lewrockwell--2019-12-09--The Genius of Hoppe

The Genius of Hoppe

[This talk was delivered 23 November at the Palais Coburg in Vienna, Austria, at an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the publication of Mises’s Human Action.]  Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for people as young as 20 or 30 to feel they have to share their memories with the world. Even at an advanced age, I prefer not to talk publicly about personal things and experiences in my life, but to reserve this for private conversations.  But on the occasion of this event I would like to tell you something about my intellectual development: about my development from a child of his time, who through his encounter with Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics became an intellectual exotic – some would say a dangerous madman – apparently from a different time. And to this end a little biographical background is appropriate.  I was born in 1949 in post-war Germany, the same year that Ludwig von Mises’ magnum opus Human Action was published, which I was to discover almost 30 years later, and which had a decisive influence on my intellectual development, and which today, on this occasion, is to be presented for the first time translated into German. Human Action: The Scho... Ludwig von Mises Best Price: $17.50 Buy New $24.95  My parents were both refugees from the area of the former GDR, who after the war had ended up in a small village in Lower Saxony, West Germany. My father was a self-employed master tailor – among many other things, a common feature I have with Roland Baader, whose father was also a master tailor – who after having been a prisoner of war did not return to his Soviet-occupied hometown. The family of my mother, who was later to become a primary school teacher, had been expropriated by the Soviets in 1946 as so-called east-Elbian Junkers and had been driven out of their homes and farms, carrying nothing more than their backpacks. Until our move to the nearby district town, seven years after my birth, we lived in great poverty, with an outhouse outside the tiny workshop apartment. But as a boy I didn’t really notice that. On the contrary, I remember my first years as a little village boy as a very happy time. Since the early fifties my family, thanks to the enormous hard work of my parents and their life-long practiced resolute and disciplined thriftiness, experienced an economic upswing year after year.  The local edition of the Hannoversche Allgemeine was read regularly in my parents’ house and every Monday Der Spiegel magazine fluttered into the house. There were also a number of books, classical literature like that of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and Fontane, and modern literature like that of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Max Frisch, Böll and Grass. There were also a few works on German, European, and ancient history, as well as various reference works and atlases. My parents were eager readers themselves and always encouraged me to read, whereby history always fascinated me more than literature (and this has remained so to this day). We did not have a television until I was 16 or 17 years old. But my parents were not intellectuals who could have guided me in my reading, disciplined me or sharpened my judgment. And I would pass the same judgment on my grammar school teachers, almost all of whom came from the war and pre-war generation. The history lessons at school strengthened my interest in studying history, the biology lessons drew my attention to Konrad Lorenz and ethology, and the religious instruction given by a Protestant theologian awakened my interest in philosophy for the first time.  It was however not least this burgeoning interest in philosophical questions that also led to my increasing intellectual dissatisfaction and disorientation. Many of the answers and explanations I received for my questions seemed arbitrary, more opinion than knowledge, contradictory or inconsistent. Where did these contradictions and disputes come from, on the basis of which criteria could they possibly be resolved and decided, or was there perhaps no clear answer to certain questions? Above all, however, I missed something like an intellectual systematization, an overall view of all things and connections, and it was especially this need and the search for a solution that made me – initially and for some years – a typical child of my time: the time of student rebellion, which began in the late 1960s, during my final two school years, and reached its peak in 1968, the year in which I began my university studies, and whose spiritual products were later to be called the 68 generation.  Inspired by the leading figures of the student rebellion, I first began to study Marx and then the theorists of the new left, the so-called cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School: Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, etc., assuming I would find an answer to my questions from them. I became (temporarily) a socialist, albeit not a follower of the ‘real existing socialism’ as practiced in the former GDR, which I knew from my own experience from regular visits of relatives and whose miserable, pitiful economy of scarcity and its proletarian leaders disgusted me. Instead, I became a follower of, as it was called, “humane democratic socialism,” led by a supposedly wise elite of philosophers. And so it came to pass that Jürgen Habermas, at that time the rising young star of the new left and today the high priest of social democratic statism and politically correct virtue-signalling, became my most important first philosophy teacher and dissertation supervisor. In 1974, the year of my PhD, my socialist phase was of course already over, and my dissertation on an epistemological topic – a critique of empiricism – had nothing to do with socialism or ‘the “left.”  My short leftist phase was followed by an equally short ‘moderate’ phase. Instead of the Frankfurt School, my intellectual curiosity was now increasingly focused on the Viennese School. More specifically: to the so-called Viennese circle around Moritz Schlick, and even more specifically to Karl Popper’s philosophy, which is located at the edge of this circle of logical positivists. The core of Popper’s philosophy, which to this day is probably the most widespread and influential worldview, especially in the non-academic field, is the following double thesis: All statements about reality are of a hypothetical nature, i.e. they can be refuted or falsified by experience. Conversely, all non-hypothetical, a priori or apodictic statements, i.e. statements which in principle are not exposed to falsification, are statements without reference to reality.  I was by no means prepared to accept the universality of this thesis. (By the way: Is this a hypothetical or an apodictic statement?) Even while working on my doctoral dissertation, I came across Paul Lorenzen and the so-called Erlangen School, which made the validity of the Popper thesis appear highly doubtful, especially in the field of natural sciences. Isn’t it necessary to first collect and measure data and carry out controlled experiments in order to test a hypothesis regarding causal connections? Doesn’t the knowledge regarding the construction of measuring instruments and the performance of controlled experiments come methodically before the hypothesis test? And doesn’t the falsifiability of hypotheses owe itself to the non-falsifiability of the construction of measuring instruments and the methodology of experimenting?  Today I consider the importance of these questions to be greater than I did then, but this is not the place or the opportunity to pursue this subject (or any higher philosophy at all). Then (as now), my main interest was in the social sciences, and as far as that is concerned, I was to a large extent initially willing to follow Popper. Like Popper, I thought that social science statements were generally hypothetical, in principle falsifiable ‘if then’ statements, and that practical social research must be, as Popper put it, “piecemeal social engineering.” One must always test one’s hypotheses before either proving them for the time being (but never definitively) or falsifying and revising them. Non-falsifiable statements, on the other hand, especially those that relate to reality, i.e. about real objects, do not exist in the social sciences. Democracy - The God Th... Hans-Hermann Hoppe Best Price: $34.81 Buy New $43.12  Today I consider this thesis of Popper’s, apparently so tolerant and open to experience, not only to be wrong, but I also consider it to be downright disastrous or even dangerous.  First, a small example from everyday experience to demonstrate their error. No one will want to expose the statement “a person cannot be in two different places at the same time” to falsification. Instead, we accept it as an “apodictic” or “a priori” true statement. And yet it undoubtedly has a reference to reality, as every fan of crime thrillers knows. For if Mr Meier was stabbed to death in Vienna on January 1, 2019 and Mr Müller was in New York at that time, then Mr Müller cannot be considered a murderer in this case: not only hypothetically not, but clearly and categorically not. This statement forms the basis of the so-called alibi principle, which repeatedly provides us with infallible help in everyday life.  My complete break with Popperism came about while working on my habilitation thesis on the foundations of sociology and economics. On the one hand, it became clear to me that when explaining human action one cannot in principle do without the categories of choice, purpose or goal, means, success or failure, whereas natural events and natural processes “are as they are” and must be explained causally, without any reference to choice, goal, means, success or failure. On the other hand, less obvious and of incomparably far greater significance, it became clear to me that the sciences of human action contain a segment: the economy (in contrast to history and sociology), in which one can very well make apodictic statements and judgments, in such a way that one does not have to test something in order to know how it ends, but where one knows the result from the outset, ‘a priori,’ and is able to predict it with certainty.  While studying economics I came across statements such as the quantity theory of money, according to which an increase in the money supply leads to a reduction in purchasing power per monetary unit. For me it was obvious that this statement is a logically true statement, which cannot be falsified by any ‘empirical data,’ and nevertheless a statement with a clear reference to reality, about real things. But wherever I looked in contemporary literature, whether on the left by Paul Samuelson or on the right by Milton Friedman, the entire guild of economists was, to put it bluntly, in love with the Viennese philosophy of logical positivism or Popperism, according to which such apodictically true real statements are impossible or scientifically inadmissible. For them, this statement was instead either a mere tautology, a definition of words made up of other words (without any reference to reality), or a hypothesis to be tested that could be empirically falsified.  However, the intellectual tension and irritation which initially arose from this apparent discrepancy quickly dissipated to my full satisfaction. On winding paths I had finally come across Mises’s Human Action in my studies – in the library of the University of Michigan. Mises not only confirmed my judgment about the logical character of central economic statements, he also presented a whole system of apodictic or a priori statements (his so-called praxeology) and explained the errors and disastrous consequences of the positivist philosophy of Viennese provenance, the central protagonists of which he, as their contemporary, was intimately familiar with.  The discovery of Mises and, immediately afterwards, that of his American students, in particular of Murray Rothbard, brought me, on the one hand, a great intellectual relief – here was finally the long-awaited integrated, coherent overview of all things, an architectonic of human knowledge! – on the other hand, however, it also brought with it much anger and disappointment and led to an increasing alienation from the academic-university business and prevailing public opinion.  This ambivalent development – increasing intellectual certainty on the one hand coupled with increased social alienation on the other – can be illustrated and explained on the basis of a small list of examples of apodictic or quasi-apodictic statements, as brought to light by the Mises-Rothbard School – the so-called Austro-Libertarians. For each of the following examples, a more detailed explanation exists as to how far the statement in question is not a falsifiable statement in Popper’s sense, but I simply trust here that this circumstance is always immediately, intuitively understandable, and that in any case the concentrated power of the various examples is sufficient to recognize that one by no means has to try and tolerate everything in order to know how it ends (and also how it definitely does not end).  Thus, for example, the previously mentioned quantity theory leads to the statement that it is impossible to increase social prosperity by increasing the money supply. How else should one explain that despite the existing possibility of any amount of increase in paper money, poverty continues to exist in some places, unchanged. An increase in the amount of money can only ever lead to a redistribution of a given stock of welfare goods. It favors the first and early recipients of the new, additional money at the expense of the last and late users.  Let me continue with a whole battery of statements of similar, i.e. apodictic or quasi-apodictic, quality.  Human action is the conscious pursuit with scarce resources of goals regarded as valuable.  No one can deliberately not act.  Every action strives to increase the subjective well-being of the actor.  A larger quantity of a good is always preferred to a smaller quantity of the same good.  The earlier attainment of a given goal by given means is preferred to its later attainment.  Only those who save – spend less than they earn – can increase their prosperity permanently (unless they steal).  What is consumed today cannot be consumed again tomorrow.  Price fixings above the market price, such as minimum wages, lead to unsalable surpluses, i.e. to forced unemployment.  Price-fixing below the market price, such as rent ceilings, leads to shortages and a persistent shortage of rented housing.  Without private ownership of production factors – in classical socialism – there can be no factor prices and without factor prices an economic calculation is impossible.  Taxes – compulsory charges – are a burden on income producers and/or property owners and reduce production and capital formation.  No form of taxation is compatible with the principle of equality before the law, because any taxation involves the creation of two unequal classes of persons with conflicting interests: those of the (net) taxpayer on the one hand, for whom taxes are a burden one seeks to reduce, and on the other hand the class of recipients or rather consumers of (net) tax, for whom taxes qua source of income are a delight that one seeks instead to increase as much as possible.  Democracy – majority rule – is incompatible with private property – individual property and self-determination – and leads to creeping socialism, i.e. to ongoing redistribution and the progressive erosion of all private property rights.  Whatever is subsidized by taxes, such as lounging about or doing things for which there is no profitable customer demand, is further encouraged and strengthened by the subsidy.  Whoever is not personally liable for the repayment and redemption of so-called public debts incurred by him or with his participation, as is the case today with all politicians and parliamentarians, will frivolously and without hesitation take up debts for his own present advantage and to the detriment of an impersonal future public. A Theory of Socialism ... Hans-Hermann Hoppe Best Price: $6.99 Buy New $10.70  Whoever controls a territorial money printing monopoly enforced by state power, like all so-called central banks, will also make use of this privilege and, even if an increase in the amount of money can never increase social prosperity as a whole, but can only redistribute it, will still print more and more new money for his own benefit and that of his direct affiliates and closest business partners.  And finally, there’s this: Whoever or whichever institution has a territorial monopoly on the use of force and jurisdiction, as actually claimed by all states, will also make use of it. I.e. he will not only exert violence himself, but he will also declare his exertion of violence to be lawful by virtue of his ultimate legal representative. And in all conflicts and disputes of a private person with representatives of this institution (the state) no independent, neutral third party decides on good and evil, or about the guilt and innocence of the opponents, but always and invariably an employee, i.e. a dependent representative, one of the two conflict parties (the state) itself, with a corresponding, reliably predictable partisan, “state-supporting” result.  The list of such apodictic or quasi-apodictic statements could easily be continued, but it should be long enough to see what kind of consequences arise from this ensemble of elementary insights of social science.  Obviously, these insights are in blatant conflict with social reality. In this reality there are monopolies of violence, monopolies of money printing, taxes, taxpayers and tax consumers, tax-subsidized idleness and uselessness, majority rule (democracy), public debt, politicians and parliamentarians exempt from liability, capital consumption (consumption without saving), redistribution of property, minimum wages and maximum rents. And what’s more, all these acts and institutions are not subject to constant criticism. On the contrary, they are, almost monotonously and from all quarters, presented and praised as self-evident, correct, good and wise.  The consequence of these insights and their comparison with social reality should be clear. To put it colloquially: one is – and I myself was – at first simply flabbergasted. It became increasingly clear to me what blatant madness prevails in the present world. And I was flabbergasted at the time and effort it had taken me to arrive at this in fact obvious insight.  And there were obviously two reasons for this insanity. One was simply human stupidity. Although the ends one supposedly pursued might have been well-meaning, one was mistaken in the choice of means. It was stupid, for example, to try to fight unemployment with minimum wages or housing shortages with rent caps. It was stupid to expect more general prosperity from an increase in the money supply or more economic growth from an expansion of credit (without increased savings). It was stupid to introduce democracy as a means to protect property. And it was also stupid to expect a reduction in violence or even justice, i.e. impartial conflict resolution, from the establishment of a monopolist on the use of force and the judiciary (i.e. a state); because taxes, i.e. the threat and use of force, and partisanship in conflict resolution are essential characteristics of any state.  But it was by no means (and unfortunately) only stupidity or ignorance that was responsible for the rule of madness. There was also deliberate deception, lies and fraud. There were also liars and deceivers who knew all this. They knew that the aforementioned measures and institutions could not, and could never, lead to the benevolent results hoped for by their simpler contemporaries, who nevertheless or precisely because of that propagated and supported them vigorously, because they themselves and their friends and followers could profit from them – even if only at the expense and to the chagrin of others. And, of course, it became immediately clear to me who the people and circles, who were these crooks and their minions, were.  And another thing I understood through my studies of Mises and his school of thought: the reason for the popularity and the affectionate promotion of Popperism especially in these circles. For it is not only this philosophy that allows any insane assertion to be considered hypothetically possible and any nonsense to be tried out. On the contrary, it also allows, quite contrary to its alleged receptivity and openness to experience, to protect any nonsense with cheap excuses against refutation. If minimum wages do not reduce unemployment or poverty, it is because they are not high enough. If money or credit expansion does not lead to increased prosperity, it is because it is too small. If socialism leads to impoverishment instead of prosperity, it is only because it was executed by the wrong people, or because climate change or some other ‘intervening variable’ has intervened, etc., etc.  However, as already indicated, all this knowledge and understanding and the inner peace, satisfaction and yes, joy, which one, which I, experienced through my encounter with Mises’s work, also had its price. For once you have understood your Mises and learned to see the world with Austrian eyes, you will quickly notice, at least if you admit to it, that in many respects you are quite lonely and isolated.  Not only was one faced with the opposition of all (these) political crooks, but also of large sections of their various minions, especially the entire, almost exclusively tax-financed academic-university establishment, which I tried to find a way into. An academic career was difficult, if not impossible, and it took considerable courage, willingness to fight, and sacrifice not to resign or give up. In Germany – let alone Austria – I was at that time out on a limb. I therefore decided to move to America. And so Mises became not only an intellectual but also a personal role model for me.  Mises had been denied a regular academic career in Austria and, after the National Socialists seized power, was forced to emigrate to the US. Even there, in the heartland of capitalism, it was difficult for him to gain a foothold. But his courage and will to fight were unbroken and he managed to make his work increasingly heard and to raise a new generation of students, especially the brilliant Murray Rothbard. Rothbard, too, had been obstructed throughout his life, and his academic career had been rather bumpy. But it was Rothbard who now took me under his wing in the USA, helped me to obtain a professorship and in particular connected me with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Lew Rockwell in 1982 and inspired by him, Rothbard, as academic director.  It is, essentially, thanks to the work of the Mises Institute, with which I have remained closely connected from its humble beginnings to the present day, and which, under the direction of the incomparable Lew Rockwell, has grown into an institution with worldwide appeal and connections, that an event like this one can once again take place in Austria today. Thanks to his work, the names and works of Mises and Rothbard are much better known today than they were during their lifetimes. In fact, there is no country in the world where there are no Misesians or Rothbardians. My own writings are now also available in more than 30 languages. And it is certainly also an indicator of the progress that the Austrian school has since made, when an audience of 1,500 attended a lecture that I recently gave, in Moscow of all places, and a few hundred more even had to be turned away due to lack of space.  In spite of this undeniable progress, one cannot, of course, hide the fact that the Misesian Austrian School still represents an intellectual outsider-position. Indeed, especially as an “Austrian” one has every reason to be pessimistic about the further development of the Western world, at least in the short and medium term. For we are currently living through a period in which the normal madness, which I have already mentioned, is once more intensified by the crazy doctrine of political correctness and the pathological, quasi-religious climate mania of infantile so-called climate protectors, confronted with whom one often no longer knows whether to simply howl and cry, or instead crack up laughing.  However, today there is no more stopping the Mises School. And when the truth finally wins out, because only what is true can also work smoothly in the long run, then the hour of the Austrian School of Economics will have come.  The Best of Hans-Hermann Hoppe


lifesitenews--2019-11-01--Trump admin: Adoption agencies won’t be forced to give kids to same-sex couples

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 1, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The Trump administration announced Friday that it will not be enforcing Obama-era rules forcing faith-based adoption and foster agencies to place children in same-sex households, and proposed new rules specifically recognizing the religious and conscience rights of such organizations.  Whereas the Obama administration added “sexual orientation” language to “non-discrimination” rules governing federal funds to adoption and foster agencies, the Trump Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it will be replacing it with a new rule that retains most of the old rule’s non-controversial langauge. However, it will revise certain provisions to bring them in line with “applicable nondiscrimination provisions passed by Congress and signed into law, including legislation ensuring the protection of religious liberty, and to provide that HHS complies with all applicable Supreme Court decisions in administering its grant programs.”  “The proposed rule represents the Trump Administration's strong commitment to the rule of law―the Constitution, federal statutes, and Supreme Court decisions,” HHS said. “These require that the federal government not infringe on religious freedom in its operation of HHS grant programs and address the impact of regulatory actions on small entities.”  Religious and conservative groups praised the move as a fulfilment of President Donald Trump’s commitment to religious liberty.  “We commend the Administration for acting to change a 2016 regulation that threatened to shut out faith-based social service providers, namely adoption and foster care agencies that respect a child’s right to a mother and a father,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement. “We are alarmed and saddened that state and local government agencies in multiple jurisdictions have already succeeded in shutting down Catholic adoption and foster care agencies as a result of their Catholic beliefs. At a time when over 400,000 children are in foster care, we need to take steps to increase – not decrease – their opportunities to be placed with safe and loving families.”  “The proposed HHS rule frees faith-based adoption and foster care groups participating in programs that receive federal grants from the prior administration’s demand they include sexual orientation as a protected trait under anti-discrimination protections,”said Catholic Association Foundation legal advisor Andrea Picciotti-Bayer. “This demand, made in the waning days of the Obama administration with no legislative or judicial mandate, limits the good done for needy kids by faith-based agencies because of their longstanding beliefs about marriage. Agencies that find loving foster and adoptive homes shouldn’t be subject to ideological shakedowns by the government.”  “Until recently, the idea of the government assisting these groups in their work was completely uncontroversial,” American Principles Project executive director Terry Schilling said. “Incredibly, however, states and localities like Michigan and Philadelphia have lately begun to demand these groups violate their consciences or lose all support, as did the Obama administration. Amid a nationwide foster care crisis, this ideological grandstanding is utterly unconscionable. Thankfully, from day one President Trump has committed to put the needs of children and the protection of religious liberty above politics.”  A variety of social science literature supports the view that children are best served by homes with both a mother and a father, as men and women bring distinct strengths and emphases to parenting, and children require guardians and role models of both sexes for development and socialization. Furthermore, numerous individuals raised in same-sex homes have attested that the experience was harmful.  Last year, House Republicans introduced legislation that also would have also prevented religious groups from losing federal funds solely because they refuse to place children in same-sex homes.


lifesitenews--2019-12-18--Without children raised by their moms and dads, the US will destroy itself

December 17, 2019 (CatholicCulture.org) — When social scientists study family life, one factor trumps all others. Study after study confirms what common sense suggests: children are better off when they are raised in an intact home, raised by their mothers and fathers together.  The data are overwhelming, and they all point in the same direction. Children raised in a single-parent household are, statistically: • less likely to perform well in school, • more likely to live in poverty as adults, • less likely to be physically healthy, • more likely to compile a criminal record, • less likely to earn a college degree, • more likely to suffer emotional disorders, • less likely to succeed professionally, • more likely to abuse alcohol or recreational drugs, • less likely to marry and stay married, and therefore • more likely to continue the cycle of misery by becoming single parents themselves.  Yet despite what we know about all these problems, our nation’s policies continue to encourage single-parent households. Welfare programs encourage women to give birth out of wedlock, and penalize them for marrying the babies’ fathers. Lawyers paid by the government help women secure divorces, and social workers (again paid by the government) discourage reconciliation. Tax deductions and outright subsidies are available to parents who send their children to day-care centers — but not those who care for their children in their own homes.  Here’s another common-sense observation that social science confirms: If you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it; if you tax it, you’ll get less. Sure enough, after decades of misbegotten family policies, the US now leads the world — by a wide margin — in the one category most likely to produce societal disaster.  Today nearly one-fourth of all American children — 23% — are living in a single-parent household. No other country comes close to that mark. In most European countries the figure is in the low to middle teens; in Asia, below ten. In 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to a crisis in the African-American family, he pointed to the rate of out-of-wedlock births: 25%. At the current rate the entire nation will surpass that rate within the next year or two.  The implications of that shocking statistic are predictable. Over the next generation — barring a dramatic change in our society — we will face higher rates of crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, unemployment, emotional pathology, and, yes, family breakdown. (Oh, and by the way China, which is bidding to replace the US as the world’s superpower, won’t have the same problems; there the percentage of children in single-parent households is just 3%.)  Do you want to salvage our future? Save our children. You want to save our children? Save marriage.


liveaction--2019-09-01--Economist Birth control has devastating financial consequences for women children

Economist: Birth control has devastating financial consequences for women, children

Despite the popular belief that birth control is necessary to lift women out of poverty, the United States Census Bureau found that more, not fewer, children are being raised by single mothers — and single mothers are more likely to live in poverty.  From 1960 to 2016, the number of U.S. children living with two married parents dropped 19 percent — and the number of children living with just their mother tripled from nine percent to 23 percent of all children under the age of 18. This represents about 17 million children. Numbers from the Pew Research Center report that 27 percent of single mothers live in poverty. Even though there are five times more single mothers raising children than single fathers, single mothers are significantly more likely to be poor than single fathers are.  In 2010, economist Timothy Reichert argued that contraception actually has devastating economic consequences for women and children. He suggested that “the contraceptive revolution has resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men,” because it “sets up what economists call a ‘prisoner’s-dilemma’ game, in which each woman is induced to make decisions rationally that ultimately make her, and all women, worse off.” Despite being a lose-lose situation for women, and the children that rely on them, he wrote that because of the “prisoner’s dilemma,” contraception would continue to be the law of the land “unless legal restrictions or social mores ‘tax’ men and ‘subsidize’ women and children.”  Reichert argued that birth control separated what has historically been a mating market, inhabited by roughly equal numbers of men and women, into two separate markets. One market, called the sex market, includes men and women seeking sexual relationships without any plan for marriage or a permanent future together. The other market, called the marriage market, is inhabited by people seeking what its name suggests. This split of one mating market into sex and marriage markets becomes a problem when “imbalances exist in these markets (so) that the ‘price’ of either marriage or sex tilts in favor of one or the other gender.”  Reichert explained how at any given time, more men are likely to be in the sex market because they don’t have a “biological clock” necessitating that they move into the marriage market by any certain age. Women in the sex market tend to “have more bargaining power than men” for two reasons: relative scarcity and age. Firstly, they are typically in shorter supply in the sex market. Secondly, women in the sex market tend to be younger, as a typical woman will decide by her early 30s that she is interested in marriage and a family, and thus leave the sex market. Younger women tend to be interested in older men, and vice versa, whereas younger men are not equally likely to be interested in older women.  Using charts, graphs, and research from the social sciences to illustrate his point, Reichert contrasted the sex market with the marriage market. In the marriage market, women face significant challenges in finding marriageable men because there are fewer men in the market than women. Reichert isn’t the only one to have made this observation. Riffs on the topics “Why can’t I find a good man?” and “Why are good men hard to find?” abound online, backing up Reichert’s economic analysis with personal anecdotes. He went on to argue that women become more likely to settle for less in order to get married, and then end up getting divorced later on. A 2017 study by Stanford University found that in 2,500 divorce cases studied, women initiated 69% of them.  Reichert further argued that the creation of separate sex and marriage markets caused by contraception correlated with a higher “cost” of infidelity to women than men, higher rates of divorce (and women heading up single-parent households), a “need” for abortion, and even — surprisingly — a driving up of the cost of real estate.  Reichert considered contraception a “prisoner’s dilemma,” or a situation in which “all parties have a choice between cooperation and noncooperation, and where all parties would be better off if they choose cooperation. But because people in a prisoner’s dilemma setting cannot effectively coordinate and enforce cooperation, all parties choose the best individual choice, which is noncooperation. The social result is disastrous, and everyone is made poorer.” He wrote that “women (and, by implication, children) would be better off had there been no separation of the mating market into separate sex and marriage markets,” because of the long-term negative consequences of the imbalance between the two markets on women, children, and society at large. But, they are nonetheless highly motivated to continue using contraception because of the short-term benefits to themselves.  Reichert’s consideration of contraception’s economic fallout adds to the growing sentiment that birth control is bad for women. It doesn’t dramatically reduce abortion rates and it isn’t necessary to prevent overpopulation. It does, however, have serious health implications and it does pit women against their preborn children. Quite frankly, women deserve better.  “Like” Live Action News on Facebook for more pro-life news and commentary!


mediamattersforamerica--2019-01-03--Tucker Carlson says women making more money than men leads to more drug and alcohol abuse higher i

Tucker Carlson says women making more money than men leads to “more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates”

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, and both of them are traditional employers of women.  In many areas, women suddenly made more than men.  Now, before you applaud that as a victory for feminism, consider some of the effects.  Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don't want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don't. Over big populations this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow.  More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation. This is not speculation, it's not propaganda from the evangelicals. It's social science. We know it's true. Rich people know it best of all, that's why they get married before they have kids. That model works.


mediamattersforamerica--2019-01-10--Tucker Carlson says studies dont exist showing undocumented immigrants commit less crime - hes wro

Tucker Carlson says studies don’t exist showing undocumented immigrants commit less crime - he’s wrong

Carlson: “We do this topic a lot and we’re pretty conversant with the social science on it. I’ve never seen that study”  In an interview with former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan, Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed he’s “never seen” a study that shows immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born citizens.  During the segment, Carlson said, “We do this topic a lot and we’re pretty conversant with the social science on it. I’ve never seen that study.” Perhaps Carlson should become more conversant with search engines, as a Google search returns numerous studies and articles published on this subject.  A 2018 Cato Institute study shows that “there were 50 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.” A Washington Post write-up of the study included this chart visualizing Cato’s data:  In August 2017, Politifact looked into a claim made by Antonio Villaraigosa that “undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born,” a claim rated “mostly true.” In its ruling, Politifact quoted assistant professor and director of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston as saying “the rhetoric of the ‘criminal immigrant’ does not align with the bulk of empirical research.”  Furthermore, a study completed by research scientists from four universities shows that while immigrant populations have increased in size during the last few decades, the crime rate has gone down in those same communities. According to The New York Times’ review, “In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two.”  Tucker Carlson’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of the academic literature on this subject is no accident. He has a well-documented history of embracing white supremacy and demonizing immigrants on his show, and white supremacists love him back. Tucker Carlson’s extremist views and fact-free demonization of immigrants has been one factor contributing to the loss of at least 24 advertisers in the last month.


mediamattersforamerica--2019-01-23--The social science explaining why Fox News wants you to believe masculinity is under threat

Gillette was probably hoping for a little bit of buzz when it released its Super Bowl ad a few weeks early. What it got was wall-to-wall coverage -- at least on Fox News.  Titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” Gillette’s video begins with a play on its long-time slogan, asking, “Is this the best a man can get? Is it?” The video then cuts to scenes touching on bullying, the #MeToo movement, and behavior that people often justify by saying “Boys will be boys.” It’s provocative, and deliberately so. The core message is that men should be their best selves and set a good example for future generations because, as the ad concludes, “the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”  Fox News, as expected, didn’t take kindly to it, and the network put its outrage machine to work in response.  During the January 15 edition of The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld said the ad “bashed men, men who fought wars, who built bridges -- they just bashed them.” Fox host Brian Kilmeade appeared on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. to say that, sure, there may be times boys will “show an aggression,” but “that’s just the way men are made up to be.” Even so, he continued, he doesn’t need a razor company telling him how to live his life.  On that morning’s episode of Fox & Friends, guest Darrin Porcher said the ad represented “an atrocity,” adding, “We should be seen as equal to women, not as beneath.” Overall, the show devoted 12 minutes of discussion time to the Gillette ad while providing just 30 seconds for the House of Representatives’ decision the night before to strip Rep. Steve King (R-IA) of his committee assignments after he made comments in support of white supremacy. That’s 24 times more coverage for the razor ad than for an objectively huge story within the world of politics.  The next day, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh appeared on Fox & Friends to denounce the ad as “clearly insulting,” saying, “I didn't learn anything from the #MeToo movement.” The last bit is not so surprising, as he’s already written articles and published videos on why the movement has “overstayed its welcome.”  While segments about a war on masculinity do appear to have increased in frequency in recent years, at least at first glance, the theme is not exactly new. It’s a catch-all designed to give a sense of urgency and create a personal investment between viewers and issues they otherwise might not feel motivated to act on. And there’s actually a fair amount of social science explaining why this sort of laser-focus on masculinity is a politically savvy move for a politically motivated media outlet.  “Men have been emasculated, they have been feminized by the left that has pushed us on a culture, and they do see Donald Trump as someone who speaks for them,” said then-Fox host Andrea Tantaros during the December 22, 2015, edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. A year earlier on the same program, she claimed that “young men … have been completely feminized,” leading to educated women “having the government subsidize their sex lives.” Months before that, she warned that the left “would love to feminize” the NFL, adding, “The White House has been weighing in on the NFL on concussions and other issues.”  In October 2015, when Playboy made the decision to no longer publish nude photos, T.J. McCormack penned for FoxNews.com something of a requiem for the magazine and America’s collective masculinity:  In response to a May 2017 article in Vox about the U.S. Marine Corps’ inaction over a revenge porn scandal among its ranks, Fox host Todd Starnes took a jab at “the emasculated pajama boys” who “seem to want our Marines to prance into battle wearing high heels and camouflage rompers.”  The report came as a set of guidelines designed to help psychologists work more effectively with men and boys. Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce appeared on the January 10 edition of Fox & Friends to decry the APA’s findings and recommendations, mounting a defense of masculinity as a force for good:  The way Bruce and others on Fox described the guidelines, you’d think the APA had republished Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and was calling for elimination of the male sex. The guidelines weren’t created to blame men or masculinity, but to help men and boys by giving psychologists the same kind of specialized tools for working with them that APA provided for working with women and girls in 2007. The guidelines aren’t anti-masculinity, either. In fact, just a quick look shows that their aim is to help men embrace their masculine traits in healthy and appropriate ways and develop a deeper understanding of themselves.  In fact, during the January 3 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson pointed to the male suicide rate in America as a problem that must be specifically addressed. Carlson suggested that the one solution is to promote marriage, while his guest, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald, stressed the “need to valorize males,” citing the “uniquely male” characteristics of “valor, courage, chivalry, heroism in war.”  Male suicide is one of the primary issues the APA’s guidelines aims to address (emphasis added):  On the January 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson and guest Christina Hoff Sommers discussed the APA guidelines, with Carlson lamenting that the report concluded that “the problem with men is their maleness,” adding, “Newly issued guidelines argue that ‘traditional masculinity’ is harmful and that psychologists should somehow undermine it.” It should be noted that this isn’t what the guidelines actually suggest.  So Fox News is upset that nobody wants to address challenges that disproportionately affect men, but when a professional organization invests 13 years in developing guidelines designed to address those issues, that is also … bad. It’s almost as though commentators like Carlson and Bruce are more interested in using these problems as talking points than in actually finding solutions.  Throughout March 2018 -- Women’s History Month -- Carlson used his massive platform at Fox to shine a light on the supposed plight of American men. In many of these shows, he could be found parroting the talking points of YouTube misogynists such as Gavin McInnes, Paul Joseph Watson, and Stefan Molyneux, and playing host to the likes of Jordan Peterson.  “The patriarchy is gone: Women are winning; men are failing,” he said during a March 28 episode. Two weeks earlier, he had argued that undocumented immigrants cause lower wages, which in turn reduce “the attractiveness of men as potential spouses, thus reducing fertility and especially marriage rates.” A week before that, he delivered a monologue about how “something ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that.”  The theme has carried on to more recent months, as well. During the October 11 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson warned that Democrats were waging war on the very concept of fatherhood:  During the show’s August 23 episode, Carlson defended a video from conservative commentator Allie Stuckey that Facebook had temporarily removed and which stoked fears that “the current trend is to feminize young men in the hopes of achieving some Utopia notion of equality and peace. It's not masculinity that is toxic. It is the lack of it.”  Why is Fox News so obsessed with the idea that masculinity is under attack? The concept may have its roots in beliefs about what it means to be a man. There’s a theory in psychology -- the precarious manhood theory -- that our society views men’s status as something to be earned -- and something that can be easily lost. To oversimplify it a bit, it’s the theory that men view their maleness as though a “man card” were a real thing that could be revoked for not meeting social expectations of masculinity. In turn, the fear of losing status prompts men to make public displays of masculinity and rejection of what they perceive as feminine.  A 2015 study published in the journal Social Psychology explored what happens when men feel their masculinity is under threat.  The article looked at threats to masculinity as political motivators, theorizing that perceived threats would inspire “men's efforts to reestablish their power over women via the promotion of ideologies that implicitly subordinate women.”  The authors found that “men’s power over women is a key aspect of men’s masculinity” and that threats to masculinity “led to greater public discomfort, anger, and ideological dominance” among those studied. That anger “predicted greater endorsement of ideologies that implicitly promote men’s power over women.”  Something called social dominance theory offers an explanation for how people justify hierarchies and inequality within a society. For much of history, men held virtually all power in government and business -- a patriarchy. In just the past hundred years or so, women emerged from their position as second-class citizens and demanded equal rights and treatment. While most men likely understand that there’s no good excuse to oppose equality between men and women, social dominance theory gets at how those with the most to lose -- men, in this instance -- might subconsciously try to preserve the status quo while convincing themselves that they treat all people equally.  Through what are called “legitimizing myths,” people in positions of power can convince themselves that there aren’t any structural barriers to success, that the playing field is already level. For instance, some could justify the dearth of women in positions of power in government and business by saying that maybe women are simply too emotional to lead, that perhaps men just happen to be the ones best suited for a specific position.  To point out that a playing field isn’t already level or promote institutional change is to threaten the existing hierarchies of society. Some people respond to these threats by gravitating to political ideologies associated with the preservation of existing social norms. In other words: conservatism. Fear and anger are a powerful political motivators, and Fox News knows how to bring those emotions out: by creating the appearance of a threat.  It’s not a huge stretch to see how the success of women in comparison to men can function as a threat to masculinity in itself. If, for instance, a media outlet wanted to sway voters toward candidates who embody certain identities -- white, male, and Christian, for example -- one of the most obvious things it could do is bombard the public with the idea that those very identities are under attack. If an outlet wanted to sway people from voting for a woman, or for a candidate running on pledges to upend the current system of male social dominance, it would regularly promote stories that evoke a type of existential threat to manhood. This is what Fox News does.  Candidates themselves might try to adopt a more masculine public image -- Donald Trump did this often, once donning a hard hat to promote his support for coal miners, bragging about the size of his hands (and, indirectly, his penis) during a debate, and making frequent claims that his female opponent simply didn’t have the “stamina” to be president. But it is the news media that shapes the underlying narrative. It’s for exactly this reason that things aimed at helping men and promoting healthy masculinity -- such as the APA guidelines or the Gillette ad -- are twisted into attacks on male identity.


mediamattersforamerica--2019-04-05--Tucker Carlson How did we wind up with a country in which feminists do science

Tucker Carlson: "How did we wind up with a country in which feminists do science?"

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Is this the science that you grew up with?  MARK STEYN (GUEST): Well, I confess I was at first skeptical. If I understand this thesis, my insecurities about my masculinity are causing rising sea levels in the Maldives. And at first I didn't really buy that. But as I think about it, I think in fact it's actually one of the least visible climate science theses of recent years. So I'm kind of on board with where they are going on this.  CARLSON:  How did we wind up with a country in which feminists do science? I mean, isn't that - we're sort of bound to get a study like this, right?  STEYN:  I think, in fact, it's very difficult to tell with social science as with climate science whether or not it's an ingenious parody. It's almost impossible to tell in fact. But I think this goes back to -- I think the important point here is toxic masculinity. They're saying that they did a survey here, this is the kind of hard core science behind it, in which they gave someone a Walmart gift card and it was pink and had lots of flowery patents on it. So it looked a bit girlie, looked a bit sissy, looked a bit milk toast panty waist. So the guy given this gift card went out and bought a lot of very macho masculine things that melt the polar ice caps. Whereas if you give him something - he's so impressionable this toxicly masculine male - that if you give him a masculine type card, he just thinks oh that's really nice and he goes out and he buys a Sierra Club tote bag and saves the planet. This is the kind of social science that the higher education institutions of America are spending a fortune investigating.


mercurynews--2019-07-28--Walters UCs new political litmus test echoes McCarthy-era oath

Walters: UC’s new political litmus test echoes McCarthy-era ‘oath’

If you’ve never heard of the Levering Act, you’re not alone.  Few Californians are old enough to remember that during the years immediately after World War II, a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies generated a wave of popular fear about communist subversion.  Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover led crusades to root out what they claimed was widespread infiltration by communists.  California had its own version of McCarthyism, as it came to be known. The Legislature created a Committee on Un-American Activities and in 1950 enacted the Levering Act, requiring all state employees to sign “loyalty oaths.”  It was specifically aimed at the University of California’s faculty, and 31 tenured professors were fired for refusing to sign it.  The state was unconstitutionally imposing “a political test for employment,” as the California State Federation of Teachers said at the time. And after much legal wrangling, the state Supreme Court voted 6-1 in 1967 to declare the Levering Act unconstitutional.  Although UC’s Board of Regents officially declares that “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee,” a new UC policy seems to be doing exactly that.  As part of its “commitment to diversity and excellence,” UC’s administrators are telling recruiters for faculty positions, as one directive puts it, to take “pro-active steps to seek out candidates committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.”  To enforce that dictum, UC also requires applicants for new faculty employment and promotions to submit “diversity statements” that will be scored “with rubrics provided by Academic Affairs and require applicants to achieve a scoring cutoff to be considered.”  The academic affairs department at UC-Davis says that diversity statements from tenure-track faculty applicants should have “an accomplished track record…of teaching, research or service activities addressing the needs of African-American, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic and Native American students or communities.” Their statements must “indicate awareness” of those communities and “the negative consequences of underutilization” and “provide a clearly articulated vision” of how their work at UC-Davis would advance diversity policies.  Jeffrey Flier, former director of the Harvard Medical School, is among the respected academics who see the inherent contradictions and perils in UC’s one-size-fits-all concept of political correctness.  “As a supporter of the original goals of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, my skepticism toward this policy surprised a number of friends and colleagues,” Flier wrote this year in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  “But it is entirely inappropriate to require diversity statements in the process of appointment and promotion. Such requirements risk introducing a political litmus test into faculty hiring and reviews.”  While Flier sees the new policy as “far from the loyalty oaths deployed at the University of California during the McCarthy era,” he adds: “It’s not unreasonable to be concerned that politically influenced attestations might begin to re-emerge in the current hyperpartisan political environment, either in response to politically driven demands for faculty to support populist or nationalist ideas, or from within the increasingly polarized academy itself. Since progressive/left identifications are dominant in the academy, especially in the humanities and social sciences (as well as in administration), politically influenced litmus tests could easily arise in that sphere.”  They’ve already arisen at UC, implicitly denying employment or promotion for anyone who fails to enthusiastically endorse “diversity,” however that might be defined.  In the name of “diversity,” therefore, the new litmus test would make the overwhelmingly liberal UC faculty even less ideologically diverse.  Walters: The DMV is Newsom’s very deep, very dark pothole California tax revenues are soaring — what does that mean? Walters: Trump and California are at it again Navarrette: America’s dialogue on race is now a vexing monologue Letter: Trump’s insults may be signs of ‘a weak mind’ Letter: Tax on recycling carpet will rise even more with this bill


nationalinterest--2019-11-06--Ken Loach’s New Film on the Gig Economy Should Shock Us All

Long-term unemployment is no longer a serious social policy problem, but standard, full time, long-term employment is also much less common.  Ken Loach’s film, Sorry We Missed You, tells the harrowing tale of Ricky, Abby and their family’s attempts to get by in a precarious world of low paid jobs and the so-called “gig economy”.  But how realistic is it? Can Loach’s film be accused of undue pessimism? After all, UK government ministers have applauded the gig economy and the freedom and flexibility of being an “everyday entrepreneur”.  A new study by myself and employment expert Andreas Giazitzoglu investigates what we know about the gig economy, in order to get a clearer picture of what is really going on in the contemporary world of work in the UK.  Narrowly conceived, the gig economy means workers (as independent contractors) doing discrete, short-term tasks – or “gigs” – for companies via digital platforms such as Deliveroo, Amazon or Uber. As one study describes them, these are “labour contracts that are as temporary as is possible for them to be”.  We argue that it is better to see the gig economy as part of a wider shift towards insecure forms of work. Long-term unemployment is no longer a serious social policy problem, but standard, full time, long-term employment is also much less common.  More and more people are churning from “one shit job to another shit job”, as Ricky puts it in Loach’s film, punctuated with periods of unemployment. And as Loach observed (in a Q&A session following a preview), Sorry We Missed You is a sequel to the 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, which explores the degradations of the UK’s benefit system.  These are two sides of the same coin, as research on “the low-pay, no-pay cycle” has shown. Many of these jobs are on zero-hours contracts, which although illegal across much of the EU, have boomed in the UK.  Read more: We showed I, Daniel Blake to people living with the benefits system: here's how they reacted  There were fewer than 200,000 of these contracts in 2007. Ten years later, in 2017, there were over 1.8m.  Employers insist that workers want this “flexibility”. But two-thirds would prefer a fixed-hours contract.  The government celebrates high levels of employment but two-thirds of employment growth since the 2008 financial crash has been in self-employment or other forms of “atypical work”. Much of this self-employment appears to be bogus. Just like in Sorry We Missed You, employers designate workers as “independent contractors” to cut wage costs and employment rights  Investigative journalism has exposed the degraded work conditions of “self-employed” delivery drivers like Ricky: intense pressure to meet delivery schedules, breaking speed limits, snatching meals on the run, urinating into plastic bottles rather than stopping, barely making the national minimum wage.  Even a government inquiry found that “some companies are using self-employed workforces as cheap labour”, damaging workers’ well-being in order to “increase profits”.  If not bogus, then much self-employment is likely to be “forced”, perceived as the only alternative to being unemployed. This was typical of the “young entrepreneurs” I interviewed in the 1980s.  Held up as role models for Margaret Thatcher’s “enterprise culture”, their ambitions were, in fact, much more prosaic. Rather than go on the dole, they used the (recently re-launched) Enterprise Allowance Scheme to set up “micro-businesses” – knitting jumpers, repairing bicycles, freelance photography – keeping going by undercutting other businesses and by gross self-exploitation. Very few succeeded over the long term.  Most plodded along until, exhausted, demoralised and in debt, they closed down their businesses. Low pay is also typical of more recent forced self-employment and has been a key factor in the UK’s shift towards low paid work.  Across the research, we found ten things that were common to workers’ experiences of this new, insecure labour market: • Modest aspirations (people were not looking to get rich quick but wanted regular work and to be able to pay the bills) • Disempowerment (employers now have “disciplinary discretion” to withhold offers of work to people on zero-hours contracts)  One of the duties of critical social science is to question fashionable ideas. We should be particularly alert when comfortably placed, middle-aged politicians exhort younger people to “take up opportunities” that they themselves would never dream of going near.  Would government ministers be quite so “excited” about the gig economy if they had to surrender their fixed salaries, paid holidays and pension schemes in favour of working a daily schedule so gruelling that toilet stops are impossible and the minimum wage cannot be earned?  All of us – the public who rely on the services of the gig economy just as much as the politicians who proclaim its virtues – need to wake up to the reality that, in this instance, “flexibility” is just another word for exploitation.  Robert MacDonald, Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


nationalinterest--2019-11-30--Why Support for the Death Penalty Is Much Higher Among White Americans

I study the impact that public policies like the death penalty have on African Americans, and I see a problem that isn’t often discussed in the media: the significant racial disparity in public opinion about the death penalty.  Sentencing a person to die is the ultimate punishment. There is no coming back from the permanence of the death penalty.  In the U.S., the death penalty is currently authorized by the federal government, the military and 29 states. The primary rationale for using the death penalty is deterrence.  As public policy, I believe that capital punishment has largely not proved to be an effective deterrent.  Nevertheless, for decades the death penalty has been popular. However, support for the death penalty has been declining over the past 25 years and is near historic lows. Critics point to issues such as inhumane killing procedures, a plunge in crime rates and the death penalty’s high cost.  I study the impact that public policies like the death penalty have on African Americans, and I see a problem that isn’t often discussed in the media: the significant racial disparity in public opinion about the death penalty.  The racially inequitable application of the death penalty was highlighted on Nov. 15, 2019, when, in an unexpected turn of events, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals halted the execution of Rodney Reed less than one week before he was scheduled to be executed for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites.  The case was racially charged. Reed, a black man, is accused of killing Stites, a white woman, and was found guilty by an all-white jury.  The Reed case is one of many capital murder cases that present an opportunity to critically examine the application of the death penalty. As director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, I lead an organization that is committed to the elimination of racial bias and disparities through promoting equitable public policies.  Since 1976, people of color have accounted for 43% of total executions and make up over half of inmates who are currently scheduled to be executed. In Texas, African Americans make up less than 13% of the population yet represent 44.2% of death row inmates. Nationally, African Americans make up 42% of death row inmates.  When both race and gender are considered, disparities in sentencing become even more pronounced. Homicides involving white female victims are significantly more likely to result in a death sentence than homicides with any other victim characteristics.  However, beyond the explicit examples of racial bias in the criminal justice system that typically get the most attention, there remains another, more subtle bias related to the beliefs held by jurors.  People who oppose the death penalty cannot serve on a murder case jury where the death penalty is a possibility. Only individuals who say they would consider the death penalty can serve.  When you examine the numbers behind support of the death penalty, a trend emerges.  White people make up the core of support for the death penalty in the United States. Studies indicate that white people show significantly higher support for the death penalty than do black people.  This is consistent with a 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center, which found that 59% of white people favor the death penalty, compared with 47% of Latino and 36% of black people. Among white people, evangelical Protestants show the strongest support for the death penalty, with 73% favoring it.  Why do white people support the death penalty at much higher levels than black people?  According to research, one answer is racial prejudice. White Americans tend to associate criminality with racial minorities. In one study, researchers found that, after controlling for factors including education, family income, religion and political ideology, white people with stronger anti-black attitudes were more likely to support the death penalty.  It should come as no surprise that views about the criminal justice system diverge widely between black and white Americans, with black Americans being much more likely to see the system as racially biased.  Perhaps this explains why prosecutors, in spite of the illegality of excluding prospective jurors based on race, still use tactics to strike potential black jurors from the jury.  When juries are more racially diverse, that increases the likelihood that potential racism is discussed. What’s more, social science research indicates that all-white juries convict black defendants significantly more often than white defendants.  In my view, in capital murder cases, an all-white jury combined with white support for the death penalty stacks the odds against black male defendants like Rodney Reed.  [ You’re too busy to read everything. We get it. That’s why we’ve got a weekly newsletter. Sign up for good Sunday reading. ]  Kevin O'Neal Cokley, Professor of Educational Psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


nationalreview--2019-01-08--Can Higher Education Be Saved

Can Higher Education Be Saved?

Universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance, and many non-academics are offering scholarly material free online.  America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.  On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.  On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences have long ago mostly lost their reputations. Go online to Amazon or to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the books on literature, art, and history are often not the products of university professors and presses.  Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge. In fairness, that is no longer the aim of higher education. When students at tony colleges present petitions objecting to free speech or the right of guests to give lectures, they are usually full of grammatical errors and often incoherent.  Colleges, with some major exceptions (Hillsdale most preeminently), simply do not ensure the teaching of such skills any more. Of course, there remain wonderful classes, courageous deans who buck trends, and hardworking faculty who teach splendidly and have received modest compensation and little credit for their yeoman work. But they are a minority and a shrinking one at that.  By and large, the bachelor’s degree, even in a liberal-arts major, no longer certifies that a graduate will be able to read, reason, compute, or draw on a body of knowledge far more effectively than those without an undergraduate degree. The decline of the university has been an ongoing tragedy since the 1960s, but the erosion has accelerated because of ideological bias and its twin, incompetence. Here are five major recent and additional catalysts.  Students owe about $1.5 trillion in student loans, much of it at interest rates higher than those of contemporary mortgages. At least a half-trillion dollars cannot and won’t be paid back. It is hard to know whether unsustainable college mortgages are a reflection or a cause of university decline, or both.  But the crushing student debt plays a variety of pernicious roles in wider society. Students postpone marriage and child-rearing, a trend that is negatively affecting U.S. demography. Home ownership is put off, in favor of living at home in prolonged adolescence, ending the old idea of becoming an adult in one’s early twenties. Most of today’s pejoratives, such as “snowflake” or “social justice warrior,” originate from the reality that on-again-off-again college debt has arrested the development of adult men and women and consumed their twenties.  Much of the debt is due to federally guaranteed loans that were sold to students, and looked on by them, as a virtual loan—more as a grant not necessarily to be paid back. And universities saw the loan guarantee as a green light to jack up their costs higher than the annual rate of inflation. Thanks to such huge cash influxes into campuses, students got Club Med rec centers and well-appointed apartments, while administrators hired a costly legion of diversity and inclusion officers, whose chief duties were to monitor faculty thought, indoctrinate students, and protect their superiors from charges of intersectional racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, and xenophobia. Perhaps the last hired diversity czar can turn out the lights at another insolvent private liberal-arts college.  Staggering student debt came at time when major research universities no longer measured their endowments and income in the millions, but in some cases the many billions. In other words, some institutions did very well, even as most students did not.  Any alumni donations that are not strictly targeted should be seen as a waste of philanthropy; they function like toxic drugs to an end-stage addict. And the most frightening idea for most elite academic socialists is that the government might tax endowments over $5 billion or adopt some sort of professional-sports nostrum in which the richest campus franchises must share with the poorest.  Most college courses in literature and history — despite their sometimes anachronistic and traditional titles — focus on “diversity.” That is, they present a play or novel, or a past historical period or event, in terms of how it adversely portrayed or affected the poor, women, and minorities. The larger agenda is ideological: to instruct how the superior present can craft remedies to ensure that incorrect thinking and the biases throughout history and literature do not contaminate contemporary life and society.  What is often forgotten is that political correctness comes at a price of not learning a language, or reading the plays of Shakespeare, or mastering the basic outlines of the Civil War or World War II — given that for youth learning is so often a zero-sum game with only limited hours in the day for study and reading.  Today’s students, like their professors, not only do not possess, but feel no need to possess, familiarity with Thucydides, or Dante’s Inferno, or some idea of the Napoleonic Wars, or the work of T. S. Eliot. And at least one reason they do not is that teaching and reading these texts and studying complex histories are far more difficult tasks than various therapeutic -studies courses about prejudices, biases, and -isms and -ologies. Becoming woke is not the same as being educated. The former is easy and seeks the affirmation of the majority, the latter harder and often a lonely experience.  Finally, the morality of the curriculum is upside down. If the purpose of the contemporary university is to empower the marginalized and the previously discriminated against, then it would be hard to envision classes that could more deprive first-generation college students of the very analytic tools and knowledge that might ensure their success.  Two simple proposals — predicating the bachelor’s degree on an exit exam analogous to required admission tests, and allowing teachers to opt for an academic master’s degree in lieu of a teaching credential — would expose the current poverty of the curriculum. Perhaps half the nation’s graduates could not pass a basic exit exam in the arts and sciences. And, if given a choice, most would-be teachers would prefer studying for an academic M.A. to spending a year with the Ministry of Credentials.  Higher education invests a huge fortune in faculty “development,” more specifically in sabbaticals, grants, teaching reductions, release time, accelerated promotions, cash prizes, and awards and merit raises to conduct research. In theory, such subsidies are a wise investment, even in the humanities and social sciences. The mostly unknown work of scholars supposedly expands the body of wisdom. Ideally, seemingly narrow, unheralded work finds its way into surveys and popular knowledge. Scholars become better teachers as they ground their classroom work with the facts and data of their own narrower investigations.  Moreover, scholarship benefits the larger public. For example, the tedious work of establishing accurate Linear B texts allows us to understand why Mycenaean civilization more or less mysteriously collapsed in the 13th century b.c. Using archival work to reconstruct the year-by-year lives of a Ulysses S. Grant or William Tecumseh Sherman allows biographers to provide the public with a richer appreciation of their complex careers. Thanks to scholarly and often underappreciated work, we have a more nuanced understanding of prior simplistic views, such as the notion that the Versailles Treaty was too punitive.  Yet as universities expanded, scholarship became deeply embedded in careerism and, in many cases, became scholastic nitpicking and, in other instances, abjectly political. Then came the Internet, which destroyed many academic hierarchies and brought the law of the arena into scholarly work. Rather than wait a year for a prestigious journal to peer-review a submission (supposedly blindly but more often not quite) and then, when published, to reach an audience of 20 to 30 fellow scholars, most academics could post anything on a blog and sometimes find an audience of hundreds if not thousands.  The absence of peer review, scholarly critique, and editorial intervention, of course, green-lighted incompetent work, but the majority thumbs-up/thumbs-down opinion of thousands of online readers also tended to glean some chaff from the wheat.  In sum, thousands of autodidacts and independent scholars are now publishing as they please, and often their ideas and research are as good as, or better than, the costly university bureaucracy of academic production. As we look back at the 75-year massive investment in post-war scholarly research, it is increasingly clear that, in our present age of over-specialization and postmodern partisanship, the results often no longer justify commensurate release time from teaching or the careerist rewards that “research” provides. Universities would be better off investing in part-time faculty to end the rank exploitation of those with provisional contracts.  The Internet likewise destroyed lots of other protocols and, by extension, university titles and the notion of a mandarin class of Ivy League scholars and the sanctity of the campus. Not only do autodidacts freelance and post their lectures through free podcasts, but colleges themselves offer online classes. The faculty who most effectively can speak before a camera without notes and maintain anonymous audiences of thousands are not always the faculty who win traditional teaching awards and get fast-tracked through promotion.  For-profit “diploma mills” are laughed at by serious colleges on the rationale they offer neither “the college experience” nor a “broad education” but simply sell units of online certification in vocational skills, education, and business. But if the universities do not offer a rich liberal-arts curriculum that emphasizes literature, philosophy, and history, and if the modern campus is a cultural and political landmine where perhaps four of the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights do not apply, then millions will ask, Why pay for academia’s toxic bells and whistles?  Colleges have an argument to make that close interaction among faculty and students, the larger landscape of cultural opportunities available on a physical campus, and the ability to see and talk directly with an instructor inside a classroom are essential to an undergraduate experience, but they have not made that case. Instead, they have invalidated it by their very intolerance and warping of the curriculum.  There should always be an argument for tenure given that administrators and academics are by nature timid and vindictive and will predictably bend to the mob’s demand to fire someone for saying something that someone else doesn’t like.  But the 80-year experience with widespread academic tenure suggests that it no longer encourages diverse views or protects freedom of speech — the university is now one of the most monolithic and ideologically repressive institutions in society. Moreover, at many state schools, nearly 40–50 percent of the courses offered are taught by part-time, non-tenured faculty, who enjoy no such career protection.  In sum, tenure has become a medieval caste system. It gives mandarins life-long career security without much post-tenure review or encouragement of diversity of thought, while simply writing off thousands of faculty helots as not worthy of commensurate career security. It could be easily replaced by five- or ten-year contracts, specifying teaching and research expectations without discriminating between part- and full-time faculty.  We are entering an age in which college, as we have understood that term, will no longer be assumed essential to becoming educated. And the number of colleges will shrink either because of consolidation, transformations to online institutions, or bankruptcy. The reasons for these existential changes are not just technology and economics but are found within the university itself. It broke its pact with the public to offer a disinterested and good education at an affordable price to the nation’s youth — and instead ended up doing precisely the opposite.


nationalreview--2019-02-12--Were Failing Our Students and It Hurts Us All

We’re Failing Our Students, and It Hurts Us All

They can go through their entire education without coming across a principled, non-left viewpoint.  In late January 2019, Kenneth Mayer, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, drew the attention of a Republican state legislator for language in his syllabus that described Trump as “a president who gleefully flouts the norms of governing and presidential behavior.” His supporters see this as “not a bug, but a feature,” the professor wrote in his syllabus, adding, “To others, he is a spectacularly unqualified and catastrophically unfit egomaniac.” In response, the campus issued a statement supporting Mayer, stating that he “leaves his political opinions at the classroom door and asks his students to do the same.” Regardless of one’s views of the current administration, it is difficult to support the claim that Mayer’s opinions stayed at the door, given that they’re embedded in the course syllabus. Professor Mayer’s endorsement of a singular political perspective in the classroom points to a larger problem that plays out more broadly and has serious implications.  We can trace the current level of political polarization to multiple sources, but, whatever the causes, we could arguably reduce polarization by increasing our ability to see issues from perspectives other than our own. Given its potential to bridge divides, nurturing this ability should be a high priority. And yet, this is neglected in one of the places where it could do the most good: the college classroom.  Our universities are failing students by teaching them that there’s only one right way to understand our most vexing inequalities and social problems. This undoubtedly disproportionately affects students focusing their studies in the social sciences, but the near universality of cross-disciplinary general-education requirements (such that many students, regardless of their area of study, are required to take courses in the social sciences) suggests that almost no student is immune.  In sociology, for instance, we teach students about a wide range of social disparities. This entails conversations about the causes of those differences. Yet we do students an enormous disservice teaching them only about the possible structural causes of those disparities — aspects we can blame on the “system” or on “institutions.” Students learn, for example, that the gender pay gap is due to systemic labor-market discrimination against women and a devaluation of women’s work. These are likely contributing factors. But when pressed on the topic, most students can’t name a single additional factor that might contribute to the wage difference (such as variation between the sexes in job preferences or priorities).  I have had a chance to see this firsthand in an undergraduate course I am currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aptly, the course is called Social Problems. It is an intro-level course in the sociology department and serves as a gateway to the major. On the first day of class, I told students that I would be teaching from multiple political angles — i.e., from a “heterodox” perspective — an approach that would necessarily include conservative viewpoints that are likely heard less often in their other classes.  We’re now almost four weeks into the semester and it’s clear that these bright, engaged students are not being exposed to the range of perspectives that they will need in their lives after college. I expect that, in this regard, they resemble students at many other institutions across the country. They are led to believe that our most difficult problems have simple causes and that those causes are rooted in structural bias that the right policies will fix. In addition, they are taught that this is the only right way to view these challenges.  For example, consider the Gillette advertisement that sparked so much controversy in January 2019. The ad used the idea of “toxic masculinity” to suggest that men should discard aspects of stereotypical “male” behavior. After showing the ad in class for the students, I asked them what they thought was positive about it. They gave thoughtful answers, including the messages to men and boys that it’s okay to show emotion and that fighting is not the best way to solve problems.  Then I asked them why they thought someone might object to the ad or to the idea of an overly broad application of “toxic” as a description of masculinity. After a few quiet moments, a couple of hands went up. The consensus was that people might object to the ad because they’re consciously or unconsciously afraid of letting go of old gender norms. I responded that, yes, that might explain a viewer’s objection, and then I asked for other suggestions. When none were offered, I asked, What would it mean if there are biological differences between men and women that might lead to certain behavioral differences? I gave the example of men being more aggressive. I pressed on, asking, What would it mean to pathologize certain male character traits if some of them are biologically determined? Curious silence was the answer. The students seemed open to considering the implications of that possibility — that biological difference may account for some behavioral differences. Not a single student seemed familiar with the notion.  This kind of example is not unusual. A similar scenario played out when we talked about “white privilege.” I asked students first why it’s a useful concept, to which they generally replied that it helps people become aware of their unearned and unacknowledged advantages in society. Again, a perfectly reasonable response. I then asked them to break into groups and discuss why someone might object to the concept. The response in the majority of the groups was that someone might object because they think it means a denial or a minimization of the hardships they’ve faced in life. There was only one group (of the seven or eight in the class) that offered the suggestion that the concept might be divisive.  This way of thinking is reinforced in the textbooks we use. In the book I am using, when individual — as opposed to structural — determinants of poverty or racial disparities are mentioned, the textbook authors present them in the same context as theories of biological inferiority, thereby implying a conceptual link. Or, in another example, an opposition to redistributive policies is presented as a manifestation of “modern racism.” In this environment, the message is actively conveyed that nonstructural perspectives on social problems are synonymous with viewpoints that are racist, sexist, etc.  Students can and do go through entire courses and indeed through their entire undergraduate (and in some cases graduate) education never encountering the possibility that there can be valid reasons to think differently about how to approach social problems. The only possible causes and solutions are structural. These students then go out into the world and interact with many people, some of whom have a similar background and some of whom do not. And the only response they have to someone who, for instance, objects to the notion of “toxic” masculinity is that such a person must be invested in maintaining antiquated gender norms.  This myopia is a disservice to the students themselves and to anyone with whom they interact who thinks differently. Some may make the point that there are people, to continue with the same example, who object to the idea of “toxic” masculinity because they in fact wish to maintain traditional gender norms. But there are other possible principled justifications for an objection — students should know that many people object in good faith and should be open to the possibility that they may even be correct to do so.