Empirical data is uncomfortable. Suck it up.

In this story, we learn that black students at Duke are upset because of

“The most immediate cause for students’ anger is an as-yet unpublished study by Duke researchers saying black students match the GPA of whites over time in part because they switch to majors that require less study time and have less stringent grading standards. Opponents of affirmative action are citing the study in a case they want the U.S. Supreme Court to consider.”

in addition to, among other things, insufficiently demonstrated dedication to celebration of black culture. The solutions proposed include “a stable funding source for cultural events and academic programs involving black students, and for the creation of a special university working group to assess whether blacks feel the climate at Duke is unwelcoming” because “These are really just symptoms of a contentious and strained racial climate here.”

Now. To recap: Because a study indicates a reason for grading parity that you don’t approve of, you cry institutional discrimination. This smacks of a mentality that can’t see beyond victimization, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement. It shows a blatant disrespect for academic freedom, free speech, and black achievement where it’s valid.

So, some questions that I would like to pose to Ms. Asante to get a better understanding of the logic behind the requests for amelioration:

1) When would you know that the “contentious and strained racial climate” has been improved to a satisfactory level? What are the objective gates or measures? (hint: there are none. this is not based on behavior or anything else–it’s based on how loved Ms. Asante is feeling.)

2) Assume for the moment that the study is accurate. Are you worried about suppressing academic freedom and truth by raising a ruckus about these findings? Would you want to know the trends behind minority student performance in college? (answer: don’t care. it’s all about Meeeeee!)

3) Assume for the moment that the study is inaccurate. Can’t you just do some research to find and disseminate the truth? What problem is funding cultural celebration going to solve?

4) Are you willing to go to bat for other minorities (i.e. Latino-heritage students, Pacific islanders, etc) on similar grounds?

In short, methinks the lady doth protest too much. She’s using this as an excuse to get indignant and put the university on the defensive about race to get her cause some wasta. Every time I read one of these stories, I have less and less regard for black cultural anything because the demands have become so devalued and divorced from anything real.

From The Bell Curve to SBDL, there is a lot of really controversy-inspiring content out and about to discuss. This one is minor, factual, and easily dealt with. It seems that Ms. Asante is aware of and worried about the implications that people might draw from this study–namely, that black minority students on average don’t do well in difficult majors, and so move to easier ones to get better grades. The underlying theme is that blacks are only doing as well as whites on paper because they move to easy majors. Uncomfortable, to be sure, and terribly un-PC–but the responsible questions arise after acknowledging the data: Is it fact? If it is fact, why does it happen? What are the implications, and how do we address them?

But so what if it’s true? I mean, really. Lots of people move to easy majors and classes to get better grades. This is a vital part of the credentialing aspect of education–that good grades in hard majors say that you worked for something worthwhile. If you decided to spend your college experience slacking off studying Communications or Art History, that’s up to you–you make the choice, you bear the consequences later. Racism has nothing to do with it. The sooner we acknowledge empirical truth, the sooner we can start dealing with it in a productive manner.

So deal.

Vegetarian = High Maintenance

Vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians whatever. If you inflict your food lifestyle on other people–that is, other people have to modify their activities to suit your whims–you are high-maintenance, and probably spoiled with significant emotional problems to boot. Could apply to guys too, but I see a lot more girls doing this.

I dated a vegetarian for a while. I thought it was a “cute” and probably temporary affliction which would only inconvenience me in my infrequent quests for steakhouses. Was I ever wrong. Then I almost dated a vegan for a short time, until I realized that the closest we’d ever get to sharing a meal was a bottle of approved wine.

There are some benefits to women being vegetarian. That means less money spent on steak dinners, a great conversational opportunity whenever you have to go out to dinner with other people (/sarc), and possibly some benefits during sex. That’s about it.

Being vegetarian means that a girl is high-maintenance. This is because* women who undertake an ostensible stance against animal-cruelty / for-animal-rights / for-any-progressive-cause are just dying to feel martyred when you, the earnest guy trying to get some tail, give them any sort of grief whatsoever about their lifestyle preference.

To repeat: Women love the emotional rush they get from feeling put-upon as a result of their adopting an irrational lifestyle for whatever the ostensible cause is. They feel as though they’re suffering for the cause, and that paradoxically makes them feel good. This in turn means that those women are otherwise emotionally empty and turn to causes as means of validation, which you, fearless reader, then have to bear the brunt of.

What are symptoms of this high-maintenance state, you ask. Well–how about having to modify what restaurants a group chooses to suit that one person. How about eating out, or even cooking becoming a nightmare–this is one reason I don’t buy dinner for girls until I want to, because dealing with a lot of eating idiosyncrasies is just a huge pain that I don’t want to deal with. How about just being an asshole. Eye-rolling, special requests for restaurants that you can’t turn down because “I can’t eat meeeeeeaat“, the implied holier-than-thou moral posturing, that whole package. The whole explanation deal when you introduce the person to someone else and have to run through the whole litany of dietary restrictions, what they can and won’t eat (gluten-free, various animal product categories, organic-only, etc). It’s goddam ridiculous and needs to stop.

There’s also a difference between “I can’t eat meat” and “I won’t eat meat.” Please please please acknowledge that you are choosing–preferring–to live a certain way when you are inconveniencing others. Own it. Don’t pretend that your lower GI tract will explode if you have a chicken nugget. That’s irresponsible and dishonest and is an attempt to move the blame for the situational discomfort  to the other person.

If you can’t find a real cause, don’t turn to a fake one so that you can add some meaning to your life through other peoples’ distress and inconvenience.

Vegetarianism was espoused by Hitler. QED.

* I threw this in there because there are small minorities of women (and men) who are vegetarians due to being raised that way, religious requirements, etc. I can’t fault that too much. Still think it’s unnecessary, but it’s a sight better than the typical attention-whoring.

Education: why? And: some modest proposals.

I enjoy writing about education, and even though I (acknowledgedly) know practically nothing about it from a professional standpoint I still go straight for strong and provocative opinions. I had teachers. Otherwise, I sit around and play video games and… well, have attended a couple really really high-grade universities for solid subjects, but that’s besides the point. So here are a few points on education in America and a few suggestions on what to do with it.

The other day I was reading Democracy in America and learned that townships used to run and fund their own schools. De Tocqueville realized that there’s a good reason for this: that degrees of removal of that responsibility from the town/city creates an agency problem where the community is removed from the school system and therefore has no reason to really support it. For instance, townships used to penalize parents whose kids didn’t attend school because it was detrimental to the commonly-agreed-up (i.e. voted upon) common good and policy. Currently, while school systems are primarily governed at the state level and funded locally, there is a growing level of federal funding and regulation which is removing responsibility and accountability from the community.

So, let’s get to the point here: why do we need education?

The benefits of education, broadly defined, are by common-sense indisputable: whether you learn in the streets of east LA or at Harvard, being better informed about a particular subject render you more able to perform competently in that subject, hence better able to vote/earn a living/recreate/procreate/destroy/break/heal/repair/whatever. The more citizens we have who can competently do a variety of things, the more we’re able to specialize labor and live better lives. More or less.

So education is good. However, we in the United States have made a fetish of public education. Why? There seem to be three general reasons for having a public education system, apart from having a ready-made apparatus for indoctrination of the youth by the state. Taken one-by-one, here are:

1. To train people for the demands of jobs and life. Per the benefits of education above, this seems to be an easily-salable idea for getting people to support public education. Literacy, employability, etc. Except that current schools don’t really train people for jobs beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. We might be better served with trade high-schools. This is also the economic argument; restated, it says that more general education equals higher GDP over time.

2.To educate responsible, socially aware citizens who can vote. Hahahaha… nice concept, but if anyone is using this to justify public education, then we need to have a real and honest discussion about what responsible voting entails, followed by an in depth examination of the proffered curriculum at the local public high school. Hint: Media, band, and art classes don’t make informed voters. Interestingly, graduation requirements seem to make sense, but certainly don’t fill four years of “education”, suggesting that the additional year-plus of time in secondary is being wasted. We haven’t even tackled the issue of remedial education for wasted primary-school years either. More likely, we’re using it here to indoctrinate and socialize students. That’s scary–society-shaping should come from laws, not from propaganda. Cue theme music.

3. And, it looks like that there’s a strong case for keeping kids in school to keep them out of the workforce. Education is compulsory up to 16. There are stringent requirements on employing youth under 18. These in addition to the facts that we’re structurally not set up to support teen employment and have huge issues when kids are out for the summer means that letting kids out of school any earlier would require a hard pivot to absorb the new, cheaper workforce year-round and still keep unemployment at acceptable levels.

So this leaves 1) and 3). Won’t discuss those here– too much material to cover. Now, proposals to help align incentives for improvement in these areas:

I would submit that 1) would be much better filled by abolishing the silly notion that somehow politicians need to ensure that everyone becomes a raging success. There is a certain minimum standard of social functionality that comes from ensuring mathematical and linguistic literacy, so that’s not a bad reason to publicly fund education–but we need to be very straightforward about the purpose of education before trying to implement it. Otherwise, the general umbrella of “education” leads to all sorts of weird governmental interventions, like in peoples’ diets, the first 18 years of their lives, and so on. Education then becomes a Cause and a make-work policy and social-control tool.

Moving on:

A) Remove all federal controls on education. Dismantle the Department of Education. (Why? the proliferation of regulations on states for one, and the increasing intrusion of bureaucracy into educational programs well beyond what our above-mentioned Purpose would require). Move educational attainment reporting to the census bureau.

B) Fix the employment situation. Education is not only about plunking your butt in a chair for 8 hours per day–it can be about learning by working, too. Ask Warren Buffett about his summers. Remove the minimum wage. States, do your own things: but the Feds should not be eliminating teen employment inadvertently and damaging the career prospects of whole generations of students. Reduce allowable ages for teens to work. Lower payroll taxes and the other costs of hiring to encourage employers to pick up teens for work.

C) States: Taxes should be levied specifically for public schools, with an opt-out that allows parents to not pay if their children don’t attend the public schools. Mandatory school attendance, since we’ve agreed that we need literacy, should go to age 12 or 14 (or equivalent educational attainment), tops. Private schools should be free to compete with public schools on matters of curriculum, cost, and results–meaning less regulation, and the removal of the cost-barrier inherent in paying taxes and paying for private school. I suspect local, quality brands would quickly develop.

This bullet in particular would ensure that the state is not keeping people in school past the point of diminishing returns–if some kids are particularly smart and want to continue on the educational track, then they can. If they want to get out and work, then they can. There is little incentive to prolong a non-productive few years of screwing around.

In fact, I might scale school-tax rates accordingly–start very low for the K-8 years, then increase the tax rate as the student moves up the educational ladder to 12th grade to compensate for the educational value added. Alternatively, tie tax rate to the student’s performance (which is also a great idea for college tuition, by the way, and will be explored in another post) as measured on a normal distribution against the rest of the student body at the school. High performance = low taxes. Low performance = higher taxes. This would again incentivize performance and making good use of time.

Is it regressive? Yes. So is everything else in life. Suck it up, people. Scholarships, private assistance, charity, etc. Take a chill pill.

D) The one useful function of a high-school degree is signalling that you completed high school, which shows a certain amount of learning and social aptitude to employers. So: Allow IQ, personality, and other aptitude tests in employment screening. Conduct these tests at schools and give certified results so that the students have reliable references. Reduce the need for the credential over the achievement.

That’s all my brain has for now. Won’t even touch curriculum, as that’s a different discussion.

These things would improve national performance by aligning incentives with the purpose of education. We would stop wasting peoples’ lives in years of mediocre schooling. We would have higher employment. We would still be offering opportunity to those who were able and willing to take it. We would still have an educated populace and citizenry.