Recession illusions, China's military buildup, industrial policy and wages, rethinking corporate tax, tightening export controls, and an interview with Darrell Owens
While I agree strongly with the sentiment that we need to invest in our defense industrial base, the PLA Navy isn't adding submarines quite that fast. The PLAN has received 21 Yuan submarines in total, up four from last year's number of 17.
This being my area of study I can tell you undersea warfare is one of the PLA's worst domains. That does make it concerning their still clocking four boats per year because it means they're fighting to catch up, but it's not 21 boats per year.
As to the collapse of The Humanities... I don't think The Humanities have fully reckoned with their origin story. At least amongst the competitive colleges and universities that graduate most of our leaders, The Humanities have always been at the center, in terms of intellectual life, but also graduation requirements and so forth. But why?
The early 19th century saw the transformation of the colleges that did exist from primarily training religious leaders into a more broad-based liberal arts education that ended up in large part being finishing schools for the wealthy. As such, they delivered the sort of education that the upper classes wanted, which emphasized lofty, theoretical, and impractical studies and looked down on practical knowledge. (This mindset is humorously detailed in Paul Fussell's book "Class." Or in the scene in the film "The Aviator" when Howard Hughes meets Katherine Hepburn's family.)
Then, when higher education started expanding in the late 19th century, the people who were available to lead all the new colleges, to teach the classes, to design the curricula, were all products of the system that emphasized the impractical knowledge. Thus the Humanities-centric knowledge-for-knowledge's sake, life-of-the-mind model was replicated at all new institutions of higher learning, even the large Morrill Act state schools.
We are still living with the consequences of centering Higher Ed around the desires of the mid-19th-century upper classes. Familiarity with difficult literature and The Classics in their original Greek and Latin distinguish one as an educated in a way that knowing how an engine works doesn't. In Universities, he more theoretical math, physics, biology, and chemistry departments clustered in Schools of Arts and Sciences, whereas (practical and vulgar) schools of Engineering and Agriculture are separated off.
Justin Stover gave a reasonable assessment of the situation in a 2017 article for American Affairs. Here in the 21st century, the cultural preferences of the pre-WWII upper classes continue to fade away and it is no longer self-evident that a Humanities-centric degree is an essential step in becoming part of the nation's elite. And The Humanities have tried to argue that they are "essential" and of the importance of "asking big questions," but increasingly nobody believes it.
The rise of ideological purity in academia, which to some extent has always been there, but in the era of the internet is so much more apparent, really is for the worst. STEM and Business types especially will suffer, as those courses are usually the ones that expose them to the concepts of critical thinking, critical analysis, and source analysis that are often lacking in their fields. Not everything is an algorithm!
My view on humanities’ decline is that it’s actually a product of diversity. First gen immigrants and children of immigrants cannot afford to take a risk on an iffy major. When American colleges were 90% white an English major from Tufts worked because you could still get a banking job through family connections. Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks do not have that luxury and need to do college on “hard mode” to make the high sticker price worth it.
As to the falloff in the humanities, the humanities include study of history, philosophy, religion, languages, the arts, communications media, and cultures. It would seem that some of these are highly practical areas of study in our era, none more so than the nature of communications media.
The trouble, I think, is that the study of the humanities has veered off into very specific cultural areas. It is not surprising that work in these areas should come across as ideological; the more you know about the history of any narrow area of academic inquiry, the more you realize that points of view become, for a time, overwhelmingly dominant, quite apart from the merits of that point of view. The academy is only broad-minded if you take the long view; in the short term it has always been a hotbed of dogmatism.
However, these (dogmatic) cultural studies are, at the moment, overwhelming the rest of the humanities, and THAT is a serious problem. This causes students to shy away, it makes the humanities less worth funding, and it invites opportunistic attack from right wingers, who, for once, can say something that contains an element of truth.
Ideological purity might be one factor, but I think it can't hurt to the costs and returns to education. The cost of education has risen for all degrees. However, the lifetime expected earnings of a STEM (or a Business) degree are both higher and have risen faster than humanities. This effect makes the returns to STEM degrees even more attractive than humanities degrees (the gains increase by more for STEM, but the costs increase across the board). A lower cost for humanities courses could help reverse this trend.
On China: do you have anything you can point to regarding the majority of China’s defense spending being off-book? Conversely, how much of the United States defense budget do you believe is off-book?
On Energy: with respect, it was an odd and seemingly hard fork to begin with china, defense, and manufacturing, then start discussing solar power. I work in Space and Defense, have a long history in upstream energy markets (my companies produce billions of British Thermal Units per month), and electrical markets (my companies consume millions of kilowatt-hours per month and participate in demand response and price response markets). I tell you this to impress you. Just kidding, I tell you this to establish that I’m intimately familiar with energy systems and believe that this post misrepresents such systems.
There is no other industry more concerned with physics than Space and Defense. The margin for error is razor-thin, and an entire rocket ship going to the moon is allowed but a few kilowatts of electrical load. You have to do a lot with very little and failure results in the loss of human life and significant financial losses. Moreover, there is a dark side to the moon and the light side of the moon experiences 14-days of darkness itself. You’d think solar in space would be celebrated. Well, it is not. SpaceX engineers know this, everyone in Space and Defense seems to understand this - solar is abysmal. Let’s examine further.
1/ Solar is your “wimper, less manly form of energy.”
Solar is energy disparate. It produces only 0.00000015 Joules per cubic meter. This is atrocious by comparison to a human which, if properly fed and in good physical condition, produces 1,000 Joules per cubic meter - human power is thus 667,000,000 times greater than solar. For reference, and the entire reason civilization has exploded post-industrial revolution, oil is 45,000,000,000 joules per cubic meter in energy density. Since solar produces only electricity, wholly incapable of being a substitute for the majority of fossil fuels, power density matters too. Solar is able to produce between 5-20 watts per square meter; compare that to fossil fuels producing 10,000 watts per square meter. As a result, solar will gobble up and destroy thousands of acres more of habitat all to produce an inferior product. To power the United States on wind and solar, which is a physical impossibility, it would take covering the land area of New York, California, and Vermont entirely in wind and solar panels. And that’s before you get that power to where it needs to be consumed.
Solar is a step back for civilization and a step to a reliance upon the weather. This isn’t a matter of opinion, either. Even Bill Gates acknowledges this in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
2/ Solar is not a “genuine technological revolution.”
The U.S. Department of Energy on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy pamphlet begins, “solar technology isn’t new.” Did you know that solar crystalline cellular structures invented by Bell Labs and ExxonMobil in the 1950s? Let’s take a second to appreciate and thank ExxonMobil for that breakthough! Despite solar efficiency beginning at 10% and now it’s up to 26%, the capacity factor is still abysmal and the capacity value is even worse – the worst of all the fuels.
3/ Solar is not “really really cheap.”
This shouldn’t be chalked up to hyperbole; it’s an outright and delusional lie. Due in part to its supremely ineffective and inefficient energy (and power) density, Solar is incredibly expensive. LCOE tends to be cited by academics and people who are not well-educated about energy systems. The problems - there are many - with LCOE is that it conveniently ignores many hugely expensive components to a solar/wind grid, with the most expensive pieces like (a) transmission and distribution cost, (b) battery backup, and (c) backup generation being brushed under the rug, while it naively relies upon faulty Capacity Factors instead of Capacity Values and amortizes power plants over incorrect timelines. Even Lazard, the inventor of the silly LCOE analysis, acknowledges this in it’s presentations. By the way, if you read their 2023 LCOE+ Paper, Lazard cites Utility Scale Solar PV + Storage between $46 and $102 per MW (higher than that of Combined Cycle Natural Gas) - and this completely ignores the gargantuan holes that even the worst running back in the NFL could make it through.
When forcing this purely academic analysis to add in the actual costs to the consumer, it becomes patently obvious that wind and solar are significantly more expensive (by orders of magnitude) than thermal energies.
Note: negative pricing isn’t the joy that you imagine it is - it’s just a glaring example of how overly generous government subsidies are distorting markets (through paper products like PTCs and RECs, which are paid based upon kilowatt-hours and not kilowatts), and exacerbating the underlying, systemic issue that the Regional Transmission Organization model has wrought on our system since the 1990s which has resulted in the long-term deterioration of power generation in this country.
A Parting Note:
For thousands of years, literally from the beginning of time through to the 1800s, society was underpinned by the limitations of physical labor. Technological breakthroughs in energy and power-dense fuels have ushered in an era of global abundance never imagined. Today - because of the densities of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear - child cancer survival, girls in school, water quality, air quality, vaccines, the democratization of information, scientific breakthroughs, the amount of protected nature, women’s rights, crop yields, literacy, and democracy are all thriving at their highest levels in history. Conversely, bad things are at their lowest levels in history - those living in poverty, legal slavery, deaths due to war, child deaths, smallpox, child labor, deaths from natural disasters, and hunger. An appreciation for the fundamentals of primary energy is paramount to society continuing to thrive; these lessons must inform our national energy policies.
If the drop in the Humanities were for economic reasons you would expect them to mach economic conditions, like even a little.
I recently went back for a Masters in a Humanities adjacent field, and boy, the conservatives are underplaying how bad things are. Anyone from any "oppressor" group who goes into the humanities is an idiot.
Basically, as a nation we reached peak consumer sentiment in the early 2000s.
The story I can tell myself is that during that time we became the world’s sole superpower and we had just come off of the high-growth Clinton years.
Now, we are emerging from a pandemic and looking at a world that is much more contentious, with China as a serious rival. We are also aging as a population. And finally, we have extreme political turmoil in our domestic politics. I think all of these factors weigh upon people’s sentiment, such that no matter how good the economy were doing they would still be sour.
"Of course, making land and regulatory approval cheaper are important ways to lower unit labor costs. But improving technology and encouraging automation is key as well. "
You can automate in places with cheaper labor as well. What's the benefit of building a nicely automated plant in Ohio versus one in Mexico? Is automation just a stopgap with which one can make producing in high cost areas somewhat economic? Theoretically one could produce economy cars in Switzerland or Singapore with a 100% robotic factory that has one human overseer. I assume there needs to be some advantage to doing so, otherwise the same automation would provide similar productivity gains to cheaper workers in other places.
The prospect of Taiwan being able to defeat the PRC even with US help is looking less and less likely. Should Taiwan develop its own tactical/strategic nuclear weapons as deterrence?
"This is an absolutely astonishing rate of military buildup, and it’s not even wartime. It’s far, far beyond anything the U.S. can manage. China builds 21 submarines a year, while the U.S. struggles to build two."
As Kenny Rogers sang: "Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em..." The Allies won WWII because they had better production capacity (mainly U.S.) than the Axis countries. China currently has greater production capacity than the U.S. and EU combined and has the centralized governmental ability to reprioritize production rapidly and efficiently. My prior experiences as a DOD contractor confirmed to me that the U.S. defense contracting system is anything but rapid and efficient. Privatization of defense contracting is slow, inefficient, and shockingly expensive. China can probably build 21 subs for the cost of 2 in the U.S.!
China has 4X the population of the U.S. and lives in a tough neighborhood. I can understand their national need for a large military budget while balancing it with extensive investment in non-military industrial capabilities. I don't need Kenny Rogers to tell me the U.S. doesn't hold a winning hand in this game. We don't have a functional government yet we're doubling down on "winning" WWIII! We can't even provide old school mortar shells and funding for a proxy war in Ukraine. Definitely the odds are not in our favor.
To flip to the other comment on humanities at universities. Traditionally, humanities were part of a scholar's 'basic' education. It was part of primary education providing a foundation for focused studies to follow. Humanities teaching should be happening in elementary school not at the university level except for specific professions such as teachers, theologists, and a few philosophers - none of which are in high demand for career paths in a modern technological economy. I can assure you that pragmatic Asians do not waste their secondary educations on such mundane things, but concentrate on STEM skills. If you haven't learned the skills to be a good human and citizen by the time you go to college, it is probably too late.
I too don't believe that woke humanity departments are responsible for the downturn, or else it would have started a few years later on the graph. I believe it's well known that interest in post-secondary programs follows perceived demand in industry, and outcomes including remuneration.
That said, I work with a lot of teens, across decades. They are much more aware of and in favour of inclusion than my generation, and that's been a trend for at least 30 years. The difference I've seen since the mid or late 2010s is that the critical thinkers (and through them, their friends) have recognized the hypocrisy of the Orwellian anti-racism and DEI philosophies, especially when people, places or beliefs are excluded as part of anti-racism and/or inclusion policies. Their school boards beat the propaganda drums ever harder each year. They know not to speak up, and that the authoritarians have the upper hand. But when they have choices, such as with selecting a post-secondary institution, they don't seek more of it. So some are now avoiding the places most known for their post-liberal views.
Unfortunately, I think they are deluded: I can't think of any post-secondary institutions that have not been captured, just a matter of (minor) degree.
Isn't the demand for a humanities education affected by the cost? I would think the ramp in university tuition over the last 10y+ has blunted people's ability to take on degrees with a lower return on investment. If the job market paid Humanities graduates the same way it pays STEM grads or if tuition was frozen around 2003 levels I'd imagine you'd see more people taking arts degrees.
While I agree strongly with the sentiment that we need to invest in our defense industrial base, the PLA Navy isn't adding submarines quite that fast. The PLAN has received 21 Yuan submarines in total, up four from last year's number of 17.
This being my area of study I can tell you undersea warfare is one of the PLA's worst domains. That does make it concerning their still clocking four boats per year because it means they're fighting to catch up, but it's not 21 boats per year.
As to the collapse of The Humanities... I don't think The Humanities have fully reckoned with their origin story. At least amongst the competitive colleges and universities that graduate most of our leaders, The Humanities have always been at the center, in terms of intellectual life, but also graduation requirements and so forth. But why?
The early 19th century saw the transformation of the colleges that did exist from primarily training religious leaders into a more broad-based liberal arts education that ended up in large part being finishing schools for the wealthy. As such, they delivered the sort of education that the upper classes wanted, which emphasized lofty, theoretical, and impractical studies and looked down on practical knowledge. (This mindset is humorously detailed in Paul Fussell's book "Class." Or in the scene in the film "The Aviator" when Howard Hughes meets Katherine Hepburn's family.)
Then, when higher education started expanding in the late 19th century, the people who were available to lead all the new colleges, to teach the classes, to design the curricula, were all products of the system that emphasized the impractical knowledge. Thus the Humanities-centric knowledge-for-knowledge's sake, life-of-the-mind model was replicated at all new institutions of higher learning, even the large Morrill Act state schools.
We are still living with the consequences of centering Higher Ed around the desires of the mid-19th-century upper classes. Familiarity with difficult literature and The Classics in their original Greek and Latin distinguish one as an educated in a way that knowing how an engine works doesn't. In Universities, he more theoretical math, physics, biology, and chemistry departments clustered in Schools of Arts and Sciences, whereas (practical and vulgar) schools of Engineering and Agriculture are separated off.
Justin Stover gave a reasonable assessment of the situation in a 2017 article for American Affairs. Here in the 21st century, the cultural preferences of the pre-WWII upper classes continue to fade away and it is no longer self-evident that a Humanities-centric degree is an essential step in becoming part of the nation's elite. And The Humanities have tried to argue that they are "essential" and of the importance of "asking big questions," but increasingly nobody believes it.
The rise of ideological purity in academia, which to some extent has always been there, but in the era of the internet is so much more apparent, really is for the worst. STEM and Business types especially will suffer, as those courses are usually the ones that expose them to the concepts of critical thinking, critical analysis, and source analysis that are often lacking in their fields. Not everything is an algorithm!
My view on humanities’ decline is that it’s actually a product of diversity. First gen immigrants and children of immigrants cannot afford to take a risk on an iffy major. When American colleges were 90% white an English major from Tufts worked because you could still get a banking job through family connections. Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks do not have that luxury and need to do college on “hard mode” to make the high sticker price worth it.
The conversation with Chad Haag was such a waste of time. I felt like I was losing brain cells listening to him talk.
As to the falloff in the humanities, the humanities include study of history, philosophy, religion, languages, the arts, communications media, and cultures. It would seem that some of these are highly practical areas of study in our era, none more so than the nature of communications media.
The trouble, I think, is that the study of the humanities has veered off into very specific cultural areas. It is not surprising that work in these areas should come across as ideological; the more you know about the history of any narrow area of academic inquiry, the more you realize that points of view become, for a time, overwhelmingly dominant, quite apart from the merits of that point of view. The academy is only broad-minded if you take the long view; in the short term it has always been a hotbed of dogmatism.
However, these (dogmatic) cultural studies are, at the moment, overwhelming the rest of the humanities, and THAT is a serious problem. This causes students to shy away, it makes the humanities less worth funding, and it invites opportunistic attack from right wingers, who, for once, can say something that contains an element of truth.
Ideological purity might be one factor, but I think it can't hurt to the costs and returns to education. The cost of education has risen for all degrees. However, the lifetime expected earnings of a STEM (or a Business) degree are both higher and have risen faster than humanities. This effect makes the returns to STEM degrees even more attractive than humanities degrees (the gains increase by more for STEM, but the costs increase across the board). A lower cost for humanities courses could help reverse this trend.
On China: do you have anything you can point to regarding the majority of China’s defense spending being off-book? Conversely, how much of the United States defense budget do you believe is off-book?
On Energy: with respect, it was an odd and seemingly hard fork to begin with china, defense, and manufacturing, then start discussing solar power. I work in Space and Defense, have a long history in upstream energy markets (my companies produce billions of British Thermal Units per month), and electrical markets (my companies consume millions of kilowatt-hours per month and participate in demand response and price response markets). I tell you this to impress you. Just kidding, I tell you this to establish that I’m intimately familiar with energy systems and believe that this post misrepresents such systems.
There is no other industry more concerned with physics than Space and Defense. The margin for error is razor-thin, and an entire rocket ship going to the moon is allowed but a few kilowatts of electrical load. You have to do a lot with very little and failure results in the loss of human life and significant financial losses. Moreover, there is a dark side to the moon and the light side of the moon experiences 14-days of darkness itself. You’d think solar in space would be celebrated. Well, it is not. SpaceX engineers know this, everyone in Space and Defense seems to understand this - solar is abysmal. Let’s examine further.
1/ Solar is your “wimper, less manly form of energy.”
Solar is energy disparate. It produces only 0.00000015 Joules per cubic meter. This is atrocious by comparison to a human which, if properly fed and in good physical condition, produces 1,000 Joules per cubic meter - human power is thus 667,000,000 times greater than solar. For reference, and the entire reason civilization has exploded post-industrial revolution, oil is 45,000,000,000 joules per cubic meter in energy density. Since solar produces only electricity, wholly incapable of being a substitute for the majority of fossil fuels, power density matters too. Solar is able to produce between 5-20 watts per square meter; compare that to fossil fuels producing 10,000 watts per square meter. As a result, solar will gobble up and destroy thousands of acres more of habitat all to produce an inferior product. To power the United States on wind and solar, which is a physical impossibility, it would take covering the land area of New York, California, and Vermont entirely in wind and solar panels. And that’s before you get that power to where it needs to be consumed.
Solar is a step back for civilization and a step to a reliance upon the weather. This isn’t a matter of opinion, either. Even Bill Gates acknowledges this in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
2/ Solar is not a “genuine technological revolution.”
The U.S. Department of Energy on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy pamphlet begins, “solar technology isn’t new.” Did you know that solar crystalline cellular structures invented by Bell Labs and ExxonMobil in the 1950s? Let’s take a second to appreciate and thank ExxonMobil for that breakthough! Despite solar efficiency beginning at 10% and now it’s up to 26%, the capacity factor is still abysmal and the capacity value is even worse – the worst of all the fuels.
3/ Solar is not “really really cheap.”
This shouldn’t be chalked up to hyperbole; it’s an outright and delusional lie. Due in part to its supremely ineffective and inefficient energy (and power) density, Solar is incredibly expensive. LCOE tends to be cited by academics and people who are not well-educated about energy systems. The problems - there are many - with LCOE is that it conveniently ignores many hugely expensive components to a solar/wind grid, with the most expensive pieces like (a) transmission and distribution cost, (b) battery backup, and (c) backup generation being brushed under the rug, while it naively relies upon faulty Capacity Factors instead of Capacity Values and amortizes power plants over incorrect timelines. Even Lazard, the inventor of the silly LCOE analysis, acknowledges this in it’s presentations. By the way, if you read their 2023 LCOE+ Paper, Lazard cites Utility Scale Solar PV + Storage between $46 and $102 per MW (higher than that of Combined Cycle Natural Gas) - and this completely ignores the gargantuan holes that even the worst running back in the NFL could make it through.
When forcing this purely academic analysis to add in the actual costs to the consumer, it becomes patently obvious that wind and solar are significantly more expensive (by orders of magnitude) than thermal energies.
Note: negative pricing isn’t the joy that you imagine it is - it’s just a glaring example of how overly generous government subsidies are distorting markets (through paper products like PTCs and RECs, which are paid based upon kilowatt-hours and not kilowatts), and exacerbating the underlying, systemic issue that the Regional Transmission Organization model has wrought on our system since the 1990s which has resulted in the long-term deterioration of power generation in this country.
A Parting Note:
For thousands of years, literally from the beginning of time through to the 1800s, society was underpinned by the limitations of physical labor. Technological breakthroughs in energy and power-dense fuels have ushered in an era of global abundance never imagined. Today - because of the densities of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear - child cancer survival, girls in school, water quality, air quality, vaccines, the democratization of information, scientific breakthroughs, the amount of protected nature, women’s rights, crop yields, literacy, and democracy are all thriving at their highest levels in history. Conversely, bad things are at their lowest levels in history - those living in poverty, legal slavery, deaths due to war, child deaths, smallpox, child labor, deaths from natural disasters, and hunger. An appreciation for the fundamentals of primary energy is paramount to society continuing to thrive; these lessons must inform our national energy policies.
If the drop in the Humanities were for economic reasons you would expect them to mach economic conditions, like even a little.
I recently went back for a Masters in a Humanities adjacent field, and boy, the conservatives are underplaying how bad things are. Anyone from any "oppressor" group who goes into the humanities is an idiot.
Did anyone else notice that the FRED sentiment looks like it is in long-term decline? I went to the St. Louis Fed site and pulled put the Michigan Consumer Sentiment graph since its inception in 1952. https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=UMCSENT&utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=alfred
Basically, as a nation we reached peak consumer sentiment in the early 2000s.
The story I can tell myself is that during that time we became the world’s sole superpower and we had just come off of the high-growth Clinton years.
Now, we are emerging from a pandemic and looking at a world that is much more contentious, with China as a serious rival. We are also aging as a population. And finally, we have extreme political turmoil in our domestic politics. I think all of these factors weigh upon people’s sentiment, such that no matter how good the economy were doing they would still be sour.
What does the US spend its military budget on? Isn’t it up to $900 billion per year, not including the CIA, NSA, etc?
"Of course, making land and regulatory approval cheaper are important ways to lower unit labor costs. But improving technology and encouraging automation is key as well. "
You can automate in places with cheaper labor as well. What's the benefit of building a nicely automated plant in Ohio versus one in Mexico? Is automation just a stopgap with which one can make producing in high cost areas somewhat economic? Theoretically one could produce economy cars in Switzerland or Singapore with a 100% robotic factory that has one human overseer. I assume there needs to be some advantage to doing so, otherwise the same automation would provide similar productivity gains to cheaper workers in other places.
The prospect of Taiwan being able to defeat the PRC even with US help is looking less and less likely. Should Taiwan develop its own tactical/strategic nuclear weapons as deterrence?
"This is an absolutely astonishing rate of military buildup, and it’s not even wartime. It’s far, far beyond anything the U.S. can manage. China builds 21 submarines a year, while the U.S. struggles to build two."
As Kenny Rogers sang: "Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em..." The Allies won WWII because they had better production capacity (mainly U.S.) than the Axis countries. China currently has greater production capacity than the U.S. and EU combined and has the centralized governmental ability to reprioritize production rapidly and efficiently. My prior experiences as a DOD contractor confirmed to me that the U.S. defense contracting system is anything but rapid and efficient. Privatization of defense contracting is slow, inefficient, and shockingly expensive. China can probably build 21 subs for the cost of 2 in the U.S.!
China has 4X the population of the U.S. and lives in a tough neighborhood. I can understand their national need for a large military budget while balancing it with extensive investment in non-military industrial capabilities. I don't need Kenny Rogers to tell me the U.S. doesn't hold a winning hand in this game. We don't have a functional government yet we're doubling down on "winning" WWIII! We can't even provide old school mortar shells and funding for a proxy war in Ukraine. Definitely the odds are not in our favor.
To flip to the other comment on humanities at universities. Traditionally, humanities were part of a scholar's 'basic' education. It was part of primary education providing a foundation for focused studies to follow. Humanities teaching should be happening in elementary school not at the university level except for specific professions such as teachers, theologists, and a few philosophers - none of which are in high demand for career paths in a modern technological economy. I can assure you that pragmatic Asians do not waste their secondary educations on such mundane things, but concentrate on STEM skills. If you haven't learned the skills to be a good human and citizen by the time you go to college, it is probably too late.
I too don't believe that woke humanity departments are responsible for the downturn, or else it would have started a few years later on the graph. I believe it's well known that interest in post-secondary programs follows perceived demand in industry, and outcomes including remuneration.
That said, I work with a lot of teens, across decades. They are much more aware of and in favour of inclusion than my generation, and that's been a trend for at least 30 years. The difference I've seen since the mid or late 2010s is that the critical thinkers (and through them, their friends) have recognized the hypocrisy of the Orwellian anti-racism and DEI philosophies, especially when people, places or beliefs are excluded as part of anti-racism and/or inclusion policies. Their school boards beat the propaganda drums ever harder each year. They know not to speak up, and that the authoritarians have the upper hand. But when they have choices, such as with selecting a post-secondary institution, they don't seek more of it. So some are now avoiding the places most known for their post-liberal views.
Unfortunately, I think they are deluded: I can't think of any post-secondary institutions that have not been captured, just a matter of (minor) degree.
Isn't the demand for a humanities education affected by the cost? I would think the ramp in university tuition over the last 10y+ has blunted people's ability to take on degrees with a lower return on investment. If the job market paid Humanities graduates the same way it pays STEM grads or if tuition was frozen around 2003 levels I'd imagine you'd see more people taking arts degrees.