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The fact that America is as economically mobile now as it was in the days when the top marginal federal income tax rate was 70 percent doesn’t mean that the country is as economically mobile as it can or should be. Nor does the extremely stable nature of U.S. economic mobility negate the fact that individuals on the high end of the income spectrum are getting richer faster than anyone else.

But Obama’s widely shared misconception also misses the greater cultural context. Economic mobility is not the sole measure of national well-being or progress. It’s not even the sole measure of mobility.

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As near as I can tell, a racist is one who approves of rigorous education, good English, civilized manners, minimal criminality, and responsible parenthood, among other things. I am, then, a racist. I see no reason to grovel about it.

I decided long ago that if, while I was doing a radio interview, a caller-in told me, “You a racist!” I would hesitate as if puzzled, and say, “… So what?”

…

Herewith another and yet worse confession: I do not see, or care, why it is thought my duty to like, or dislike, groups because of their race, creed, color, sex, sexual aberration, or national origin. Nor do I think it their duty to like me. I especially do not understand why the federal government should decide with whom I ought to associate.

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But only for parents who don’t want to see their kids shot down like sheep in their ‘gun-free zones’.

Freeberg does language.

Its meaning is not limited to “someone who does a lot of talking.” It means a great deal more than that. There has to be a certain meaninglessness to the chatter. And, a certain bossiness too. Flibbertigibbets are radios without off buttons; they care not that the commodity they’re supplying, is in negligible and dwindling demand, or in no demand at all.

If you know a flibbertigibbet or two, it may not have escaped your notice — or maybe it did — that they prattle on with their excess verbiage in an attempt to convince themselves. That is the common content, and that is the common purpose. They repeat most bumptiously and most frequently the things that, according to their own systems of belief, are so emphatically true that they ought to be able to stand on their own. In so doing, they confess to that which is never to be considered: There actually are some doubts. About “The science is settled on global warming!” or “There is no god, now relax and enjoy your life” or “ObamaCare is a spectacular success.”

Hence the term Chattering Classes — all talk, no reality.

Read it.

Hint: Consumption spending.

I’ve been somewhat dismayed to see so many economists debate the economic inequality issue using highly flawed income and wealth data, instead of consumption inequality data. Recently I was listening to an interview with Thomas Piketty when he suddenly said something that caught my attention. He advocated a progressive property tax. That sounds like a great idea, as the consumption value of housing is probably closely correlated with the market value. And then he ruined everything by adding that it should not be levied on the gross value of property, but rather the net value after mortgage debt was subtracted. That defeats the entire purpose of a progressive consumption tax!

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When it comes to identifying Hillary Clinton’s major accomplishments as Secretary of State, one thinks of Eisenhower on Nixon. The problem, however, is not some underlying antagonism between Clinton and administration spokesmen. Rather, it’s lack of material to work with. As when Tom Friedman posed the question, one can see the difficulty it presents even for Hillary herself.

Don’t forget proto-Obamacare….

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Much like the growth of socialism early in the 20th century.

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Almost all of it owned by the government, I’d bet.

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The National Low Income Housing Coalition took those fair market rents and calculated how much a worker would have to earn per hour to cover such modest housing, if we assume a 40-hour work week and a 52-week year. They call this rate a “housing wage,” and it is, unsurprisingly, much higher than the minimum wage in much of the country.

Of course, that assumes one person per apartment, which is how the Crust prefer to live.

Read it.

I trust I don’t have to say anything about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

John Hinderaker does the numbers.

So a majority of Americans will be in the top 10% of income at some time during their working lives. That makes a mockery of the Left’s portrayal of a rigid caste system that–somehow!–must be combated by ever-higher taxes and more government spending.

Read it.

Read it.

Obama says it’s George W. Bush’s fault, and who can prove it isn’t?

Theodore Dalrymple has had enough.

I realized a long time ago that a very large number of people in a modern economy are paid to do things that not only fail to add to the economic product of the country, but on the contrary reduce it, insofar as they obstruct others from producing as much as they otherwise might.

There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward.

More to be feared even than the secret sadist, however, is the person who genuinely believes in the intrinsic value and even indispensability of his absurd task. He is as dangerous as any true believer. In my hospital, I saw many such people, scurrying like the White Rabbit in Alice from one meeting to another—meetings which medical staff were required to attend, thus diverting them from the main purpose of having medical staff in the first place. A friend of mine who had waited all day for a minor but potentially life-preserving operation was told at the last minute that his operation had been postponed because the surgeon had been called to attend a meeting. Only a credible threat by my friend of dire consequences for the hospital if the operation were not performed as planned diverted the surgeon from his pseudo- to his real work.

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Researchers have an idea for how future nuclear reactors can avoid the trauma that led to the 2011 disaster at Fukushima: by building new plants five to seven miles out into the ocean. “This affords some absolutely crucial advantages,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, which led the research, explains in a video presenting the idea. In particular, Buongiorno says that this distance into the ocean will remove the risk of tsunamis, which won’t throw big waves in such deep water, and of earthquakes, the seismic waves of which will be damped by the ocean.

XKCD has it right.

The New York Post is on the case.

Gold diggers are such a problem in NYC, one woman has set up an agency that proclaims it will weed them out.

Upper East Side matchmaker Janis Spindel founded Club J-Love in 1993 — and since then claims to have 1,008 marriages under her belt. Her specialty? Helping men like K.G. avoid heartbreak — and the loss of hard-earned money — by sussing out a woman’s true motives.

“I can smell a gold digger from a mile away,” says Spindel, who says she rejects about 10 percent of all those vying for a place in her 3,000-member stable of beauties. “It’s why [my clients] come to me — to protect them from bimbettes and gold diggers.”

According to Spindel, gold diggers are a growing problem, now that the city is awash in “more money” — from Wall Street to hedge funds to startups. And so she vets each woman in person, grilling each one with a series of pointed questions aimed at determining whether she’s a perfect 10 — or a 49er in disguise.

Read it.

Although the concept of identitarian religion is relatively new in North America, it has gained some popularity in Europe.  One prefatory note I’d like to make is that identitarian religion can be pagan or Christian.  (Some critics seem to assume that all identitarian religion is pagan.)

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Following an ex vivo prototyping phase, we successfully used the DNA origami robots in living cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) to control a molecule that targets their cells.

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Since they lose pretty much every argument, the global warming fraudsters try to tell us that the science is settled, and we should all just shut up. In fact, however, debates over various aspects of climate science are constantly raging. This one is a great example: “Major Errors Apparent in Climate Model Evaporation Estimates.”

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The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a place tends to steer a culture in distinct ways. Research has long shown that people in tropical climates with high pathogen loads, for example, are more likely to develop a taste for spicy food, because certain compounds in these foods have antimicrobial properties. They are also prone to value physical attractiveness—a signal of health and “immunocompetence,” according to evolutionary theorists—more highly in mates than people living in cooler latitudes do. But the implications don’t stop there. According to the “pathogen stress theory of values,” the evolutionary case that Thornhill and his colleagues have put forward, our behavioral immune systems—our group responses to local disease threats—play a decisive role in shaping our various political systems, religions, and shared moral views.

If they are right, Thornhill and his colleagues may be on their way to unlocking some of the most stubborn mysteries of human behavior. Their theory may help explain why authoritarian governments tend to persist in certain latitudes while democracies rise in others; why some cultures are xenophobic and others are relatively open to strangers; why certain peoples value equality and individuality while others prize hierarchical structures and strict adherence to tradition. What’s more, their work may offer a clear insight into how societies change. According to Thornhill’s findings, striking at the root of infectious disease threats is by far the most effective form of social engineering available to any would-be reformer.

Read it.

Colleges are in an unsustainable arms race of spending on non-teaching lures – football stadiums and sushi-laden cafeterias – to attract students who can neither afford the cost of education nor find jobs to repay their debt once they’re out in the real world.

With more than $1.1 trillion of outstanding student debt, up to 40 percent of recent college grads are either unemployed or underemployed. In 2010, the unemployment rate for young workers aged 16-24 hit 19.6 percent, the highest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unemployment in 1947. The next time you go to an amusement park, think that one in four park workers has a college degree.

As is often the case, change is coming from entrepreneurs looking to reshape education. After all, this stems from a real need on the part of startups to attract and retain great engineers. In most startups, the hardest jobs to fill are positions in core technology, product design and product management.

Taki deals out some inconvenient truth.

Some questions are asked in a spirit of inquiry, to obtain answers, but others are asked to intimidate or badger or coerce agreement with a point of view and establish the irreproachable virtue of the persons who ask them. I received such a question by email the other day from the Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world. Addressing me by my first name (already sufficient to irritate me), it asked me, “Do you care about the health of our planet?”

Frankly, the answer is that I don’t. Planets, unlike dogs, are not the kind of thing I can feel affection or concern for. My bank account occupies my mind more than the health of the planet. I am not even sure that planets can be healthy or unhealthy, any more than they can be witty or self-effacing. To call a planet healthy is to make what philosophers used to call a category mistake. This is not to say that I wish the earth any harm; on the contrary. Indeed, in a multiple-choice examination, I might even tick the box for wishing the world well rather than ill, at least if I had any reason for wanting to pass.

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How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Why is President Bush so much more popular than President Obama among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans? That’s an easy one. Bush was the president of let’s roll. Obama is the president of let’s retreat.

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Economist Mark Gius has a new study in the journal Applied Economics Letters that bears on the gun control debate. Gius finds that permissive concealed carry laws (generally, “shall issue”) result in a lower rate of homicide involving firearms. Conversely, state-level assault weapons bans have no statistically significant effect on the homicide rate involving guns.

Something that everyone realizes intuitively but few are willing to acknowledge publicly.

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Hey — I worry about these things….

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So where does all this Rube Goldberg action come from? It’s tempting to blame evolution, and the accumulation of cruft in the genome, but evolution can be quite good at simplifying when simplicity is actually optimal. We have only one backbone in our body, not five sort-of-parallel ones all trying to combine to support us. So there must be something optimal here about complexity, and when considered it’s obvious: if we could understand the immune system easily, so could microbes, and so they could subvert it easily. Indeed, it seems like whenever I read about the workings of any well-studied human pathogen, those workings include at least one way of eluding, deceiving, or sabotaging the immune system, and often two or three of them. Germs don’t seem to qualify as human pathogens, in the eyes of doctors, unless they have such a way; otherwise they are just one of the “harmless” background microbes which the immune system usually deals with so efficiently that we don’t even know that they are trying to eat us (though they can still be harmful in high doses). Yet even when a germ has three different ways of eluding the immune system, that doesn’t make it 100% deadly; most of the time the immune system can still eventually get it under control, using a fourth (and maybe a fifth and a sixth) mechanism in its arsenal.

Freeberg speaks wisdom.

I’ve been noticing that with what we lately call “left” and “right” in politics, it is a rather consistent configuration that this “side that refuses to define things” is on what we call the “left.” Issue after issue. I have also noticed that where these halves overlay occupations, the “left” sympathizes with those who don’t have any. Or, are occupied with something disassociated with any sort of material demand. Community organizing. Wheelchair-ramp-reconstruction or health insurance including birth control; other things people buy not because they actually want them, but to meet some sort of regulatory requirement. Well, this stands to reason. If you’re going to sell something to people who actually want to buy it, you’re going to need to define things in order to do your market research. And, to build the widget to make sure it does what people want it to do. And then the people lining up to spend their hard-earned dollars buying it, oh boy howdy, they’re going to want things defined too. What’s the total cost of ownership? What’s it like to use it? What are the consequences of moving on to this new thing, and stopping using the old thing?

…

When every argument you make relies on presenting things as the opposites of themselves, that’s deceit; and, deceitful people don’t want things defined, that makes it harder to do the deceiving.

Dymphna riffs on Mark Steyn.

In the video, Mr. Steyn points out what one “tiny, miserable grey island in the North Atlantic” managed to accomplish. The great horror is the ways in which that hard-won knowledge is being buried beneath the strew and slander of the deliberate ignorance of those who want only its subjugation under a theocratic supremacy. Those currently in power chant a mantra about the ways “poverty breeds ignorance”, etc., while their own educated ignorance reduces all facts to mere opinion.

Read it.

It certainly reduces your risk of dying of starvation.

I’m wondering how big these portions are.

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Our dataset-of-datasets graph averages the monthly anomalies for the three terrestrial and two satellite temperature records. It shows there has still been no global warming this millennium. Over 13 years 2 months, the trend is zero.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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I blame Garrison Keillor.

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Only two Republican districts make the list of the top 10 richest House districts, according to an Associated Press analysis.

All are in one of the Left Coast states.

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Here’s a simple test of who is “rich”: If you can afford $40,000 a year for your kid’s college tuition, congratulations, you’re rich.

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Mainly because you trusted Voices of the Crust … like the Guardian.

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The experts were staggeringly wrong about saturated fat…but they couldn’t possibly be wrong about “sugar and ultra-processed foods”. That makes no sense, but that’s what Bittman wrote (“increasingly apparent”). To me, what is increasingly apparent is that nutrition experts shouldn’t be trusted.

I don’t know what “ultra-processed foods” are but I am beginning to believe the experts are utterly wrong about sugar, too. As far as I can tell, sugar in the evening improves sleep — by a lot, if you get the details right — and nothing is more important than good sleep. If you have read The Shangri-La Diet, you already know that sugar alone cannot have caused the obesity epidemic. It is more complicated than that.

Read it.

Historically, the left has had an ambivalent relationship to what used to be derisively called “bourgeois freedoms.” From Marx’s On the Jewish Question to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, some of the most interesting thinking on the left has been devoted to examining the limits of what for lack of a better word I’ll call the liberal defense of freedom and rights. And of course this tradition of thought has often—and disastrously—been operationalized, whether in the form of Soviet tyranny or the internal authoritarianism of the CPUSA.

But if we think about this issue from the vantage of the 1960s, my sense is that today’s left—whether on campus or in the streets—is far less willing to go down the road of a critique of pure tolerance, as a fascinating text by Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Woolf once  called it, than it used to be. (As Jeremy Kessler suggests, that absolutist position, which is usually associated with content neutrality, historically went hand in hand with the politics of anti-communism.) Once upon a time, those radical critiques of free speech were where the action was at. So much so that even liberal theorists like Owen Fiss, who ordinarily might have been more inclined to a Millian defense of free speech, were pushed by radical theorists like Catharine MacKinnon to take a more critical stance. But now that tradition seems to be all but dead.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reminds us of the poetry we’ve (mostly) lost.

Turner’s idea was to gather together poems that late-Victorian children would have committed to memory and recited at family gatherings or school concerts: “Poems”—I’m quoting from his preface—“of the highest moral rectitude…with plain, easy rhythms, uncomplicated heroics, and unabashed pathos.”

He says that the tradition of family reciting in the actual parlor—the living room—of middle-class homes died out with the coming of radio in the 1920s, but recitation lingered on in the educational system. It certainly did: I learned to recite some of these poems—Byron’s “Sennacherib,” Browning’s “How They Brought the Good News”—in my own 1950s school days.

Time spent memorizing poetry is like putting money in the bank; when you pull it out again years later, you’re always surprised at how valuable it’s become.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

From time to time, it seems necessary to remind readers that there is no such thing as “moderate feminism.” Feminism is inherently radical — indeed, revolutionary in its aims — and if you are not a radical, you are not a feminist. This is not what I say, this is what feminists themselves say. Women who think of themselves as “moderate feminists” simply have not paid attention to actual feminists.

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Don’t ever say that we don’t give you useful stuff here.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, explains.

Remember, minimum-wage legislation strips from workers an important bargaining chip – namely, the ability to offer to work for an hourly wage below the legislated minimum.  So in addition to destroying some job opportunities for low-skilled workers, minimum-wage legislation also prompts employers to offer worse non-wage employment terms to those workers who are not rendered unemployable by minimum-wage legislation.  Employee morale thereby generally falls.  But because minimum-wage legislation reduces low-skilled-workers’ job opportunities across the board, workers are less able to shift jobs from their current employers to other employers.  (And because nearly all employers who continue to hire some low-skilled workers at the now-higher minimum wage worsen their non-wage employment terms, the relative attractiveness of shifting jobs also falls.  At the very least, each employee is denied by government the opportunity to offer a different employer the option of paying him or her a below-minimum wage in return for the employer offering to that worker especially attractive non-wage benefits.)

Kate Paulk understands the dialectic.

See, there’s a hell of a lot of people claiming to be scientists who don’t act like it, because underneath everything else, science isn’t a body of knowledge or a set of defined facts and rules (although of course science has plenty of those and they’re important). It’s a way of thinking and one which both heads of the power-hungry hydra that is the modern American two party system abuse shamelessly.

The first important thing is that science is never “settled”. Science is about observing facts, searching for patterns, making predictions from those patterns and then trying to disprove the predictions. If – to take an example – the pro-Global Warming faction was actually engaging in science, they would be searching for data that disproved their theories.

Oh, and a “theory” in science does not mean the same thing as a theory in general discourse. To be a scientific theory, it has to be mathematically rigorous and disprovable. Otherwise it’s a hypothesis (aka educated guess). Scientific laws describe behavior that is sufficiently well understood nobody expects to ever see it disproved – although since Einstein published the Theory of Relativity, it’s become clear that laws need to also specify the environment in which they apply, since Newton’s laws break down under conditions that you won’t find in normal life.

Read it.

Worth it just for the maps.

John Hinderaker brings it all together for you.

Climate alarmism is not based on empirical observation; rather, it is entirely predicated on computer models that are manipulated to generate predictions of significant global warming as a result of increased concentrations of CO2. But a model in itself is evidence of nothing. The model obeys the dictates of its creator. In the case of climate models, we know they are wrong: they don’t accurately reproduce the past, which should be the easy part; they fail to account for many features of the Earth’s present climate; and to the extent that they have generated predictions, those predictions have proven to be wrong. There is therefore no reason why anyone should rely on predictions of future climate that are generated by the models.

Freeberg has an amazing insight.

But a lot of life is like this, which is why conservatives and liberals argue about, evidently, just about everything. Images…which are put together by the task of visually capturing an object. The image is not synonymous with the object, it is just a reflection of it. But to the liberal, to whom each painting is a separate item of value, that doesn’t work. Images are objects, to the liberal. Say something profound in English, then say it in Spanish, now you’re twice as smart. That’s complete balderdash to about half of us, while to the other half it makes perfect sense.

This explains a lot. It explains why today’s statesmanly “leaders” tend to be a grown-up versions of sissy liberal hippie kids back in the 1960?s, and many among those who were not alive back in the 1960?s, but would have fallen in line with the anarchy and rebellion and counter-culture protesting and what-not if they were, now tell the rest of us we’re a bunch of racists if we don’t take our orders unquestioningly from this crop of sixty-something lefty politicians. Liberals see every message as some kind of command. They don’t understand “You go ahead and pay taxes to fight climate change if you want to, but I personally don’t want to” — you say that, and what they hear is “I hate the Earth and I wish to destroy it.” And pretty much every time. That’s a painting they don’t like. Oppose them on the debt talks, and you’re a racist. Oppose them on social spending, you hate poor people. Oppose them on Medicare, you must want to push granny off a cliff. Oppose them on education, you must want more stupid kids. Oppose them on paying for birth control, you must hate women. You know the litany.

Read it.

I would say No, but that’s just me.

Until the late 1980s, nestled behind the Yan Ma Tei breakwater in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, you could find tens of thousands of boat-dwellers who formed a bustling, floating district. The residents were members of the Tanka community, and their ancestors were fishermen who retreated from warfare on land to live permanently in their vessels. Until the mid-20th century, these traditional outcasts were forbidden even to step ashore.

God forbid that anybody should inquire as to why that was so. They’re the victim-of-the-week, so they must be morally superior.

The typhoon shelter was famous for its restaurants’ cuisine – including Under Bridge Spicy Crab – and it was a nightlife hub, alive with mahjong games and hired singers. Shops on sampan (flat boats) catered to the floating district’s needs.

And night-life and cuisine are what SWPL journalists are all about.

It may seem like science fiction, but as rising sea levels threaten low-lying nations around the world, neighbourhoods like this may become more common. Whereas some coastal cities will double down on sea defences, others are beginning to explore a solution that welcomes approaching tides. What if our cities themselves were to take to the seas?

Which is like saying, Gee, these Latin American cities all have these crowded slums nearby, maybe we should try that? (What’s wrong with this picture?) The problem with ‘floating cities’ is that they float, and if they ever cease to float, many people will die. These are the sort of people who build their fashionable houses on stilts in the canyons around L.A., and then weep when a brushfire or a mudslide land them in a pile of rubble.

The Nigerian-born architect Kunlé Adeyemi proposes a series of A-frame floating houses to replace the existing slum. As proof of concept, his team constructed a floating school for the community. Still, many buildings do not make a city: infrastructure remains a problem here. One solution would be to use docking stations with centralised services, rather like hooking up a caravan to power, water and drainage lines at a campground.

Like the parking lot at, uh, Walmart? (Aaaack! Unclean! Unclean!)

You could extend an existing city like London into the water quite far before ever being seriously challenged by infrastructure issues.

Not if the government builds it. And good luck getting that by the eco-nazis. The paperwork alone would take a century.

Florida architect Jacque Fresco, meanwhile, foresees a time when humans must colonise the sea, to escape land made uninhabitable by overpopulation.

I’m surprised that anybody still believes that hoary myth. Population levels, especially in the First World, have been dropping for decades, and the available evidence shows that when the Developing World gets Develops, their population rates will drop, too. This guy needs to have a long talk with Paul Ehrlich.

He has spent his career designing cities of the future, and himself lives in a dome-shaped prototype.

Okay, I’ll bite: How is ‘designing cities of the future’ a ‘career’? Does he make money at it? If so, where are these ‘cities of the future’? (Wouldn’t that make them ‘cities of the present’?) Or do people just give him money for airy schemes that won’t be seen for years and years? Man, I would love a job like that.

Mobility among the waves lends floating communities a degree of political independence. The Seasteading Institute, founded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton), proposes a series of floating villages, and claims to be in active negotiations with potential host nations that would give the villages political autonomy. Billed as a startup incubator for political systems, the aquatic communities would serve as experiments in governance – and represent a rejection of what Seasteaders see as big government intrusion.

Oh, yeah, as if that would ever happen. Looks like somebody jumped the gun on the ‘legalize pot’ initiative.

Sarah Hoyt understands the dialectic.

I wonder how the culture warriors today would react to being compared to those fairly ignorant peasant Christians who nonetheless preened on the certainty they were better than their forebears because they were more “moral?”

No, wait, I know exactly how they’d react.  Yes, I’m smiling right now.

…

Sometimes I feel like my generation (no, not boomers, again, simply on experience.  Our class sizes were shrinking, by then) has spent most of its life learning stuff no one taught us.  From religious doctrine to how to cook from scratch, I had to go out and learn on my own, because the people who were supposed to teach me were either boomers who’d never learned, or the generation before them who had “given up on that old stuf.”

There are certain arts of living, like how to iron a shirt properly, or a lot of home maintenance, which I had to discover like… an archeologist digging through the past.

Read it.

Aesthetic hiring. This one I think is specific to select industries, but in some fields if you don’t have the right “look”, you’re going to find it difficult. For example, the NYT Magazine just today has a major piece called “Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem” talking about this very issue. Hip, cool startups see their working environment and culture as critical to success. And that’s true, but those cultures aren’t very inclusive, which is why many Silicon Valley firms are continuously under fire for various forms of discrimination. When they’re trying to be the hot new thing, the last thing an app startup wants is some 55 year old dude with a pocket protector cramping their style, no matter how much of a tech guru he might be.

…

Watching the Chicagoland documentary and seeing what kids in these inner city neighborhoods face, a lack of machine tool or coding skills is far from the problem. Similar problems are now hitting rural and working class white communities where the economic tide has receded. Heroin, meth, etc. were things that just didn’t exist in my rural hometown growing up – but they sure do now.

These aren’t skill problems, they are human problems. And the answer isn’t simply job training. These problems are much, most more complex and they are incredibly difficult to solve. They need to be tackled by very different means than a job skills problem.

Read it.

Wonder what the reaction would have been if it had gone the other way?