Just a short comment to thank everyone for their insightful and thoughtful remarks. I'd like to respond in more detail, but I have a media commitment that requires travel tomorrow and a piece to file by COB Friday. Presence around here will be light to variable.
Excellent article. It is like the people with useless college degrees these days, posing as intellectuals. This is a well written article with some history and present mixed in to make some excellent points. True innovation comes from people who have critical thinking skills outside the box.
The notion that progress flows from Basic Science down to Engineering, is, as you noted a long term
conceit of scientists. The more usual route is that the engineers get something to work, the scientists go back and analyse why the thing worked, and then, armed with a better theory of what is going on, the engineers make improvements and end up with something that does it better. Then the scientists point at the recent deal and say 'look, look, engineering is downstream of theory and basic knowledge!' One of the reasons that this is not widely known, and why, for instance the Apollo program was touted as 'a triumph of science' as opposed to one of engineering has to do with the relationship that Vannevar Bush had with Roosevelt, Truman and then Eisenhower.
If the Mililtary Industrial Complex had a father it was Vannevar Bush. He tirelessly advocated for pots of government money to go for research and development -- see for instance "Science The Endless Frontier A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945" https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm and he knew perfectly well that what he was advocating was 'better living through engineering'. But Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower all had very strong prejudices against the Army Corp of Engineers, based on personal experience. It appears that some of the members of the Army Corp of Engineers weren't particularly bright. This translated into a prejudice against engineering in general. So Bush knew that the notion of handing pots and pots of tax dollars to some engineers to do engineering was never going to receive approval. Thus his pitch was, relentlessly, 'we must do it all for Science' and 'We need more Basic Science'. He writes about this in his book 'Pieces of the Action' -- which I think that all historians, whatever their period, would enjoy reading.
I think that this is why the myth that 'science comes first' is so enduring. Vannevar Bush was one of the best and most successful myth-makers of the 20th century, and this was one of his.
Oh, it is a great story, and I am in no way saying that Bush invented the snootiness that certain (most?) scientists still have for 'applied science' and 'engineering'. It's just that by the time the Bush and his great buddy Walt Disney completed their mythmaking, the USA was deeply committed to a shiny technological future. There are downsides to this, and to creating strong ties between business and governement -- but it is hard to argue against technology-driven prosperity which the USA enjoyed for 2 postwar generations.
But there is a problem when you don't know your history. After the architects of the military industrial complex all were dead, their decendents thought that the ticket to prosperity was in becoming more theoretical, and having more knowedge workers. The practical matter of engineering was not important, and indeed could be shipped overseas to Indian and Chinese engineers who were cheaper. As long as we have the ideas -- went the thinking -- we will still be at the summit of the technological mountain. It hasn't worked out this way. Bright technological futures need a bunch of engineers who are going to engineer -- make stuff --, come what may, because that is what engineers do.
Can’t agree with this one. “...went the thinking” when in reality, the only thinking being done was how to harness cheap labor in less-developed countries. Corporate America laid cash in the palms of politicians...bought them off, that is...for the right to expand overseas and across borders without tax consequences, and then loaded equipment on flatcars and ships to escape the higher-cost labor markets at home. The only “engineers” involved were the millwrights sent along to set up new plants and factories where cheap labor was to be found.
US technology was thus exported to profit only the corporations, Americans-be-damned. Those who were not so inclined were later forced to follow suit, or die, as reduced costs of their competitors began driving them out of business.
Thus the United States now lacks opportunity for graduating scientists and engineers, lacks well-paying industrial opportunities for the working class, and the now-multinational noses-in-the-air corporatocracy seek to govern, ultimately, through the WEF. One of the many benefits of this approach will be to ride the high-horse of “equity” and “world benefit” while forcing the masses they screwed while polluting the earth, to pay for its salvation.
Oh, I agree with you that the corporations bought off the politicians this way and did exactly as you said. The question is, why did everybody go along with this? Where were the critics on the left who could have been expected to say that this was a cruel swindle? A great many people on the left thought that society was abandoning the low skilled jobs for something higher up the mountain, and there were stacks and stacks of economics papers claiming this was the way to prosperity instead of, in Hayek's expression, part of _The Road to Serfdom_.
I don’t believe the left was even paying attention. When the exodus of manufacturing began, early in the Clinton years with NAFTA, there were Ross Perot’s warnings of “a giant sucking sound” as industry would move off-shore. There were death-cries of competing small business, and massive objections from labor. Why labor unions still support Democrats in the US escapes me. The premise may seem valid to some academic-types who know little of how the world actually works, produces and prospers.
I don't live in the USA, so I make these observations from long distance, but I think the term used in the title of the article is a misnomer. I don't think that the bulk of the people who swelled the ranks of the universities wanted to join 'the elite'. Instead, they were the people who read popularisations of those economic papers I talked about, and really believed that the defunct good jobs in manufacturing were going to be replaced with good jobs in the knowledge economy. They wanted to be part of the new properous working class, the one with middle-class income.
I’m unable to read the bulk of university students, even though I was one, and worked two decades for that same university...certainly not as faculty. As one might expect the student population seems layered. At the cream-separation point and above are the true scholars, the scientists, mathematicians and liberal academics who were meant to be what they would inevitably become. As students they are stand-outs.
Beneath that are widely-varying layers of human potential, from which both competent, employed grads and the unsuccessful grads will emerge. I’ve always argued that people get exactly that for which they are willing to settle, but in reality it IS to a degree (no pun intended) a game of “musical chairs.”
In response to what they wanted, I was one who thought I knew, but didn’t; others knew and achieved it, many others never knew or even really thought about what would follow university. In the minds of many I knew as a student were thoughts of becoming a part of the “ruling class,” as they expressed over their third or perhaps, sixth drink. Or whatever.
But in my opinion, only a small percentage were even thinking about their futures. It’s the age and immaturity.
The “knowledge economy” is hopefulness. a ghost, is it not?
That’s a long-held but false belief, just exactly like the long-held and false premise that the Republican party is the party of the rich. It was, in a way, at one time, but circumstances, the makeup of the electorate and progressive liberalism have changed that.
Talk to anyone alive and working, as I was, during the Carter years. His administration achieved 22% mortgage interest rates. I remember it well because I needed a home for my young family. Jobs? Forget it. Small businesses, collectively major employment, failed in droves.
The standoff staged by airvtraffic controllers during Reagan’s administration would seem to support your claim, except that he believed, as do I, no labor union can have the power to shut down the country and its economy. He fired them all.
But that doesn’t mean the party is anti-labor.
It IS true that corruption of BOTH parties fed the NAFTA and TPP among others that decimated domestic manufacturing. As far as a thirty-year erosion, there simply isn’t that much time between the post-WWII boom and NAFTA for it to be true.
I scanned your article, you have much research into this, and I respect that. But you began with more than one false premise. “Investment in climate change strategies” is all wrong. The entire EV effort drastically increases carbon output, through mining and efficiency losses in conversion of fuel to power, transmission losses, re-conversion to motive energy. The fact that the vehicles themselves are emissions-free is ridiculous in the face of that. Sone 17 million trees have been removed to accommodate wind farms, and solar cells are even worse environmentally to produce, and to dispose of.
Indeed there are solutions. But liberals today are the comfortably rich, the privileged, the know-nothing screw-everything-up class. And they are Democrats, politicizing science so that even THAT tool is useless.
I claimed Republicans were anti-labor. You objected and offered as evidence Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers. That doesn't support your point. All the other stuff you brought up was irrelevant.
What destroyed the labor movement was the sustained high unemployment during the late 1970's and most of the 1980's. I explain in the link how and why that unemployment appeared.
What has prevented labor from ever recovering since as been the lack of wage growth. This has happened because of the lack of investment in the real economy because business prefers to use their profits for stock buybacks and dividends. See figure here
Note the decline tax rate over time. One thing Republicans have been consistent in is tax cuts. Its practically the only economic policy they have.
The other way Republicans have been anti-labor is through their pursuit of reductions in the top income tax rate. This has changed the environment in which economic culture evolves, resulting in the shareholder primacy culture of today in which investor interests take precedence over all else. This is described here.
As for direct evidence for anti-union sentiment among Republicans I would point to Right to Work Laws passed in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin and Michigan by Republican state legislatures. One of the founders of the modern conservative Republican ideology was Barry Goldwater who was staunchly opposed to unions.
You know I didn’t offer the firing of air taffic controllers to support my point, and as I lived the “other stuff” that I brought up, such as the abject economic failure of the Carter administration, I find your remark that it’s irrelevant, offensive. Further I know there is nothing I’m going to say that will ever change your mind.
The tax cuts you say are the only economic policy Republicans have was a strategy used by Democrat Kennedy and misnamed “trickle down.” Democrats have always railed about its failure because the only economic policy they have is tax-and-spend. And yet, Reagan saved the country economically by repeating it, as did Trump. The tax cuts spur economic growth across the board, genuinely add to employment and always return more in revenue to the federal government than the tax cuts cost.
Wage growth is part of the free market, which we should be able to agree has been depressed by the exodus of manufacturing to offshore sources and Mexico, which has been corrupt and bipartisan and tax law pertaining to it, purchased by corporations all along.
Blaming one party or the other is useless anyway, both are deeply-flawed as is the system. The founders could not have foreseen the rise of a corporatocracy, ans should have separated business and state with far greater force and vigor than they separated church and state.
You can’t pretend to know everything while you proclaim facts as irrelevant, and continue to talk to me. I would discuss with you, but if you keep coming back at the party I am left to support with the things I know, I’ll simply block you.
By irrelevant I mean it doesn't address the issue of Republican attitude towards labor, which is what is being discussed. I also lived and worked through the Carter years and didn't vote for him because of how shitty things were. But high interest rates and the stuff you bring up about environment stuff isn't germane to the issue of whether or not Republicans have a negative view of organized labor, unions. The air traffic controller example was the only thing you mentioned that was about labor. One can be a supporter of labor yet vote for the anti-labor party, knowing they are anti-labor, without being a hypocrite. It is easy when the other party, the one that claims to be pro-labor, doesn't act like it.
Management and capitalists are people who deserve representation. They play a very important role in our political economy. They both deserve and have always had a political party looking out for their interests. Originally, it was the Whigs and then continued on with the Republicans, which it still is. In just the last term, Republicans passed a corporate tax cut that this constituency desired. Labor is on the other side from this group. Democrats truly acted as supporters of Labor from Wilson through Johnson. Since then, they have been sort of indifferent to Labor and were called on it in 1978 (I'm surprised you did not bring this up, rather than the air traffic controller thing). Just because Democrats have become indifferent toward Labor doesn't change the Republican's traditional alignment with Capital. What Democrats did was their own business.
Great piece. On a personal note, it's really depressing to be the first generation in your family to get past o-levels, let alone go to uni, and find out just how pointless much of it is.
"University" acts like a pyramid scheme in some ways. Where I live, the Uni is the biggest employer, especially for admin staff (studentification is a real thing and a big problem imo, but that's a different essay).
The uni demands degrees for quite basic jobs, possibly to capture plenty of its own graduates and therefore boost its stats (over x% of our graduates get jobs after their degree, send your kids here!). I remember an ad for a PA job, approx £23k p.a., they wanted a first class degree. Absolute piss-take. We're seemingly trapped in a constant state of qualification inflation. Qualiflation, if you will. A waste.
I'm 24, and recently graduated with a technical degree from the third world, everyone expects you to be getting job offers here and there, but the truth is a sad, sad story. The degree doesn't matter much if there are new graduates like you every year for the last 20 years, trying to fill in the same 400(high paying) jobs that have been stagnant since the 80's. Those degrees accrued status for the previous generation and all the kids were coached to do the same. The only hope now is to get out of the country, especially for those who came from poorer backgrounds and had literally staked everything on education. The immigration trend from the third world to the West will be triple what it is right now due this problem alone.
That is so sad, and yes that degree thing is overplayed. I remember advancement in the military became a check box culture - much less of a meritocracy after WWII. The military has been the closest thing to a functioning meritocracy, retaining that aspect through many fads and fashions until Obama began the purgings.
College/university can be wonderful and challenging, with the exposure to many fields, access to big libraries, concerts, recreation - for example, you can take rock-climbing, swimming, spelunking, scuba diving classes, go on trips, forays, meet all kinds of people, argue, talk, listen with little interference - at least when I was going. The "hard sciences" crowd affected increasing atheistic views, especially so in the upper degrees which I did not understand. The more I learned about how things worked, the more awe I but it seems to work the opposite there and deism wasn't fashionable. You could find the lefties too, the commie profs and get steeped in that (young people have excess energy and it is easy to tap that, tap youthful anger and shape it, give it "reasons"). I feel terribly for the loss of freedom to explore, to truly learn, quashing of optimism and discouragement of developing problem-solving skills, and the danger - even physical danger - of not conforming to the indoctrination.
For a regime seeking to perpetuate itself the great challenge is how to suppress talent where it is not needed and how to counterfeit the appearance of merit where it is. The present system does this effectively enough.
Merit gets its chance only when the survival of the regime is at stake. Without a serious, imminent, threat, the system will go on as before. People will grumble.
The pious frauds of higher education are transparent enough. The institutions that count are aware of the problems and are starting to recruit technical trainees with serious ability straight from high school. The fixation with credentials will misdirect the attention and energy of midwit drones and the terminally naive.
Did you mean suppress talent where it is needed? I am missing something; that happens with me sometimes.
I have noticed shitty placement services even in areas where the degrees/skills are needed. The expensive degrees in faux ideology that the graduates expect qualify them for at best rare and fleeting job slots, floor me. Just as do the libbie-tards that insist that black people don't know how to get an ID - those nitwits not rising to midwits.
I am trying to make case that while there is an obvious need for talent (medicine, nuclear engineering etc) the regime always prioritises its own intrrest in maintaining an undereducated population. They are threatened by the expectations of the lower orders and restrict educational opportunity to ensure social and political stability. An overeducated counter-elite would form a very dangerous opposition.
IMHO you see proof of this most clearly in the way that the US has allowed public education to decline. The dumbing down of higher education enables the regime to cater to demands for education while devaluing the content/significance of formal credentials. It is a scam but worked well enough fir decades. Now it us all breaking down.
It is worth remembering that the big pushes for expanding higher came after WW2 and then after the end of the Cold War. The first had some basis in the needs of rapidly developing economies, the second was a ruse to make up for wage stagnation and persistent unemployment.
I've often thought that school children would be better off learning about people like Maudsley (who started work at 12) Whitworth and Wilkinson, etc. None of them went even close to a university and are arguably key figures in the industrial revolution, which in itself has been far more important to our modern life than most of the history we study.
Indeed, we have gone too far along the path of credentialism. We are witnessing credential inflation as well. As I wrote here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/not-qualified-but-overqualified, "while the mean IQ of a graduate student in the 1960s was 114, that fell to 105.8 by the 2000s. For undergraduates, the mean IQ dropped from 111.3 to 100.4 by the 2010s. Given that, by definition, an IQ of 100 is average, a college degree now merely signals average intelligence to potential employers. A college-educated person today scores barely a point higher than a High School educated person did in the 1960s."
This, among other reasons, is why we are going to need occupation reform, to disinflate credential inflation, and change the way that we finance and operate higher education.
“Authoritarian states can produce excellent science.”
🇺🇸 government isn’t Authoritarian in any sense of Centralized Authority. More of a free for all scramble for money, status, lawsuits, denunciations.
It’s rather like the French Assembly with the denunciations by borderline personalities with the soul of Murat but not his courage. No Danton, no mob, no pikes, no storming of the Bastille. Brats smashing up Starbucks then Daddy’s lawyers get them out of jail.
It’s sort of Performance Artist playacting at Bastille Day. They don’t have the Balls or physical strength to see it through.
The real enforcement mechanisms are The Media, which functions as our ghey fake KGB. The STASI economic side is people in their same Striver group get cancelled and have to go on Substack; but you see LW and the rest needed to be dead or in a labor camp for this to work, for L Ws tormentors to be safe. They’re not safe. They know they’re not safe, they know they’re weak cowards.
In 🇺🇸 the man with skills and a Don’t F with me attitude can always change jobs or start his own business (I became an LLC in 5 mins and $1500 for tax purposes, the filing took about 30 days but they handled it).
Not to mention if you have skills and a work ethic you’ll be fine IF you’re not so gutless as to be a doormat. Even so it will just be the office shirkers giving you their work.
Burly men especially with skills are fine. We’re waiting.
The only real danger is these idiots sensing their out, maybe dead or worst of all having to work 🤣 is they fire the Nukes in some Nero order. Possible, getting less likely. In nuclear war terms the most dangerous year for humanity was 2022.
You’re looking at the family tragedies shrieking at the prospect of living on their own merits.
You’re also looking at a fire sale.
Want an Ivy Degree? Sure ! 🤦🏿♂️
Want Roe overthrown? DONE!
Want factories back? TIDAL WAVE, the 2 biggest problems not enough workers, running out of real estate ( you need transportation, water, power, labor base). But these are the right problems! CHIPS Ahoy!
Want a check for being black?
SURE!
Look it’s Perestroika and Glasnost all over again, with aging cowards and pederasts instead of aging killers of the USSR.
Charlotte Iserbyt is notable among those describing the long agenda of mis-education in America, and to paraphrase Bertrand Russell from his third autobiography, if memory serves, schooling seemed relentlessly committed to trying to prevent people from thinking well. Add fluoride to water, and subject virtually every person alive today from birth to relentless mass media crap, and we graduate to the contemporary tendency to make sure that kindergarten children are exposed to adult sexual perversion, in lieu of alphabets and numbers.
But there is hope. 'Blue collar'-ish truckers by the thousands drove thousands of miles in the Canadian winter and occupied parts of Ottawa peacefully, inspirational for much of humanity, made the city safer, cleaner, funner, to the outraged consternation of many highly educated Canadians and fomenting in-your-face weak-kneed totalitarian-flavoured dysfunction in the governments across Canada.
The truckers had de facto advanced degrees in common sense, driving through snow and sleet with their senses alert, along with whatever other formal credentials.
“berating US police officers for not going to college. “
The police ob in _____ county FL didn’t go to my friend, because the other guy had a Masters degree. If you think that’s something look at “outside” hires for NYPD. Green Berets, PhD.
*outside the “family” 🍀.
I met the Fireman’s NYFF 🍀 society once on St Patrick’s day in Manhattan. He was head of Fireman’s 🍀 society.
He was coal black man 👨🏿.
🤣🤣🤣
In NYPD same deal.
And in Blood 🩸 Trades Nepotism is actually best practice.
Tom Wolfe was telling the truth, they all want to be ☘️ cops, even the DA lawyers.
Great article! It occurs to me that the association of university attendance with “a more skilled and productive workforce” rests on the assumption that students graduate from programs that are of use to society (ex.STEM). While a liberal arts education can lead to a more rounded person, they are only useful if students are taught how to think instead of what to think. Many other programs (ex. women’s/gender/queer studies) provide no benefit to society and only benefit the individual if the graduate goes on to teach (in which case the new teacher is just perpetuating the problem).
"The fact that China can do that — it’s a genuine and successful example of what is probably best described as “authoritarian capitalism” — is a powerful counterclaim to Ridley’s “small state” argument, one that, to his credit, he tackles head-on. He accepts that China’s innovation and economic growth has killed off the Whiggish belief that economic freedom would lead ineluctably to political liberty. He then does his level best to explain how, and to sound a note of caution. Maybe Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. And maybe it won’t."
The problem is the safeguard for innovators in the West (patents) has been thoroughly compromised by the intel agencies/Deep State to protect their interest, and cooperative corporate interests. The West now has the worst of both worlds, China only has half. Imagine if the West had both...
This is great. I am a professional engineer, university trained, and having worked in aerospace and energy for many decades, I know what you say is true. Academia has its place certainly, but genuine innovation usually comes from industry. And your point about thermodynamics as a science FOLLOWING the development of practical inventions is exactly correct.
I'm a layman with lots of interests in engineering and mechanics. Through watching and listening to pilots, steam locomotive preservationists and operators, and similar real-world practitioners, I've learned so much more than just how their particular machine works.
Basic physics rules and laws were clarified and made real for me listening to these people. One small example---I now understand why hydraulic power does things that pneumatic power cannot. A professional pilot who explains aerodynamics and control surfaces answered a prosai question for me: Why is that the more I squeeze liquid out of the bottle, the harder it is to get the remaining liquid out? Why does it require so much more pressure as the bottle empties?
Because liquid (hydraulics) does not compress; gas (pneumatics) does.
Simple, not earth-shattering, but important. I could say similar things about the knowledge I've acquired about thermodynamics, energy transfer and "holding" (flywheels, batteries), and efficiency.
When you understand these basics, the scam claims of "clean energy," for example, become obvious. And maddening.
Cool. Yeah, one's understanding of fluids (liquids and gases are considered fluids) greatly increases once one realizes the difference between compressible and incompressible fluids. One factor with compressible fluids is that a lot of energy is captured in compressed gases, which is why pressure vessels designed for gases are actually tested (welds etc) with water, at the design pressures, so that in the case of a failed test, the release of the test fluid isn't a disaster. This is called a hydrotest.
And yes for sure there are a lot of things going on the energy space that are downright stupid, sometimes as the result of project proponents not properly understanding engineering principles. Lots of magical thinking out there.
Also, interestingly, there is another state of matter not usually discussed called a super-critical fluid, and happens to some gases (like CO2 under pressure) and these fluids exhibit some properties of liquids and gases. If you ever hear of CCS, this is injection of CO2 underground, and in this case most people think of it as a gas. But its not.
Just a short comment to thank everyone for their insightful and thoughtful remarks. I'd like to respond in more detail, but I have a media commitment that requires travel tomorrow and a piece to file by COB Friday. Presence around here will be light to variable.
Gosh you do right some interesting and provocative articles Helen! This one has me spinning with ideas.
Excellent article. It is like the people with useless college degrees these days, posing as intellectuals. This is a well written article with some history and present mixed in to make some excellent points. True innovation comes from people who have critical thinking skills outside the box.
The notion that progress flows from Basic Science down to Engineering, is, as you noted a long term
conceit of scientists. The more usual route is that the engineers get something to work, the scientists go back and analyse why the thing worked, and then, armed with a better theory of what is going on, the engineers make improvements and end up with something that does it better. Then the scientists point at the recent deal and say 'look, look, engineering is downstream of theory and basic knowledge!' One of the reasons that this is not widely known, and why, for instance the Apollo program was touted as 'a triumph of science' as opposed to one of engineering has to do with the relationship that Vannevar Bush had with Roosevelt, Truman and then Eisenhower.
If the Mililtary Industrial Complex had a father it was Vannevar Bush. He tirelessly advocated for pots of government money to go for research and development -- see for instance "Science The Endless Frontier A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945" https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm and he knew perfectly well that what he was advocating was 'better living through engineering'. But Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower all had very strong prejudices against the Army Corp of Engineers, based on personal experience. It appears that some of the members of the Army Corp of Engineers weren't particularly bright. This translated into a prejudice against engineering in general. So Bush knew that the notion of handing pots and pots of tax dollars to some engineers to do engineering was never going to receive approval. Thus his pitch was, relentlessly, 'we must do it all for Science' and 'We need more Basic Science'. He writes about this in his book 'Pieces of the Action' -- which I think that all historians, whatever their period, would enjoy reading.
I think that this is why the myth that 'science comes first' is so enduring. Vannevar Bush was one of the best and most successful myth-makers of the 20th century, and this was one of his.
Fascinating detail (Ridley is British, so tends to focus on UK history - hence the Newcomen story).
Oh, it is a great story, and I am in no way saying that Bush invented the snootiness that certain (most?) scientists still have for 'applied science' and 'engineering'. It's just that by the time the Bush and his great buddy Walt Disney completed their mythmaking, the USA was deeply committed to a shiny technological future. There are downsides to this, and to creating strong ties between business and governement -- but it is hard to argue against technology-driven prosperity which the USA enjoyed for 2 postwar generations.
But there is a problem when you don't know your history. After the architects of the military industrial complex all were dead, their decendents thought that the ticket to prosperity was in becoming more theoretical, and having more knowedge workers. The practical matter of engineering was not important, and indeed could be shipped overseas to Indian and Chinese engineers who were cheaper. As long as we have the ideas -- went the thinking -- we will still be at the summit of the technological mountain. It hasn't worked out this way. Bright technological futures need a bunch of engineers who are going to engineer -- make stuff --, come what may, because that is what engineers do.
Can’t agree with this one. “...went the thinking” when in reality, the only thinking being done was how to harness cheap labor in less-developed countries. Corporate America laid cash in the palms of politicians...bought them off, that is...for the right to expand overseas and across borders without tax consequences, and then loaded equipment on flatcars and ships to escape the higher-cost labor markets at home. The only “engineers” involved were the millwrights sent along to set up new plants and factories where cheap labor was to be found.
US technology was thus exported to profit only the corporations, Americans-be-damned. Those who were not so inclined were later forced to follow suit, or die, as reduced costs of their competitors began driving them out of business.
Thus the United States now lacks opportunity for graduating scientists and engineers, lacks well-paying industrial opportunities for the working class, and the now-multinational noses-in-the-air corporatocracy seek to govern, ultimately, through the WEF. One of the many benefits of this approach will be to ride the high-horse of “equity” and “world benefit” while forcing the masses they screwed while polluting the earth, to pay for its salvation.
Let’s get this picture right.
Oh, I agree with you that the corporations bought off the politicians this way and did exactly as you said. The question is, why did everybody go along with this? Where were the critics on the left who could have been expected to say that this was a cruel swindle? A great many people on the left thought that society was abandoning the low skilled jobs for something higher up the mountain, and there were stacks and stacks of economics papers claiming this was the way to prosperity instead of, in Hayek's expression, part of _The Road to Serfdom_.
I don’t believe the left was even paying attention. When the exodus of manufacturing began, early in the Clinton years with NAFTA, there were Ross Perot’s warnings of “a giant sucking sound” as industry would move off-shore. There were death-cries of competing small business, and massive objections from labor. Why labor unions still support Democrats in the US escapes me. The premise may seem valid to some academic-types who know little of how the world actually works, produces and prospers.
I don't live in the USA, so I make these observations from long distance, but I think the term used in the title of the article is a misnomer. I don't think that the bulk of the people who swelled the ranks of the universities wanted to join 'the elite'. Instead, they were the people who read popularisations of those economic papers I talked about, and really believed that the defunct good jobs in manufacturing were going to be replaced with good jobs in the knowledge economy. They wanted to be part of the new properous working class, the one with middle-class income.
And according to this gallup poll, an increasing number of them think they _are_ the new working class. https://news.gallup.com/poll/159029/americans-likely-say-belong-middle-class.aspx The problem they face is that this new knowledge economy never produced the good replacement jobs promised, or at least not in quantity.
I’m unable to read the bulk of university students, even though I was one, and worked two decades for that same university...certainly not as faculty. As one might expect the student population seems layered. At the cream-separation point and above are the true scholars, the scientists, mathematicians and liberal academics who were meant to be what they would inevitably become. As students they are stand-outs.
Beneath that are widely-varying layers of human potential, from which both competent, employed grads and the unsuccessful grads will emerge. I’ve always argued that people get exactly that for which they are willing to settle, but in reality it IS to a degree (no pun intended) a game of “musical chairs.”
In response to what they wanted, I was one who thought I knew, but didn’t; others knew and achieved it, many others never knew or even really thought about what would follow university. In the minds of many I knew as a student were thoughts of becoming a part of the “ruling class,” as they expressed over their third or perhaps, sixth drink. Or whatever.
But in my opinion, only a small percentage were even thinking about their futures. It’s the age and immaturity.
The “knowledge economy” is hopefulness. a ghost, is it not?
As for unions, what choice did they have? Republicans were and are virulently anti-union.
That’s a long-held but false belief, just exactly like the long-held and false premise that the Republican party is the party of the rich. It was, in a way, at one time, but circumstances, the makeup of the electorate and progressive liberalism have changed that.
Talk to anyone alive and working, as I was, during the Carter years. His administration achieved 22% mortgage interest rates. I remember it well because I needed a home for my young family. Jobs? Forget it. Small businesses, collectively major employment, failed in droves.
The standoff staged by airvtraffic controllers during Reagan’s administration would seem to support your claim, except that he believed, as do I, no labor union can have the power to shut down the country and its economy. He fired them all.
But that doesn’t mean the party is anti-labor.
It IS true that corruption of BOTH parties fed the NAFTA and TPP among others that decimated domestic manufacturing. As far as a thirty-year erosion, there simply isn’t that much time between the post-WWII boom and NAFTA for it to be true.
I scanned your article, you have much research into this, and I respect that. But you began with more than one false premise. “Investment in climate change strategies” is all wrong. The entire EV effort drastically increases carbon output, through mining and efficiency losses in conversion of fuel to power, transmission losses, re-conversion to motive energy. The fact that the vehicles themselves are emissions-free is ridiculous in the face of that. Sone 17 million trees have been removed to accommodate wind farms, and solar cells are even worse environmentally to produce, and to dispose of.
Indeed there are solutions. But liberals today are the comfortably rich, the privileged, the know-nothing screw-everything-up class. And they are Democrats, politicizing science so that even THAT tool is useless.
I claimed Republicans were anti-labor. You objected and offered as evidence Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers. That doesn't support your point. All the other stuff you brought up was irrelevant.
What destroyed the labor movement was the sustained high unemployment during the late 1970's and most of the 1980's. I explain in the link how and why that unemployment appeared.
What has prevented labor from ever recovering since as been the lack of wage growth. This has happened because of the lack of investment in the real economy because business prefers to use their profits for stock buybacks and dividends. See figure here
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F256392ca-fa28-4b59-86d3-d93102c7a419_621x289.gif
Or you can go to the article to see it:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-capitalist-crisis
Note the decline tax rate over time. One thing Republicans have been consistent in is tax cuts. Its practically the only economic policy they have.
The other way Republicans have been anti-labor is through their pursuit of reductions in the top income tax rate. This has changed the environment in which economic culture evolves, resulting in the shareholder primacy culture of today in which investor interests take precedence over all else. This is described here.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
As for direct evidence for anti-union sentiment among Republicans I would point to Right to Work Laws passed in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin and Michigan by Republican state legislatures. One of the founders of the modern conservative Republican ideology was Barry Goldwater who was staunchly opposed to unions.
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/09/archives/labor-and-goldwater-reasons-for-unions-opposition-to-his-election.html
You know I didn’t offer the firing of air taffic controllers to support my point, and as I lived the “other stuff” that I brought up, such as the abject economic failure of the Carter administration, I find your remark that it’s irrelevant, offensive. Further I know there is nothing I’m going to say that will ever change your mind.
The tax cuts you say are the only economic policy Republicans have was a strategy used by Democrat Kennedy and misnamed “trickle down.” Democrats have always railed about its failure because the only economic policy they have is tax-and-spend. And yet, Reagan saved the country economically by repeating it, as did Trump. The tax cuts spur economic growth across the board, genuinely add to employment and always return more in revenue to the federal government than the tax cuts cost.
Wage growth is part of the free market, which we should be able to agree has been depressed by the exodus of manufacturing to offshore sources and Mexico, which has been corrupt and bipartisan and tax law pertaining to it, purchased by corporations all along.
Blaming one party or the other is useless anyway, both are deeply-flawed as is the system. The founders could not have foreseen the rise of a corporatocracy, ans should have separated business and state with far greater force and vigor than they separated church and state.
You can’t pretend to know everything while you proclaim facts as irrelevant, and continue to talk to me. I would discuss with you, but if you keep coming back at the party I am left to support with the things I know, I’ll simply block you.
By irrelevant I mean it doesn't address the issue of Republican attitude towards labor, which is what is being discussed. I also lived and worked through the Carter years and didn't vote for him because of how shitty things were. But high interest rates and the stuff you bring up about environment stuff isn't germane to the issue of whether or not Republicans have a negative view of organized labor, unions. The air traffic controller example was the only thing you mentioned that was about labor. One can be a supporter of labor yet vote for the anti-labor party, knowing they are anti-labor, without being a hypocrite. It is easy when the other party, the one that claims to be pro-labor, doesn't act like it.
Management and capitalists are people who deserve representation. They play a very important role in our political economy. They both deserve and have always had a political party looking out for their interests. Originally, it was the Whigs and then continued on with the Republicans, which it still is. In just the last term, Republicans passed a corporate tax cut that this constituency desired. Labor is on the other side from this group. Democrats truly acted as supporters of Labor from Wilson through Johnson. Since then, they have been sort of indifferent to Labor and were called on it in 1978 (I'm surprised you did not bring this up, rather than the air traffic controller thing). Just because Democrats have become indifferent toward Labor doesn't change the Republican's traditional alignment with Capital. What Democrats did was their own business.
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fraserresign.html
The decline of manufacturing an anti-worker policy began thirty years before Clinton. https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Great piece. On a personal note, it's really depressing to be the first generation in your family to get past o-levels, let alone go to uni, and find out just how pointless much of it is.
"University" acts like a pyramid scheme in some ways. Where I live, the Uni is the biggest employer, especially for admin staff (studentification is a real thing and a big problem imo, but that's a different essay).
The uni demands degrees for quite basic jobs, possibly to capture plenty of its own graduates and therefore boost its stats (over x% of our graduates get jobs after their degree, send your kids here!). I remember an ad for a PA job, approx £23k p.a., they wanted a first class degree. Absolute piss-take. We're seemingly trapped in a constant state of qualification inflation. Qualiflation, if you will. A waste.
"Qualiflation".
SNERK.
I'm 24, and recently graduated with a technical degree from the third world, everyone expects you to be getting job offers here and there, but the truth is a sad, sad story. The degree doesn't matter much if there are new graduates like you every year for the last 20 years, trying to fill in the same 400(high paying) jobs that have been stagnant since the 80's. Those degrees accrued status for the previous generation and all the kids were coached to do the same. The only hope now is to get out of the country, especially for those who came from poorer backgrounds and had literally staked everything on education. The immigration trend from the third world to the West will be triple what it is right now due this problem alone.
That is so sad, and yes that degree thing is overplayed. I remember advancement in the military became a check box culture - much less of a meritocracy after WWII. The military has been the closest thing to a functioning meritocracy, retaining that aspect through many fads and fashions until Obama began the purgings.
College/university can be wonderful and challenging, with the exposure to many fields, access to big libraries, concerts, recreation - for example, you can take rock-climbing, swimming, spelunking, scuba diving classes, go on trips, forays, meet all kinds of people, argue, talk, listen with little interference - at least when I was going. The "hard sciences" crowd affected increasing atheistic views, especially so in the upper degrees which I did not understand. The more I learned about how things worked, the more awe I but it seems to work the opposite there and deism wasn't fashionable. You could find the lefties too, the commie profs and get steeped in that (young people have excess energy and it is easy to tap that, tap youthful anger and shape it, give it "reasons"). I feel terribly for the loss of freedom to explore, to truly learn, quashing of optimism and discouragement of developing problem-solving skills, and the danger - even physical danger - of not conforming to the indoctrination.
For a regime seeking to perpetuate itself the great challenge is how to suppress talent where it is not needed and how to counterfeit the appearance of merit where it is. The present system does this effectively enough.
Merit gets its chance only when the survival of the regime is at stake. Without a serious, imminent, threat, the system will go on as before. People will grumble.
The pious frauds of higher education are transparent enough. The institutions that count are aware of the problems and are starting to recruit technical trainees with serious ability straight from high school. The fixation with credentials will misdirect the attention and energy of midwit drones and the terminally naive.
Did you mean suppress talent where it is needed? I am missing something; that happens with me sometimes.
I have noticed shitty placement services even in areas where the degrees/skills are needed. The expensive degrees in faux ideology that the graduates expect qualify them for at best rare and fleeting job slots, floor me. Just as do the libbie-tards that insist that black people don't know how to get an ID - those nitwits not rising to midwits.
I am trying to make case that while there is an obvious need for talent (medicine, nuclear engineering etc) the regime always prioritises its own intrrest in maintaining an undereducated population. They are threatened by the expectations of the lower orders and restrict educational opportunity to ensure social and political stability. An overeducated counter-elite would form a very dangerous opposition.
IMHO you see proof of this most clearly in the way that the US has allowed public education to decline. The dumbing down of higher education enables the regime to cater to demands for education while devaluing the content/significance of formal credentials. It is a scam but worked well enough fir decades. Now it us all breaking down.
Thank you - I see.
I agree!
It is worth remembering that the big pushes for expanding higher came after WW2 and then after the end of the Cold War. The first had some basis in the needs of rapidly developing economies, the second was a ruse to make up for wage stagnation and persistent unemployment.
I've often thought that school children would be better off learning about people like Maudsley (who started work at 12) Whitworth and Wilkinson, etc. None of them went even close to a university and are arguably key figures in the industrial revolution, which in itself has been far more important to our modern life than most of the history we study.
Amen
Indeed, we have gone too far along the path of credentialism. We are witnessing credential inflation as well. As I wrote here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/not-qualified-but-overqualified, "while the mean IQ of a graduate student in the 1960s was 114, that fell to 105.8 by the 2000s. For undergraduates, the mean IQ dropped from 111.3 to 100.4 by the 2010s. Given that, by definition, an IQ of 100 is average, a college degree now merely signals average intelligence to potential employers. A college-educated person today scores barely a point higher than a High School educated person did in the 1960s."
This, among other reasons, is why we are going to need occupation reform, to disinflate credential inflation, and change the way that we finance and operate higher education.
I didn't know that, wow!
A response to a comment, which I think should be more visible:
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/meritocracy-elite-overproduction/comment/21201631
Alas I have no control over how Substack displays comments!
I’ve re-stacked your fine article with the comment as an opening remark.
“Authoritarian states can produce excellent science.”
🇺🇸 government isn’t Authoritarian in any sense of Centralized Authority. More of a free for all scramble for money, status, lawsuits, denunciations.
It’s rather like the French Assembly with the denunciations by borderline personalities with the soul of Murat but not his courage. No Danton, no mob, no pikes, no storming of the Bastille. Brats smashing up Starbucks then Daddy’s lawyers get them out of jail.
It’s sort of Performance Artist playacting at Bastille Day. They don’t have the Balls or physical strength to see it through.
The real enforcement mechanisms are The Media, which functions as our ghey fake KGB. The STASI economic side is people in their same Striver group get cancelled and have to go on Substack; but you see LW and the rest needed to be dead or in a labor camp for this to work, for L Ws tormentors to be safe. They’re not safe. They know they’re not safe, they know they’re weak cowards.
In 🇺🇸 the man with skills and a Don’t F with me attitude can always change jobs or start his own business (I became an LLC in 5 mins and $1500 for tax purposes, the filing took about 30 days but they handled it).
Not to mention if you have skills and a work ethic you’ll be fine IF you’re not so gutless as to be a doormat. Even so it will just be the office shirkers giving you their work.
Burly men especially with skills are fine. We’re waiting.
The only real danger is these idiots sensing their out, maybe dead or worst of all having to work 🤣 is they fire the Nukes in some Nero order. Possible, getting less likely. In nuclear war terms the most dangerous year for humanity was 2022.
You’re looking at the family tragedies shrieking at the prospect of living on their own merits.
You’re also looking at a fire sale.
Want an Ivy Degree? Sure ! 🤦🏿♂️
Want Roe overthrown? DONE!
Want factories back? TIDAL WAVE, the 2 biggest problems not enough workers, running out of real estate ( you need transportation, water, power, labor base). But these are the right problems! CHIPS Ahoy!
Want a check for being black?
SURE!
Look it’s Perestroika and Glasnost all over again, with aging cowards and pederasts instead of aging killers of the USSR.
Look if Brezhnev were Gay = 🇺🇸
Short version;
🇺🇸 “Authoritarians”
Look if Brezhnev were Gay = 🇺🇸
Charlotte Iserbyt is notable among those describing the long agenda of mis-education in America, and to paraphrase Bertrand Russell from his third autobiography, if memory serves, schooling seemed relentlessly committed to trying to prevent people from thinking well. Add fluoride to water, and subject virtually every person alive today from birth to relentless mass media crap, and we graduate to the contemporary tendency to make sure that kindergarten children are exposed to adult sexual perversion, in lieu of alphabets and numbers.
But there is hope. 'Blue collar'-ish truckers by the thousands drove thousands of miles in the Canadian winter and occupied parts of Ottawa peacefully, inspirational for much of humanity, made the city safer, cleaner, funner, to the outraged consternation of many highly educated Canadians and fomenting in-your-face weak-kneed totalitarian-flavoured dysfunction in the governments across Canada.
The truckers had de facto advanced degrees in common sense, driving through snow and sleet with their senses alert, along with whatever other formal credentials.
“berating US police officers for not going to college. “
The police ob in _____ county FL didn’t go to my friend, because the other guy had a Masters degree. If you think that’s something look at “outside” hires for NYPD. Green Berets, PhD.
*outside the “family” 🍀.
I met the Fireman’s NYFF 🍀 society once on St Patrick’s day in Manhattan. He was head of Fireman’s 🍀 society.
He was coal black man 👨🏿.
🤣🤣🤣
In NYPD same deal.
And in Blood 🩸 Trades Nepotism is actually best practice.
Tom Wolfe was telling the truth, they all want to be ☘️ cops, even the DA lawyers.
Police job-
Rule by the best was never Aristocracy...
🗡 this was Aristocracy
Great article! It occurs to me that the association of university attendance with “a more skilled and productive workforce” rests on the assumption that students graduate from programs that are of use to society (ex.STEM). While a liberal arts education can lead to a more rounded person, they are only useful if students are taught how to think instead of what to think. Many other programs (ex. women’s/gender/queer studies) provide no benefit to society and only benefit the individual if the graduate goes on to teach (in which case the new teacher is just perpetuating the problem).
"The fact that China can do that — it’s a genuine and successful example of what is probably best described as “authoritarian capitalism” — is a powerful counterclaim to Ridley’s “small state” argument, one that, to his credit, he tackles head-on. He accepts that China’s innovation and economic growth has killed off the Whiggish belief that economic freedom would lead ineluctably to political liberty. He then does his level best to explain how, and to sound a note of caution. Maybe Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. And maybe it won’t."
The problem is the safeguard for innovators in the West (patents) has been thoroughly compromised by the intel agencies/Deep State to protect their interest, and cooperative corporate interests. The West now has the worst of both worlds, China only has half. Imagine if the West had both...
I'm not sure there is that much innovation in China, the economic system is adept at swallowing advances and copying tech from other nations.
This is great. I am a professional engineer, university trained, and having worked in aerospace and energy for many decades, I know what you say is true. Academia has its place certainly, but genuine innovation usually comes from industry. And your point about thermodynamics as a science FOLLOWING the development of practical inventions is exactly correct.
I'm a layman with lots of interests in engineering and mechanics. Through watching and listening to pilots, steam locomotive preservationists and operators, and similar real-world practitioners, I've learned so much more than just how their particular machine works.
Basic physics rules and laws were clarified and made real for me listening to these people. One small example---I now understand why hydraulic power does things that pneumatic power cannot. A professional pilot who explains aerodynamics and control surfaces answered a prosai question for me: Why is that the more I squeeze liquid out of the bottle, the harder it is to get the remaining liquid out? Why does it require so much more pressure as the bottle empties?
Because liquid (hydraulics) does not compress; gas (pneumatics) does.
Simple, not earth-shattering, but important. I could say similar things about the knowledge I've acquired about thermodynamics, energy transfer and "holding" (flywheels, batteries), and efficiency.
When you understand these basics, the scam claims of "clean energy," for example, become obvious. And maddening.
Cool. Yeah, one's understanding of fluids (liquids and gases are considered fluids) greatly increases once one realizes the difference between compressible and incompressible fluids. One factor with compressible fluids is that a lot of energy is captured in compressed gases, which is why pressure vessels designed for gases are actually tested (welds etc) with water, at the design pressures, so that in the case of a failed test, the release of the test fluid isn't a disaster. This is called a hydrotest.
And yes for sure there are a lot of things going on the energy space that are downright stupid, sometimes as the result of project proponents not properly understanding engineering principles. Lots of magical thinking out there.
Also, interestingly, there is another state of matter not usually discussed called a super-critical fluid, and happens to some gases (like CO2 under pressure) and these fluids exhibit some properties of liquids and gases. If you ever hear of CCS, this is injection of CO2 underground, and in this case most people think of it as a gas. But its not.