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.
And a Yuan class is a diesel-electric boat displacing 3600t vs 8-10,000t of a Virginia class (nuclear) SSN. As I understand it, man hours of construction don't scale linearly with increases in mass, so a 10k tonne SSN takes much longer to build than 3 Yuan diesel boats.
Better comp for Yuan class would I guess be PLANs Type 093 or 095 nuclear SSNs, which they're turning out at like 0.5/year or fewer.
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.
I think the romantic notion that college is about self-cultivation and "finding oneself" was already a minority view but collapsed entirely during the great recession. Over the course of my time at a highly ranked Midwestern liberal arts college (2007-2011) the culture changed a lot. Younger classes were much harder hustlers and way more concerned about their reputations. The computer science department swelled up because that was the only field where graduates were getting good jobs.
I agree. College has long been shifting from "becoming well-rounded" to vocational training. The recession, with the loss of state funding and increased demand for an job credentials added to that. I enjoyed my humanities classes that I took in general ed, but I never considered majoring in them. I needed an education that I could see directly leading into a job.
Now that the labor market is tight, and fewer 18-25 year old Americans overall, dand for any college degree has gone down, and humanities are first on the chopping block.
And please Og, the sooner we eliminate "gen ed" requirements as a result of this, the better!
What a monstrous waste of time and money and talent - I was the typical STEM jerk in undergrad, and literally refused to take gen eds (eventually CLEP-ing a bunch of them), because the idea of being charged 5 figures and years of my life just to be forced to parrot back whatever right-think some idiot TA / teacher thinks of whatever random book or article was unbearable to me.
And yet, I happily read literature and study history to this day, recreationally, and am by far the exception there amongst everyone I know, whether STEM or Humanity backgrounded. If people want to read the classics, they can and should do it on their own time, and I'll be right there to talk to them about it, but they don't need to be literally forced into it at immense cost in money and time as adults in post-secondary education.
And here we are, still forcing students to do the same thing decades later, when humanities / gen eds are less relevant and more ideological with each passing year.
I appreciate that you note that education in the humanities has value. Humanities disciplines like philosophy, history, literature, and so on have a great deal of value and I believe they always will. The fact is that the way we teach new experts in the humanities is no longer working. I actually do know old classmates who are relatively successful as humanities scholars at the cost of enormous opportunity cost and (in one case) a lot of regret about the same. How do we guarantee that there are informed scholars and teachers bringing these disciplines forward outside of the old academic model? I have no idea.
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!
The idea that humanities promotes critical thinking is the sort of widely made but unsupported assertion that people trained in critical thinking would be quick to dispute.
Logic courses, which are part of the humanities, are where the tools of critical thinking get taught. It appears you you do not know this, so how can you speak to it?
At my engineering school I was taught logic in 5 different classes (or was it 6?) mostly in different STEM departments. Only one of those classes was a humanities class (philosophy).
As far as I know this is usually how it's done. Logic is an explicit bedrock element of math, computer science and electrical engineering. There's no getting away from it.
Do you really think English courses that are advertising themselves as all about intersectionality are filled with logic courses? If so, where are all these very logical humanities graduates??
You didn’t respond to my main point, so I have to assume you can’t formulate a counter argument. I did not SAY English courses did so. It is a separate category. It seems clear that you can’t process that concept. Hint: you don’t learn how to conjugate verbs in a logic course. Although it definitely helps.
In my experience, English courses don’t typically provide the drivel that you see in the ethnic studies and other courses you’re decrying so emphatically. They teach you how to communicate with the written word. You could also use some help with that.
I also have compassion for folks who view those curricula as necessary. After all, this country WAS founded on a slave economy. Which a lot of privileged white people (of which I am one) would do well to remember, illustrating why some people consider those courses necessary
In the past I've been both a professional writer and paid speaker, so my command of English is certainly sufficient for this thread.
> In my experience, English courses don’t typically provide the drivel
When was this experience, exactly? Because there are a lot of people these days saying the exact opposite: that English degrees have become nothing to do with literature or the written word, that it's now utterly dominated by hard-left ideological theorizing.
We can quickly prove this to be true by simply searching for [english departments critical theory]. The results show that all the major US universities have English departments overflowing with professors specializing specifically in hard-left ideology:
This is typical for modern humanities departments. They're all open Marxists who have no interest in literature, let alone logic. If we pick a professor from the Berkeley list for example, we learn that "his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay". This biography is not only race-obsessed, it isn't even written in idiomatic English ("may lay"? "quadrates"?), so the idea that these people can teach anyone how to communicate with the written word is laughable.
"Critical theory" is the general term for "mode of criticism." This is a really cool field of study--it looks at HOW we criticize texts and why! Beginning with "New Criticism" in the 1930s, different modes of deconstructing texts and extracting meaning have been theorized, proposed, implemented, and taught. Most English departments will have at least one professor specializing in just a class on different modes of criticism, which will go from New Criticism to (well, it used to be Disability Studies but now the latest name in town is either Queer Studies or Critical Race Theory) and cover the history of each mode and when and why you might use it.
Yes, the name sounds Marxist and there's a lot of professors in this field that specialize in Marxism. That's because Marxism changed the game by introducing about 4 new modes of criticism.
I'd recommend you read up on various modes of criticism! They serve a useful purpose in providing different lenses (much like the old "1 or 2?" at the eye doctor) to help readers get more meaning out of a text. *The issues we see in the present day about these things is when they stop being applied to texts and start being used as a lens through which to see everything.*
For real. What an absolute crank. He was just a crazy person yelling about the unabomber and gigantic theory-of-everything concepts rather than actually addressing Noah's arguments.
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.
I suspect that this effect is amplified by the higher tuition students pay these days. You especially need to make the degree count if you're going into serious debt to get the degree.
It's also related to the housing crisis. Becoming something like a teacher/professor or journalist or some other field that required high education compared to the pay was one thing when you could rent a cheap apartment and just buy a small, crappy starter home to live in for a long time. Now people in those professions are locked out of home ownership in entire metro areas. "Move to Pittsburgh from the coasts/Austin" is a great solution for individuals who might be ready to enjoy life in what might be America's most underrated city, but it's not systemic and if everyone did it Pittsburgh would be unaffordable too.
I think it's the same for lower- and middle-class whites too, especially those who were the first to attend college. But, of course, the immigrant groups you mention grew in the '60s as college expanded and combined with the Civil Rights movement, GI Bill, etc, to increase demand for everyone.
When I was considering grad school in economic history I was talking to the professor who was my main mentor at a pub in the town I went to college in. He was pretty clear and emphatic in his advice (for God's sake, don't go). He'd gone to an Ivy League for undergrad and one thing he said that stuck with me is that when he considered his college friends who'd gone into law, medicine, consulting, finance etc. and looked at the opportunities that they could give their children that he couldn't he frequently doubted he'd made the right choice of career. And this dude was a tenured professor, which meant he already won the humanities grad school lottery!
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.
I recall classes in Black Literature ,another in Irish literature in high school. They were FANTASTIC. Opened my eyes and heart (aspect you rarely seem to consider here), to other world views and herstories.
I have similar recollections! And I taught some, too, hoping to provide similar recollections.
However, it appears that a sort of dogmatism has overtaken the field, crowding out both even mild dissent and other humanities, particularly at the university level.
(Which may just be a personal grievance, since my specialty was in the area of media analysis.)
I think it's a self fulfilling prophecy: any overarching theory of power is how people are going to act when they get power.
Right now people in the humanities are so far into critical theories that they truly believe the only purpose of education is to reproduce power structures and to enforce the power of the dominant group through ideology and biased curriculum and that nothing of value was produced by these oppressors of the past... so guess what kind of system these people put in place when they are in charge? Though to their credit, this is what a deconstruction of the Humanities would look like.
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.
In terms of financial returns, it would be great if the humanities could train future managers. It’s a job that requires wisdom and empathy, which seem to be what the humanities are trying to teach. But instead we have business school where people who have already proven themselves get educated for the second time in how to drink a lot.
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.
Thank you. It is scarce but refreshing to see a bit of reality creep into this forum where mostly what is printed and passed for intellectual and factual truths are usually those of Noah and his liberal sycophants supporting whatever the current leftist Biden/handlers policy happens to be. If one is to discuss costs and benefits of anything, ALL the input costs must be considered, especially those hidden by government subsidies.
You are welcome. However, a word of caution too. I follow Noah because I do not enjoy echo chambers and he challenges me. More importantly, he is usually well-sourced which I appreciate. While I challenge his position in this post, I do not want to demean him personally. It’s one thing to attack an idea, and entirely another to attack the person. I would like to see everyone elevate from Name Calling and Ad Hominem attacks. Have a great day croploss.
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.
The main culprit is the monopolization of the defense industry plus corporate profits funneled into shareholders dividends, stock buybacks, exorbitant CEO pay, and lobbyists vs enhanced efficiencies and research.
A secondary issue is the failure of DoD to ever pass an independent audit.
People complain about the VA. How necessary is it to have a separate health care system for the military -- I mean aside from combat medics? Are their life-long wounds so different from people who suffer car crashes? --So different public-facing doctors can’t treat them?
Or VA Health could just work like a normal insurance company, paying for care at other facilities, rather than feeling the need to operate its own hospitals.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs has a budget of $325 billion, and there's 16 million veterans in the US. Just give every veteran $20,000 and tell them to buy their own health insurance, or not, as they see fit.
I was thinking the 10% of defense money spent on health care could be moved to our national health care bill instead, so we’d have a more accurate sense of what we’re spending on defense itself.
Generally I expect at scale, many costs come down — like prescriptions and equipment purchasing. And while our health care system is excessively complex, I think it could be simplified and streamlined, which is easier to do if there are fewer redundant service providers & systems.
Lots of assumptions there. I don't believe Medicare is more efficient than the VA. For instance, Republicans have prohibited Medicare from negotiating on the price of drugs.
"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.
Because automation is not automatic. I worked in a manufacturing facility that had older and newer lines, with the newer being automated. While the newer lines produced more product per employee, we still needed highly competent line employees and engineers to keep it running. Mexico likely does not have the same level of skill in those regards.
For labour intensive manufacturing, labour cost is very important. If labour intensity declines due to automation, other factors become more important, such as distance to the customers and suppliers, tariffs and taxation, availability of the still needed highly skilled workers.
And for capex intensive business, political and regulatory stability and rule of law become more important. Losing a sweat shop to a corrupt bureaucrat is not so bad. Losing a powerplant or a shipyard is, let alone a chemical factory or chip plant.
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?
So, you think if Taiwan used its own nuke on China, China wouldn't nuke us in return? You may not know this, but most of the kinds of chips that we don't want China to get its hands on are made in the largest quantities in Taiwan. If China gets those chip fabs, they'll have better access to high tech than we do.
If we aren't ready to go to bat for our allies, then South Korea and Japan need to start building their own nukes.
Boy you are rigidly legalistic About your definition of ally. It is just as much in our interest to defend Taiwan as it is South Korea or Japan. If we want to absolutely guarantee that China will never attack us, we need to declare them part of China's official sphere of influence and be done with it.
" It is just as much in our interest to defend Taiwan as it is South Korea or Japan."
You're right in that it's not in our interest at all. The best you can argue is benevolence. But treaty allies are treaty allies.
"If we want to absolutely guarantee that China will never attack us, we need to declare them part of China's official sphere of influence and be done with it."
We could sit on our hands for eternity and China wouldn't attack us. Japan never even had a real plan to invade us, and neither would China.
The official policy on *defending* Taiwan is "strategic ambiguity". The unofficial policy is "yes, but we don't want to make any promises out loud that could make China angry."
There is no firm yes on defending Taiwan. We are not treaty bound to, and we shouldn't. The official estimates for dead US military personnel in the first few weeks of a war with China is in the 5 figures.
Not sure about that. We’re not going to be the first to use nuclear weapons against China in a conflict with Taiwan, or at least I very much hope not. If Taiwan had its own weapons that could give the PRC some pause about what they were willing to risk in a conflict, even if the US does not get involved.
Japan and South Korea have been doing pretty well under the US nuclear umbrella. The US has a strong policy against nuclear proliferation. Taiwan may not want to complicate its relationship with its greatest patron.
In fact, Taiwan was extremely close to developing nukes in the 80s. A "defector" in their program informed the US what was happening, and we forced them to dismantle their program. It's never been revived.
They could do this very quickly if they wanted to. The problem is that even the two years you would need for a crash program are enough time for the PRC to react, and Western nations probably wouldn't want Taiwan to do that.
But nuclear weapons are the only thing that could provide a secure insurance against Chinese invasion. Especially if you consider that Taiwan is nice to have, but not critical territory for the Chinese.
"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.
What kind of campus are you talking about, though? Small liberal arts college, flagship research school, land grant university?
If they are titans like Ohio State, Arizona State or like a dozen Cal State U campuses, they'll draw so broadly from the general population that you won't see an indoctrination effect.
Indiana is a famously conservative state, yet its state universities don't tip the balance in favor of the Democrats despite being dispersed throughout the state.
These are Canadian teens, and the great majority would go to Canadian institutions, so the landscape is a little different. US post-secondary is fairly expensive on a Canadian 95th percentile income, and the ones that aren't, are not as likely to be competitive with Canadian institutions (I'm would not be surprised to learn there are exceptions, I am not knowledgeable).
Canada doesn't have the 'small liberal arts college'. The closest thing would be about 5 private religious universities. They would be conservative campuses, and when noticed at all, it's because some professional accreditation board is punishing them for their social conservatism. Outside of those, other private universities are all scammy.
The remaining universities, about 55 of them, are all public, creatures of the provinces. Some are smaller and concentrate on the undergrad experience, others are considered more research-oriented, and focus resources on medical/doctoral degrees.
The bottom 1/3 are mostly intended to serve rural and remote areas of the country. Quality would vary greatly. Those that cater to Indigenous communities are post-liberal. I don't know about the others, but they are neither large nor culturally important institutions.
Among the top two-thirds of universities, (contrary to what individual institutions might like to believe), quality doesn't vary that much. But quality is generally high, internationally, which is why there are a million international students attending, paying through the nose. Those universities would all be post-liberal.
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.
And a Yuan class is a diesel-electric boat displacing 3600t vs 8-10,000t of a Virginia class (nuclear) SSN. As I understand it, man hours of construction don't scale linearly with increases in mass, so a 10k tonne SSN takes much longer to build than 3 Yuan diesel boats.
Better comp for Yuan class would I guess be PLANs Type 093 or 095 nuclear SSNs, which they're turning out at like 0.5/year or fewer.
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.
I think the romantic notion that college is about self-cultivation and "finding oneself" was already a minority view but collapsed entirely during the great recession. Over the course of my time at a highly ranked Midwestern liberal arts college (2007-2011) the culture changed a lot. Younger classes were much harder hustlers and way more concerned about their reputations. The computer science department swelled up because that was the only field where graduates were getting good jobs.
I agree. College has long been shifting from "becoming well-rounded" to vocational training. The recession, with the loss of state funding and increased demand for an job credentials added to that. I enjoyed my humanities classes that I took in general ed, but I never considered majoring in them. I needed an education that I could see directly leading into a job.
Now that the labor market is tight, and fewer 18-25 year old Americans overall, dand for any college degree has gone down, and humanities are first on the chopping block.
And please Og, the sooner we eliminate "gen ed" requirements as a result of this, the better!
What a monstrous waste of time and money and talent - I was the typical STEM jerk in undergrad, and literally refused to take gen eds (eventually CLEP-ing a bunch of them), because the idea of being charged 5 figures and years of my life just to be forced to parrot back whatever right-think some idiot TA / teacher thinks of whatever random book or article was unbearable to me.
And yet, I happily read literature and study history to this day, recreationally, and am by far the exception there amongst everyone I know, whether STEM or Humanity backgrounded. If people want to read the classics, they can and should do it on their own time, and I'll be right there to talk to them about it, but they don't need to be literally forced into it at immense cost in money and time as adults in post-secondary education.
And here we are, still forcing students to do the same thing decades later, when humanities / gen eds are less relevant and more ideological with each passing year.
I appreciate that you note that education in the humanities has value. Humanities disciplines like philosophy, history, literature, and so on have a great deal of value and I believe they always will. The fact is that the way we teach new experts in the humanities is no longer working. I actually do know old classmates who are relatively successful as humanities scholars at the cost of enormous opportunity cost and (in one case) a lot of regret about the same. How do we guarantee that there are informed scholars and teachers bringing these disciplines forward outside of the old academic model? I have no idea.
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!
The idea that humanities promotes critical thinking is the sort of widely made but unsupported assertion that people trained in critical thinking would be quick to dispute.
Logic courses, which are part of the humanities, are where the tools of critical thinking get taught. It appears you you do not know this, so how can you speak to it?
At my engineering school I was taught logic in 5 different classes (or was it 6?) mostly in different STEM departments. Only one of those classes was a humanities class (philosophy).
As far as I know this is usually how it's done. Logic is an explicit bedrock element of math, computer science and electrical engineering. There's no getting away from it.
Do you really think English courses that are advertising themselves as all about intersectionality are filled with logic courses? If so, where are all these very logical humanities graduates??
You didn’t respond to my main point, so I have to assume you can’t formulate a counter argument. I did not SAY English courses did so. It is a separate category. It seems clear that you can’t process that concept. Hint: you don’t learn how to conjugate verbs in a logic course. Although it definitely helps.
In my experience, English courses don’t typically provide the drivel that you see in the ethnic studies and other courses you’re decrying so emphatically. They teach you how to communicate with the written word. You could also use some help with that.
I also have compassion for folks who view those curricula as necessary. After all, this country WAS founded on a slave economy. Which a lot of privileged white people (of which I am one) would do well to remember, illustrating why some people consider those courses necessary
In the past I've been both a professional writer and paid speaker, so my command of English is certainly sufficient for this thread.
> In my experience, English courses don’t typically provide the drivel
When was this experience, exactly? Because there are a lot of people these days saying the exact opposite: that English degrees have become nothing to do with literature or the written word, that it's now utterly dominated by hard-left ideological theorizing.
We can quickly prove this to be true by simply searching for [english departments critical theory]. The results show that all the major US universities have English departments overflowing with professors specializing specifically in hard-left ideology:
https://english.berkeley.edu/departments/critical-theory (21 professors of critical theory in the English dept)
https://english.ucla.edu/interest-areas/critical-theory/ (24 professors of critical theory in the English dept)
https://english.washington.edu/fields/critical-theory (a relatively restrained 6 professors)
https://english.uchicago.edu/about/fields-study/critical-theory-and-objects-study (observe that the first listed professor's first listed research interest is Marxism)
This is typical for modern humanities departments. They're all open Marxists who have no interest in literature, let alone logic. If we pick a professor from the Berkeley list for example, we learn that "his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay". This biography is not only race-obsessed, it isn't even written in idiomatic English ("may lay"? "quadrates"?), so the idea that these people can teach anyone how to communicate with the written word is laughable.
Hey, quick note: critical theory =/= leftist.
"Critical theory" is the general term for "mode of criticism." This is a really cool field of study--it looks at HOW we criticize texts and why! Beginning with "New Criticism" in the 1930s, different modes of deconstructing texts and extracting meaning have been theorized, proposed, implemented, and taught. Most English departments will have at least one professor specializing in just a class on different modes of criticism, which will go from New Criticism to (well, it used to be Disability Studies but now the latest name in town is either Queer Studies or Critical Race Theory) and cover the history of each mode and when and why you might use it.
Yes, the name sounds Marxist and there's a lot of professors in this field that specialize in Marxism. That's because Marxism changed the game by introducing about 4 new modes of criticism.
I'd recommend you read up on various modes of criticism! They serve a useful purpose in providing different lenses (much like the old "1 or 2?" at the eye doctor) to help readers get more meaning out of a text. *The issues we see in the present day about these things is when they stop being applied to texts and start being used as a lens through which to see everything.*
The conversation with Chad Haag was such a waste of time. I felt like I was losing brain cells listening to him talk.
For real. What an absolute crank. He was just a crazy person yelling about the unabomber and gigantic theory-of-everything concepts rather than actually addressing Noah's arguments.
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.
I suspect that this effect is amplified by the higher tuition students pay these days. You especially need to make the degree count if you're going into serious debt to get the degree.
It's also related to the housing crisis. Becoming something like a teacher/professor or journalist or some other field that required high education compared to the pay was one thing when you could rent a cheap apartment and just buy a small, crappy starter home to live in for a long time. Now people in those professions are locked out of home ownership in entire metro areas. "Move to Pittsburgh from the coasts/Austin" is a great solution for individuals who might be ready to enjoy life in what might be America's most underrated city, but it's not systemic and if everyone did it Pittsburgh would be unaffordable too.
I think it's the same for lower- and middle-class whites too, especially those who were the first to attend college. But, of course, the immigrant groups you mention grew in the '60s as college expanded and combined with the Civil Rights movement, GI Bill, etc, to increase demand for everyone.
When I was considering grad school in economic history I was talking to the professor who was my main mentor at a pub in the town I went to college in. He was pretty clear and emphatic in his advice (for God's sake, don't go). He'd gone to an Ivy League for undergrad and one thing he said that stuck with me is that when he considered his college friends who'd gone into law, medicine, consulting, finance etc. and looked at the opportunities that they could give their children that he couldn't he frequently doubted he'd made the right choice of career. And this dude was a tenured professor, which meant he already won the humanities grad school lottery!
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.
I recall classes in Black Literature ,another in Irish literature in high school. They were FANTASTIC. Opened my eyes and heart (aspect you rarely seem to consider here), to other world views and herstories.
I have similar recollections! And I taught some, too, hoping to provide similar recollections.
However, it appears that a sort of dogmatism has overtaken the field, crowding out both even mild dissent and other humanities, particularly at the university level.
(Which may just be a personal grievance, since my specialty was in the area of media analysis.)
I think it's a self fulfilling prophecy: any overarching theory of power is how people are going to act when they get power.
Right now people in the humanities are so far into critical theories that they truly believe the only purpose of education is to reproduce power structures and to enforce the power of the dominant group through ideology and biased curriculum and that nothing of value was produced by these oppressors of the past... so guess what kind of system these people put in place when they are in charge? Though to their credit, this is what a deconstruction of the Humanities would look like.
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.
With our current university system, which is essentially a for-profit sports presentation cartel, that is absolutely never going to happen 🤣
But enough about the SEC.
🤣
In terms of financial returns, it would be great if the humanities could train future managers. It’s a job that requires wisdom and empathy, which seem to be what the humanities are trying to teach. But instead we have business school where people who have already proven themselves get educated for the second time in how to drink a lot.
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.
Thank you. It is scarce but refreshing to see a bit of reality creep into this forum where mostly what is printed and passed for intellectual and factual truths are usually those of Noah and his liberal sycophants supporting whatever the current leftist Biden/handlers policy happens to be. If one is to discuss costs and benefits of anything, ALL the input costs must be considered, especially those hidden by government subsidies.
You are welcome. However, a word of caution too. I follow Noah because I do not enjoy echo chambers and he challenges me. More importantly, he is usually well-sourced which I appreciate. While I challenge his position in this post, I do not want to demean him personally. It’s one thing to attack an idea, and entirely another to attack the person. I would like to see everyone elevate from Name Calling and Ad Hominem attacks. Have a great day croploss.
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?
The main culprit is the monopolization of the defense industry plus corporate profits funneled into shareholders dividends, stock buybacks, exorbitant CEO pay, and lobbyists vs enhanced efficiencies and research.
A secondary issue is the failure of DoD to ever pass an independent audit.
People complain about the VA. How necessary is it to have a separate health care system for the military -- I mean aside from combat medics? Are their life-long wounds so different from people who suffer car crashes? --So different public-facing doctors can’t treat them?
Like could we transition all veterans and defense staff onto MediCare?
Or VA Health could just work like a normal insurance company, paying for care at other facilities, rather than feeling the need to operate its own hospitals.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs has a budget of $325 billion, and there's 16 million veterans in the US. Just give every veteran $20,000 and tell them to buy their own health insurance, or not, as they see fit.
Why would that save the government money? It certainly wouldn't improve our military's combat effectiveness.
I was thinking the 10% of defense money spent on health care could be moved to our national health care bill instead, so we’d have a more accurate sense of what we’re spending on defense itself.
Generally I expect at scale, many costs come down — like prescriptions and equipment purchasing. And while our health care system is excessively complex, I think it could be simplified and streamlined, which is easier to do if there are fewer redundant service providers & systems.
Lots of assumptions there. I don't believe Medicare is more efficient than the VA. For instance, Republicans have prohibited Medicare from negotiating on the price of drugs.
"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.
Political stability is advantage in capital intensive industries. Otherwise it’s hard to overlook the risks to investing.
Because automation is not automatic. I worked in a manufacturing facility that had older and newer lines, with the newer being automated. While the newer lines produced more product per employee, we still needed highly competent line employees and engineers to keep it running. Mexico likely does not have the same level of skill in those regards.
For labour intensive manufacturing, labour cost is very important. If labour intensity declines due to automation, other factors become more important, such as distance to the customers and suppliers, tariffs and taxation, availability of the still needed highly skilled workers.
And for capex intensive business, political and regulatory stability and rule of law become more important. Losing a sweat shop to a corrupt bureaucrat is not so bad. Losing a powerplant or a shipyard is, let alone a chemical factory or chip plant.
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?
Yes, but they probably can't at this point.
Don't really need to. Take out one of the giant dams China built and you can cause more devastation than a nuclear warhead.
And other than killing lots of people and pissing off the PRC, what would that accomplish?
Nukes provide strategic deterrence because they can wipe out your entire country. Busting dams wouldn't.
I imagine China reacting to this in ways that would echo the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That's as good as saying the US nuclear umbrella means nothing.
It's insane that any American would sacrifice many American cities to keep Taiwan independent.
So, you think if Taiwan used its own nuke on China, China wouldn't nuke us in return? You may not know this, but most of the kinds of chips that we don't want China to get its hands on are made in the largest quantities in Taiwan. If China gets those chip fabs, they'll have better access to high tech than we do.
If we aren't ready to go to bat for our allies, then South Korea and Japan need to start building their own nukes.
"So, you think if Taiwan used its own nuke on China, China wouldn't nuke us in return?"
You were talking about the US nuclear umbrella, which implied we would provide nuclear deterrence to them.
"If we aren't ready to go to bat for our allies, then South Korea and Japan need to start building their own nukes."
Taiwan is not our ally. The official US policy on Taiwan is a One China policy.
Boy you are rigidly legalistic About your definition of ally. It is just as much in our interest to defend Taiwan as it is South Korea or Japan. If we want to absolutely guarantee that China will never attack us, we need to declare them part of China's official sphere of influence and be done with it.
" It is just as much in our interest to defend Taiwan as it is South Korea or Japan."
You're right in that it's not in our interest at all. The best you can argue is benevolence. But treaty allies are treaty allies.
"If we want to absolutely guarantee that China will never attack us, we need to declare them part of China's official sphere of influence and be done with it."
We could sit on our hands for eternity and China wouldn't attack us. Japan never even had a real plan to invade us, and neither would China.
The official policy on *defending* Taiwan is "strategic ambiguity". The unofficial policy is "yes, but we don't want to make any promises out loud that could make China angry."
There is no firm yes on defending Taiwan. We are not treaty bound to, and we shouldn't. The official estimates for dead US military personnel in the first few weeks of a war with China is in the 5 figures.
Not sure about that. We’re not going to be the first to use nuclear weapons against China in a conflict with Taiwan, or at least I very much hope not. If Taiwan had its own weapons that could give the PRC some pause about what they were willing to risk in a conflict, even if the US does not get involved.
Japan and South Korea have been doing pretty well under the US nuclear umbrella. The US has a strong policy against nuclear proliferation. Taiwan may not want to complicate its relationship with its greatest patron.
In fact, Taiwan was extremely close to developing nukes in the 80s. A "defector" in their program informed the US what was happening, and we forced them to dismantle their program. It's never been revived.
Nukes are bad but we should let our friends have them and destroy anyone else who tries to get them. Man, Carl Schmidt is undefeated.
They could do this very quickly if they wanted to. The problem is that even the two years you would need for a crash program are enough time for the PRC to react, and Western nations probably wouldn't want Taiwan to do that.
But nuclear weapons are the only thing that could provide a secure insurance against Chinese invasion. Especially if you consider that Taiwan is nice to have, but not critical territory for the Chinese.
"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.
What kind of campus are you talking about, though? Small liberal arts college, flagship research school, land grant university?
If they are titans like Ohio State, Arizona State or like a dozen Cal State U campuses, they'll draw so broadly from the general population that you won't see an indoctrination effect.
Indiana is a famously conservative state, yet its state universities don't tip the balance in favor of the Democrats despite being dispersed throughout the state.
Thanks for asking!
These are Canadian teens, and the great majority would go to Canadian institutions, so the landscape is a little different. US post-secondary is fairly expensive on a Canadian 95th percentile income, and the ones that aren't, are not as likely to be competitive with Canadian institutions (I'm would not be surprised to learn there are exceptions, I am not knowledgeable).
Canada doesn't have the 'small liberal arts college'. The closest thing would be about 5 private religious universities. They would be conservative campuses, and when noticed at all, it's because some professional accreditation board is punishing them for their social conservatism. Outside of those, other private universities are all scammy.
The remaining universities, about 55 of them, are all public, creatures of the provinces. Some are smaller and concentrate on the undergrad experience, others are considered more research-oriented, and focus resources on medical/doctoral degrees.
The bottom 1/3 are mostly intended to serve rural and remote areas of the country. Quality would vary greatly. Those that cater to Indigenous communities are post-liberal. I don't know about the others, but they are neither large nor culturally important institutions.
Among the top two-thirds of universities, (contrary to what individual institutions might like to believe), quality doesn't vary that much. But quality is generally high, internationally, which is why there are a million international students attending, paying through the nose. Those universities would all be post-liberal.
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.