
The real problem is wealth disparity. More and more wealth is concentrated at the top, where instead of circulating in the real economy and increasing demand and creating jobs, it goes into dubious investments where it creates bubbles over and over again.
Well, most of it: some of that money goes into campaign finance, and into convincing people like you to vote against their own interests. The labor union is one of the very few mechanisms we have to move wealth back into the real economy. Progressive taxation is another. People like you oppose both.
Instead of demanding a decent wage for yourself, as you deserve (wages after inflation haven't increased in 30 years), you simply begrudge a few industries farsighted enough to still have unions for earning a decent living. It's masochistic.
Yes, America is an unrecoverable tailspin, and unwittingly, you demonstrate why.