The public heartburn over Loughlin and Huffman seems less about them bribing their kids into good schools than about them being able to AFFORD to bribe their kids into good schools. Suppose the scandal had unfolded in a different way. What if, instead of rich people writing checks they could afford, it was working class parents scraping together money they really couldn’t afford, or trading menial work or even sexual favors a la Mrs. Gump, for illicit “admissions assistance?”
Tag: class
What the College Admissions Scandal Reveals
The signaling theory of education is correct. Except a degree is not a signal of employability. It’s a signal of adherence to the dominant social status religion of the day.
Klein on Groupthink
I don’t regard left-wing domination of the humanities and social sciences as the world’s most-pressing problem, or even the world’s tenth most-pressing problem. As I explained in The Case Against Education, educators simply aren’t very persuasive, so they do far less intellectual damage than you’d think. Indeed, despite their teachers’ biases, well-educated Americans tend to be social liberal but economically conservative. How is this possible?
Wish List Politics: Green No Deal
The resolution calls, fuzzily, for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal,” but it doesn’t advertise that as a cost. It calls such a “mobilization” an “opportunity” and claims that its named predecessors “created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen.”
Starting the Day on My Own Terms
I don’t have a morning routine. Sometimes I experiment with one, other times I alter my mornings based on other larger goals. In some phases of life, I’ve slept in ’till eight or nine. In others I’ve gotten up at five or six. Sometimes I do both from day to day. I’ve done email first…
Aircraft Carriers: Give Truman and Ford a Burial at Sea
The US Department of Defense wants to retire an old aircraft carrier early while building two new ones (and adding other goodies to their shopping list). Surprise, surprise — politicians from states with the shipyards and naval bases that employ their constituents want to keep the old carrier AND build the new ones.
Does Ideological Dystopia Await Us?
Imagine a world in which the great majority has no respect for facts or for truth of any sort, where ideological convictions rule almost everyone’s understanding of the world, where truth has become an endangered rhetorical species on the brink of extinction. In such a world, facts would still exist, of course, and true propositions would still stand in stark contradiction of false ones, but hardly anyone would care.
Reflections on the Balan-Caplan Poverty Debate
I really enjoyed my Tuesday debate on “The Philosophy of Poverty?” with my friend David Balan. Many thanks to GMU’s Economics Society for setting it up. While we had a great discussion, here are a few thoughts I’d like to add.
The Great Pretender
The score now stands at 45 attempts, 0 successes. That is the POTUS scoreboard. Some POTUS were worse failures than others. Some came to the job with evil in his heart, others were just incompetent.
One Institution at a Time
I’m not sure when I stopped reading newspapers, but they fell out of my favor when I was a freshman in college. My professor for Advanced Composition used the local papers in every class to present to us examples of horrendously poor writing.