Lots o' Graphs About School

 From ACX, What Happened to NAEP Scores?

Everyone want their theory about what happened to education during Covid to prove out. (What am I saying?  Have I gone mad?  Everyone has already decided their theory about education has proven out whatever the data is. Post hoc rationalisation is very powerful.) Covid certainly didn't help, but it looks like a decline with the same slope was already in play.  The states that had schools open more vs those which stayed closed do not show clear trends.  Exceptions abound.  There is discrepancy between what happened with the best student and the worst.  Except where there isn't any difference.  Alexander notes that the 2026 scores will be of 4th graders who did not miss any covid closing time at all, so it will be interesting what their numbers are.

Anyway, there are lots of graphs, and many of you like those.

Charles Murray, A Brilliant Observer as Usual

Interviewed on Unsupervised Learning

Nothing's going to happen to the Harvard, Princeton, Yales of the world. Okay. They are immune from any of these things. But the rest of the higher educational establishment is not. These are underway. They're going to accelerate. And at some point... Maybe the private sector will realize the degree to which the only thing that they care about with the college degree is its value as a signal. And insofar as the signal has gotten really noisy, the fact that you hold a BA in history from a good school no longer tells you very much about that person of That signal has gotten so noisy that it may be that employers in the private sector are going to say, what we really need is a good measure of general intelligence and a good measure of conscientiousness and openness. And if I know those things about an applicant, if I'm not talking about STEM, basically, that's all I need. The college degree no longer is telling me much of anything. That kind of change is going to undercut an awful lot of what's driven college enrollment figures for the last several years.

I worry about the fine smaller schools, often religious schools who are hoping that the alligator eats them last.

Far-UVC

No, I didn't know what it is either. Flipping the Switch on Far-UVC by Richard Williamson guesting at the Works in Progress Newsletter, which reports on biotech, replicability and fraud, and the intersection of tech and social problems. 

Well, that got my attention.  Is there another side to this story I don't know about?  There was a specific link to research on the air in night clubs, which go out of business quickly under any kind of restriction, and I would think that restaurants and indoor arenas would want to be on this as well.  The article, admittedly by someone from a nonprofit that is advocating for this, describes some of the reasons why this can't get off the ground.

Opinions welcome, as always.  Informed opinions even more.

2010 Links

Topics I still consider important. 

Well-Meaning Opposition. A favorite soapbox, of people believing they understand the (evil) motives of others and how divisive this is in political discussion. Amazon doesn't sell any Motiv-o-meters.

Why Charter Schools fail the test. If you disagree, remember that you aren't arguing with me, but with Charles Murray.  Schools matter at the margins.  We put a lot of arguing energy into school and style differences that don't leave any measurable trace behind. Since writing this post I have refined that to believing that schools and teachers matter more for the worst students than the middle or best.  This is because if one is near the bottom, the either-or is much more stark. Graduation versus dropping out. Learning to suck it up and get at least something done to meet your goal rather than throwing in the towel. Not coming stoned to school. Much of life is random, or at least not programmable in advance by parents, schools, or churches. There might be Providence, but the schools aren't affecting that much.

 Stimulus Dollars - Just another example of the individuality of decisions when working with the mentally ill. You just hope you are right, or right enough.

A Man of the People

Well I didn't even need to click on the link, except to pick up the url.  It was right there on the sidebar, from Althouse. "Ambitious Democrats Have a New Game Plan: Yak It Up About Sports/Prominent leaders are flocking to sports radio shows and podcasts, an early sign of how the party is trying to reach apolitical young men...." 

It's news, and I shouldn't even be taking a chef's taste of it, but I had two thoughts: Second, how are the female candidates going to take this?  The female voters will be okay with the guys-being-guys approach - unless they deeply support a disadvantaged female candidate - but how are the female governors and women of the Senate going to feel?

And my first thought was unfair.

Diplomacy

Also mentioned in class by another this morning, is that diplomacy is the art of making everyone equally unhappy.  My mind still goes to the news instead of keeping my fast, so I will just leave that out there for general application.

Envy

In the discussion of Envy this morning in class, it occurred to me that much of our life is given to us by God, and we can either accept this and marry that life, or go off seeking someone else's life, which has an element of coveting someone else's spouse.

When we marry our assigned lives, we vow to to be faithful to the life for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, so long as we both shall live.

Update:  I said discussion and class.  Neither are true.  It was during the sermon and I was listening to one person.

Man With a Plan

Where is Fred when we need him?  He ran for congress in Vermont after he retired because he needed the money and it was a good-payin' job that didn't require any experience. 

He did pretty well, considering. The video is 90 minutes, but you can pick it up pretty quickly.

DEI

 

Different Drum

I don't know how long it took me to figure out that this song must have been written by a man, though its most famous version was sung by Linda Ronstadt. It fits the male stereotype of the time* - in fact of all recent times until just after this was popular.  Women trying to secure promises and commitments from men and men trying to elude them was a common theme of novels, plays, and folk songs.

Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty

All I'm sayin' 's I'm not ready

For any person, place, or thing to try and pull the reins in on me 

So yeah, it was a man who wrote it. Michael Nesmith, later of the Monkees, in 1964.

 *I was on the other end of that spectrum in the 70s, actively seeking serious relationships, but choosing girls who went on to marry late or never. They were ahead of their time, I suppose, but I was rescued by Tracy, who found some reason to accept my suit.

Johnny Cash

I received Cash's American VI: Ain't No Grave for my birthday years ago, and it still haunts me. I don't know how I would rate it. It exists on a different scale, from Weak to Powerful, on which it would get five stars. But on the scale of Bad to Good, maybe not so well.

Someone who didn't know the story of Johnny Cash, a younger person who hadn't seen the movie or didn't know his history, would be amazed that an album this bad could be made and sell copies. Cash, who recorded most of these songs shortly before his death in 2003, had almost no voice left, little energy. His range of interpreting songs, his last remaining strength, was greatly constricted.

But what he does with those last remaining talents is so gripping that I nearly drove off the road twice on the way to work, my distraction was so great. His ability to take a shallow song and inject depth into it forever, which he did increasingly over the last 20 years of his career, reach their pinnacle here. I had always found "For The Good Times" to be the first example of country music's glorification of the tawdry.

Don't look so sad
I know it's over
But life goes on
And this old world
Will keep on turning
Let's just be glad
We had some time to spend together
There's no need to watch the bridges
That we're burning

Lay your head,
Upon my pillow
Hold your warm and tender body
Close to mine...

But Cash sings it from his deathbed, with June Carter Cash unnamed but present. "Hold your warm and tender body close to mine" has an entirely different meaning when stripped of its cheap sexuality. It is from a husband with damaged lungs to a wife who has seen the worst of him and is herself dying. The abuse, the amphetamines and infidelities, the helpless devotion, are just beneath the surface. The song is changed forever. It is a resurrection.

Something similar came out in their "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" duet on American IV - his stark voice, her unusual harmony in a voice weak but clear.

"Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" is similarly redeemed. Since the 1950's it has been little more than a reality-challenged peacenik song, sung by wise-seeming 30-year-olds for 20-year-olds, an earlier "Imagine" with a worse bass-line.

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed...

No longer a starry-eyed hippie anthem, but the reflection of an old man with no illusions about humanity, reciting the dream once again as a reminder.

The whole album has deeply Christian humility and defiant resurrection threading it together, though less than half the songs are Christian. "Ain't No Grave" is an old Pentecostal Holiness song that runs deeper than the camp meeting and the sawdust trail, back into an Appalachian revivalism barely above the pagan, but more profound for that primitiveness.

The album has no real liner notes, just some B&W photos and the list of songs. The arrangements and accompaniment are impossibly understated, a simplicity that self-respecting studio musicians would never attempt these days. But this is the Man in Black, who now signs himself John R. Cash with a shaky scrawl. There's no other way to do these songs.

Pick something.  There's plenty.

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

I commented on this book in 2010.  I think his book and my comments are still correct, but less so now.

Andrew Gelman's book has a good deal of useful information. Neglecting some important questions reduces its value.

There is a reminder that all states are purple, and even in states we think of strongly one way or another, it's a 60-40 split. This isn't new - in fact, it should be obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it a few minutes - but it can't be said often enough. We like our data packed into economical packets, so we are attracted to the largest simplifications we still find satisfying, but these mislead. One of the most intelligent people I know commented with rolled eyes about a trip to Tennessee, and what an obviously red state it was, with its guns, confederate flags, churches with big message signboards, and pro-America bumper stickers. Problem is, Tennessee isn't that red - and she was in the bluest section of it. Good chance those were Democrats in those pickups.

Of considerable interest in thinking about voting preferences and relative, rather than absolute wealth, Gelman notes that the richest states tend to vote Democratic, but the wealthier voters within each state tend to vote Republican. Similarly, in the blue states the poor have higher church attendance - in red states, the wealthier attend. That's a bit more nuanced, a little less predictable, than we are used to describing. These sorts of odd breakdowns, not shocking but not quite what we thought, make up the bulk of the book. If you like that sort of thing, Gelman's got plenty.

Two things left me mistrusting some of his conclusions. He does not break down the voting patterns of the poor into black and nonblack (or white and nonwhite, if you prefer). I get that he is trying to show voting tendencies in terms of purely economic considerations, and racial data would be a complicating factor. But it is likely an important complicating factor. Remember that these voting tendencies are much like the purple states. If 60% of a group votes a certain way that is comparatively significant because in the American context, that's a big split. (Compare to say, Romania, where the UMDR receives almost no votes from ethnic Romanians - it's a Hungarian party.) If African-Americans are disproportionately represented among the poor, and they vote 90% Democratic, that can create a false picture that some trends are economic when they are in fact racial. Perhaps the tendencies Gelman reports hold up even if this adjustment is made, but they would at minimum be far less robust.

Secondly, the Democratic Party is a coalition of groups, far more so than the Republican Party. Thus, popular generalizations about Democratic voters which Gelman debunks might in fact be strongly true about one or more members of the coalition. He is at pains to illustrate that stereotypes about Democrats as wealthy latte-drinking liberals are not true. I believe the numbers he puts before us, showing that Democrats do not dominate among the wealthy, are true. But the Pew research category of liberals, which makes up 19% of the US (and therefore well more than a third of the Democratic Party) are indeed much wealthier than the other groups. I don't have the data on latte, but the stereotype he purports to debunk is in fact true - but only for a large but definable portion of Democrats, not the party as a whole.

Just for sake of guessing, Gelman's misunderstanding of some conservative ideas tells me he is not one. He does not come off as especially liberal, however, and may be an honest broker - a commodity in short supply these days.

Expectations

Texan99 and others have noted that many of the federal workers who have been dismissed or laid off are expressing an unusual amount of outrage, as if their jobs were supposed to be untouchable, a given in the world unless they screwed up on a personal level. I commented there, and for that side of the story it might be better if you also commented there rather than here, as that conversation has already started. But that is too connected to the news, currently outside my remit.  

I think the spiritual aspect of what we expect is more interesting at the moment anyway.  What people come to expect, they grow to feel they deserve.  We deserve not to have an accident or traffic jam detain us on the way to work.  It is unfair when the supermarket is out of our type of tomatoes. There is always enough snow our vacation week at the resort, but this year we were cheated somehow. Our flights are delayed, the lights were against us when we were in a hurry, the phones should work.

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear... They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. (CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters Chap XXI)

Perhaps related: The more you give people the less grateful they are.

International House of Prayer

A post about the consequences of not wanting to hurt someone's feelings.  I am usually guilty of the opposite sin, of "saying the quiet part out loud" or blundering into an offense.  But this time...

Mo. police, fire chaplains dismissed in fallout from church sexual abuse investigation

We have good friends whose children became deeply involved with this ministry, traveling to Kansas City for events, and the daughter and her husband ended up working for them.  They still do, I believe, though they are in a distant city and are now sheltering some of the victims who spoke out. 

I didn't like the group from the start, mostly for doctrinal reasons concerning their approach to prophecy and their own centrality to the coming Last Days. Teenagers influenced by them prophesied over each other what their careers should be and dangers that were about to happen to them. There was a youth group in town where such things were common. This is exactly the sort of cultish behavior that is so often connected with financial and sexual scandals, including threats during the coverups.

But I said nothing because I feared their parents would think I was criticising their judgement and discernment by letting, even encouraging their children to travel and participate.  Nor did I want to hurt the teenager/young adult feelings, because I had known these children from birth and am fond of them as well. We were at their weddings, they were at our yearly Jesse Tree celebration, they were very welcoming to our two boys when they arrived from Romania. The son has long since left the faith.

They are adults and their decisions are their own, certainly. Yet I wish I had not refrained from putting in my oar for fear of offending.  20/20 hindsight, surely.

The Man Born To Be King

Someone on a Wade Center podcast I listened to last year said that some people use Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born To Be King as an Advent devotion some years. Listening to it, it is immediately clear that they meant a Lenten devotion, so my wife and I are listening to it 3-4 nights per week.  It can be read at archive.org at The Man Born to be King.  CS Lewis read it every Holy Week for the last twenty years of his life, greatly approving of the down-to-earth quality, the contemporary language, and the informality. It was a weekly radio play beginning late 1941 on the BBC and repeated on radio a half-dozen times.

It was controversial at the time, because many people in Britain thought anything from the Bible had to be quite Authorized Version in its tone, so her townspeople with Irish or Northern or City accents were right out. There were homely details of a woman inviting Jesus to dinner after the baptism and remembering him as a boy and young man, or children singing scraps of songs.  We would consider such things normal in our day, and in fact this broadcast seems to our ears too stilted, too residually formal.  The music and sound effects are from another era when such things were less subtle.

But it's good, very good, and I think it will bear reading or listening. I mentioned recently that I had some concern about The Chosen, good as it is,  because people will begin to mix up the scripture with the artistic license.  There is no such danger here, I don't think, though there may have been in its own day.

God Out Loud

In discussing the mystery of the Trinity in Adult Sunday School years ago, we followed the thought that reading silently to oneself was uncommon in history until quite recently, and thus the believer’s experience of scripture, lessons, and discussion about God was quite different. God was known out loud, most often in a group. Jesus didn’t carry scrolls around, nor did he sit and contemplate them a long time and then speak extemporaneously when they handed Him one at synagogue. Talmud was written in the form of a conversation about the text, and Torah was discussed. Paul Saenger has an academic book brought out by Stanford University Press Space Between Words tracing how differences in writing slowly changed reading from oral to silent. When Augustine read silently to himself, people wondered whether he was just faking, and whether it “counted” as having read the text, the effective reverse of modern debate debate whether listening to audible books constitutes reading them or not.

Reading silently, then, drove the development of printing as much as printing encouraged the spread of silent reading. An interesting history and thought discussion, of course, but I am more concerned here with the effect this has had on faith and the experience of God. Literacy increased, and even participatory hymns became poetic and complicated. By the late 1900s culture,  we were at the extreme of this perception of God as something that happens on the page and in our heads, so it is not surprising that bibliolatry and gnostic abstraction were among the particular heresies Americans have been prone to. As one who does not partake in most religious media, neither music, nor film, radio, TV, conferences – I think I am on the outer edge of silence even in that culture. I do discuss a fair bit. I attend services. I read. But there is clearly a danger for me of experiencing God mostly in my own head.

It is very Protestant, an uber-Protestant personal faith that sees its expression in both the evangelical and pietist Quiet Time/ Meditation/ Sola Scriptura branches of the faith, and the academic and seminary portions of all our denominations. It is isolating one part of the faith, often necessarily and with powerful effect. But it would be a foreign and dry faith to the huge majority of those who have carried the name of Christ – and most Jews, frankly.  

This is changing back to the more visual, auditory, multisensory experience of God.

Saying things out loud gives them a reality they did not seem to have before, as anyone who has ever shared a personal secret knows. The faith was always much more concrete and physical in earlier ages, and still is in most places of the world. The kaleidoscope shifts a bit and the old elements look new.

Eurovision 1964 and 2024

 Guess which is which

The Return of Flamingos

I posted many flamingo photos years ago.  I had plastic flamingos in my office, in my yard. I suppose they went out of fashion, and it was no longer ironic to flaunt them.

They seem to be making a comeback. 

GK Chesterton And Paradox

The ability to invert a concept and see the wisdom in the reversal is very rabbinic: "Perhaps the opposite is also true." It is much of what attracts me to Chesterton. A friend and poet in his own time had apparently had enough, however, and penned this:

O Gilbert, I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length
And the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height. Edward Anthony

Partly Off The Hook

Reposted from 15 years ago. Tracy and I will be going down for our 50th college reunion next month.

There are a full dozen beautiful places to propose in Williamsburg: Crim Dell, a little back nook behind the St. George Tucker House, the Wren Porch...

I missed all of those and picked a really dumb place to propose. Tracy had once said that she had told me where she had wanted to be asked for her hand. All these years, I thought she meant the little nook. On the way to Williamsburg, she told me it was the bridge over the canal at the Governor's Palace. Now, I would have remembered that, because I don't like the Governor's Palace, and would have tried to find something better that I liked. That is, I would have done a different stupid thing than what I actually did. She admitted she might not actually have said what she wanted, but this was what she wanted. While there, she set me up to propose in the proper place, and Kyle took the picture.

Well, that's a little better. I still have to own terrible taste in romanticism for where I proposed (Camm Dormitory. When Jonathan saw it when he was 16, he shook his head sadly at his father. Pretty sad when a 16-year-old can instantly see your style is lacking), but at least I'm off the hook for not listening, and the Governor's Palace in specific.

And we have this.

Mime - Teatro Hugo & Ines

Hugo's good



and here's Ines

Lent

The pinch of cravings reminds me to pray. In the EO tradition, Lent is a time of doing battle with the devil.  

Grim has a short post up on something similar about Lenten observance.

60s Retro Band

 Carroll County sang this in 1972.  We were on the cutting edge of 60s retro.  Got in on the ground floor. 

 

Also "Walk Away Renee"

It's a Marriage Crisis, Not a Fertility Crisis

 Rob Henderson at City Journal writes another summary article about a shift in thinking about what is driving fertility down, Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage.  I've been seeing a run on this idea lately, with what look like good numbers to back it up.

 The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.

Yes, I just mentioned urbanism and housing verticality as causes, but I think those are related. It has long been easier for a single person to live in an urban area than a rural or suburban one. 

Imagine A Mystical Limpet

From Miracles, by CS Lewis

Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet's words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.

2010 Links That Are Surprisingly Timely

 Make Bureaucrats Justify Their Spending 

Government Budget Discussions. If the people in charge of agencies do not make cuts with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with an axe.

The Receiving End of Abuse

 Change Is Difficult means "Things aren't better because some people won't get in line."

Now You Know

Why there was no "French Invasion"


or "Finnish Invasion"


in Rock 'n Roll.

Food for Thought

By replacing your morning coffee with green tea, you can lose...

 

 

up to 89% of what little joy you still have in your life.

Love Is A Fallacy

 For some reason, this story has stuck with me since 8th grade. It shows the limits of logic.

Max Shulman: Love is a Fallacy

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these.
My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a
scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.

It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows,
my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice
enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable.
Impressionable...

Grok 3 and Wokeness

Via Scott Alexander at ACX

If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.

I admit I feel better that Grok doesn't do this because it is nefariously trained to, but as a byproduct of something else.

Or do I? Dangerous statements that have an understandable origin are easier to detect and ferret out, aren't they?

Steven Pinker Resigns from APA

Steven Pinker resigns from the American Psychological Association after 43 years for "virulent Jew hate."

Housing and Fertility

 A study on housing and fertility. I should mention that this is in Brazil.

We find that obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20-25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%, with no increase in fertility for people above age 40. The lifetime fertility increase for a 20-year old is twice as large from obtaining housing immediately relative to obtaining it at age 30. The increase in fertility is stronger for households in areas with lower quality housing, greater rental expenses relative to income, and those with lower household income and lower female income share. These results suggest that alleviating housing credit and physical space constraints can significantly increase fertility. 

Housing for family formation has frequently been put forward as a key item, and verticality is supposed to depress birthrates in cities worldwide.  Cities themselves depress birthrates anyway, and have for centuries.

Gondolas in Sugarland

Sugarland TX, in response to rapid growth, is trying ski-lift gondolas for public transport. Roads, tunnels, and elevated trains are expensive.  These are cheaper.

Not sure how you do that in Boston in winter, but hey, skiers are used to it and may adapt quickly.

ABBA Reposting

I've been putting up music that I posted fifteen years ago, but nothing from ABBA, which was a staple then. Notice a Swedish group, singing on German television, is choosing to not only sing in translation, but compsing entirely in English in 1975.

 

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld

We Confess Our Small Faults Only To Convince People We Have No Greater Ones

Rob Henderson extracts some of his favorite maxims from the collection.

And you thought I was cynical about human motivations?

Adoption Series

 The 2010 memories of the adoption from Romania in 2001.

5 More Short Links from 2010

 She Ain't Heavy, She's My Dachshund

 As The Backs Go Tearing By. My mother sang this at Central in the 40s, I sang it in the 60s & 70s. 

Bureaucratese of the Day

Tourist Site - Budapest.  click to enlarge

Tourist Site - Zurich   click

Remember to comment here and not at the 2010 link.

Fairfield Four

 

Vaccine Efficacy

 Neil Stone on X  

Sometimes vaccine efficacy is subtle.

Sometimes it isn't.

(Post 2500 -) The Free Market

Reposted From 2010

Conservatives, not just progressives, often fail to remember that free market principles are not something one applies to a society. They are like gravity, always present. Adam Smith's invisible hand was a description of how things work, not advocacy for how things should work. Market principles continued within communist regimes. Governments may ignore them or try to counteract them, but they remain. Ignore or fight against them too much, as in communism, and gravity eventually brings you to earth.

The free market is not the only operating force, of course. As with gravity, other forces can be brought to bear to harness it or hold it at bay for some purpose, such as throwing a stone or building an airplane. Affection, vengeance, drive for power, moral principles - all these can work to channel or oppose the self-interest mechanisms of the market. These are in fact necessary countervailing forces, as they are often the basis of long term "self-interest" in a broader sense. We like to have family and friends, we like to believe our lives have meaning, we give up resources to build systems of law and fairness to inhabit. Corruption - a type of self-interest that does not have regard for these other forces - can harness the free market to benefit the few, leaving only scraps of value outside the centers of power. The free market will continue to work in both places, whether on the scraps or among the cronies, but these circles will then operate independently.

Surprise After Surprise

Another podcast from someone smarter than me, being interviewed by someone who is also smarter than me.  My sidebar is full of such folks. (Not all.  Some just have topic specialties I enjoy.)

Steve Hsu has a Manifold episode which records his being interviewed by...someone. An anonymous tech person on the  Informtion Theory podcast: Adventures in Physics, Trump, and More. Steve is or was a liberal and was dean of research at Michigan State but has surprisingly good things to say about Trump and surprisingly negative ones to say about gov't research, especially NIH.  I didn't see either of those coming. 

Also AI, Miltech, and Balance of Power. Deepseek is a game-changer because it uses so much less energy; 6th generation Chinese fighter planes; America's chip advantage via Taiwan and Netherlands is not only narrowing, but the Chinese just smuggle in those chips if they really need to.  Not in quantity, but still very useful.

From the book club that David Foster and I are in one of the Silicon Valley guys passes along an article about AI coding, The 70% problem. Recommended. By him, I mean. Most of it is beyond me, but some of you like that stuff.  Have at it. 

Evangelicals and Ukraine...And AVI's Three Year Rule

There is widespread support for Trump's "rudeness and arrogance" to Zelenskiy, including some liberals who would rather not admit it.  But I think this will be less popular with evangelicals than his other moves. You will find some fringe fundies who approve of Putin because he is against gay marriage, but as a whole, evangelicals have had far more success evangelising in other places in Eastern Europe. Russia had a strong tradition of underground Baptists during the Soviet era (see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), but when the Iron Curtain fell, a lot of the religious revival went straight to the Orthodox Church. Evangelical missionaries had great success in Romania, Ukraine, Slovak Republic, and Hungary.  Rather less in former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Baltic nations, and not well at all in Belarus and points east.

Many evangelical congregations have Romanians or Ukranians in them, have people who have gone on short term missions there, and support charities there. They have become very tied to the people of these nations, essentially ignoring their corrupt governments as a work in progress that will sort itself into western values...Someday. 

It has been 35 years since the Romanian revolution, and early on, Americans rooted for all the formerly communist nations to not fall prey to Russian expansionism.  If Iliescu was actually no better than Ceausescu, that was ignored because the danger was that it would go back.  That is still not outside the realm of possibility, and Moldova and the Baltic nations are on edge with what has happened in Ukraine. Yet it is progressively less likely that the Russians could do any such thing for the next decade or so. 

I have some parallels.  We resettled Laotian refugees in the 80s, and I boned up on that country's politics and people left behind, because I knew that the Syha's still cared about it. I haven't got a clue what is happening in Laos now, and frankly, I don't care. We worked with (South) Sudanese refugees not so many years ago and still have some connection. We were excited that South Sudan became independent in 2011 after horrifying persecution and oppression.

But of course, the South Sudanese were still capable of getting into wars between Dinka and Nuer over cattle.  What is up now?  I don't know. Maybe I should care, but I don't. As with Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Kosovo, etc, I don't even know who to pretend are the good guys. There have been Americans since the beginning who have insisted that the various factions in Ukraine are all so corrupt that we should have nothing to do with any of them, and they have receipts. Some liberals and libertarians, but a fair number of conservatives of paleo stripe have been beating out that rhythm on the drum for a few years, Putin or no.

For evangelicals who have to mix with liberals every day it has been something of a respite as well. They finally have something they can hold in common, rooting for Ukraine. Trump and Vance have seemed obnoxious, and most modern Christians of all sorts have a lot of the Gospel of Nice under the hood. Jeez, can't you guys take a hard line more quietly, without having to be rude about it?  

But now the full question is on the table, whether we like it or not: regardless of what happened before, What are we willing to do now? Russia invaded almost exactly three years ago, and I have long noted that Americans don't even like their own wars to go longer than three years, never mind anyone else's with our money. We will tolerate endless low-intensity warfare it seems, but not sharp hostilities. Billions, not millions of dollars have gone unaccounted for. My feelings are quite mixed at this point. As far as any war can be said to have started at a particular point, this one started in 2014. Two mostly-Russian provinces of Ukraine attempted to break away, and the Russians poured resources into them. The Ukrainians tried to prevent them. That still looks like Russian aggression, but you could stretch a point...

Feb 2022 invasion is unarguably Russian.

So what are my possible bad reasons for this uncertainty of position?  Am I being a typical American who just gets tired of hearing about a war and wants it to go away, whether we are winning, losing, or treading water? Am I seeing Ukraine as a Romanian equivalent and wanting them to prevail against Russians because I just always will?  Have I become increasingly isolationist because president after president has punched tar babies of countries? Do I just not want to hurt my wife's very pro-Ukraine feelings?  Am I becoming a MAGAhead, or reflexively disliking something because liberals like it?  Does Zelenskiy being an obvious arrogant prick about this sway me more than it should? I harp on all of us having buried and unattractive motives for our mostly-performative politics. Shouldn't I be especially alert to that here?

Accuse me of anything.  I might cop to it.