At its core, the Woke are building a movement that subverts the Left and renders it impotent in the face of its very real theocratic and fascist enemies. It sets male against female, straight and cis-gendered against queer, Black against white, and the working class against the intelligentsia. It debases science with various offshoots of the meaningless pseudo-science known as “critical theory” – a field so rigorous that one of its leading journals published a (fabricated) paper that purported to chronicle endemic rape culture…at a dog park.[1] Above all, however, the Woke teach young and idealistic students that they should seek refuge in “safe places” rather than learn how to overcome their fears…and their enemies.
It is almost as if our enemies invented this thing.
[1] Lindsay, James, Peter Boghassian, and Helen Pluckrose. “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.” Areo, 10 February 2018.
This is from Jonathan Lipow, Public Policy for Progressives, 2023.
Jonathan is a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He’s in a different part of the university than the one I was in but we interacted as colleagues for many years.
Jonathan is a progressive and he wants to talk to other progressives who he thinks, correctly, need to hear his economic message. Jonathan and I don’t agree on everything, of course. Remember that he’s a progressive. But we agree on a number of things.
In the next week or so, I’ll have a few more posts about content in his book.
Here’s one more excerpt, with my brief commentary, for now:
Yet, as we shall see, logic and evidence strongly suggest that some policies currently popular among American leftists are indeed literally ridiculous, such as opposition to charter schools and nuclear energy. Meanwhile, other policies widely advocated by progressives – such as a $15 minimum wage – are not silly, but large bodies of evidence suggest that they are ineffective and essentially a waste of time. [DRH note: I wish they were just a waste of time rather than a policy that makes it more difficult for young unskilled workers to get on the first rung of the economic ladder.] On the other hand, readers might be pleased to know that progressives’ instinctual support for universal health insurance [DRH note: hmmm] and liberal immigration policies [DRH note: yes] are well supported by both logic and evidence.
More to follow.
Postscript: Here’s a post I did in 2016 about a previous book by Jonathan in which he said nice things about me: he did so to argue that my libertarian views wouldn’t work in the world nearly as well as I thought they would.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 18 2024 at 4:39pm
$15 minimum wage as a “waste of time.”
My guess is that he thinks that it is not a binding constraint in many cases (or minimally so if some other cost of employment are cut) so neither much benefit or cost compared to a more generous EITC.
Roger McKinney
Jul 19 2024 at 10:22am
Seems to me the leftists he dislikes are merely taking the ideology to its logical conclusions.
steve
Jul 19 2024 at 1:05pm
Outside of academia and away from NYC and California I think he probably represents what most people on the left believe. Woke is one of those words that have no real meaning but I think that the large majority of people on the left dont like or support the version of woke that the right cariacatures. They arent as interested in identity politics which the radical left embraces. Critical theory? I believe it was Rufo, a leading thinker on the right, who said the goal was to just lump everything the right didnt like and blame it on critical theory. It’s actually taught or talked about at very few K-12 schools.
Safe places has always puzzled me. Get out and argue and refine your points if you think someone else is wrong. Do it in good faith and sometimes you will find out you are wrong. Of course if you publicly disagree with someone on the right you will be accused of being politically correct, but argue that too. If you really need a safe place for a while turn off social media. Maybe even do that if you dont.
Steve
PS- He should have added rent control to his list. Also, the endless list of things they want to spend on. Everyone should run a corporation for a while. You learn early when people want stuff to ask “how do you propose we pay for this?”
Steve
nobody.really
Jul 19 2024 at 4:08pm
On “safe spaces”:
Learned Hand, Speech to the Board of Regents, University of the State of New York, October 24, 1952.
I share the Enlightenment view that people need to enter their arguments into the marketplace of ideas, to succeed or fail on their own merits. That said, Enlightenment philosophy often seems to reflect an assumption that people have infinite time and energy for public concerns. Public Choice Theory and the idea of “rational ignorance” reflects an important refinement: They don’t. Attention and enthusiasm are scarce. When we reflect on the standard economic insight that resources are finite, we can see that the outcomes we expect will differ systemically from the outcomes predicted by Enlightenment theory.
Consistent with this refinement, we now know that people have finite capacity for conflict. We increasingly recognize that long-term conflict leads to hypertension and PTSD. Throughout the world, black people and white people have similar rates of high blood pressure—except in the US, where 41% of black people have high blood pressure vs. 27% of white people. In addition, black people in the U.S are more likely to be overweight than black people in other countries.
Consider the scene from A Bug’s Life: Sure, I can take a seed to the chest without flinching. But people who live in a constant hailstorm of seeds will live in a constantly depleted state–and this will lead them systemically to make different decisions than I would. Any philosophy built on the assumption that everyone shares my wealth of emotional researves is bound to lead to false conclusions.
For whatever reasons, black students are much more likely to drop out of college than other students—and college administrators have been desperate to change this pattern. So they’ve tried providing “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” This does not offend me; let’s study the data and determine what norms best promote the outcomes desired.
(Jewish students also complain about facing systemic adversity on campus. But they have NOT shown a tendency to drop out of college at a disproportionate rate—certainly not at a rate that would reduce their numbers below their share in the general population.)
Mike Burnson
Jul 19 2024 at 7:14pm
Over the many yers, I have asked hundreds of liberal friends and relatives to cite a liberal program that actually works. The silence has been deafening.
Ask Thomas Sowell or read the late, great Walter E. Williams’s comments on minimum wage laws. First, they are manifestly racist. Second, they inhibit employment among youth. Third, they encourage replacement of workers with machinery and/or computers (e.g., kiosks at McDonald’s). They most certainly do not help any significant portion of the labor force.
Universal health insurance? Obamadoesntcare KILLED people: life expectancy fell for at least the first three years of its full implementation. None of the promises from its promoters was even remotely truthful.
LEGAL immigration is almost universally supported; it is only ILLEGAL that is opposed and wisely so. There is no indication that the ten million over the past few years is engaged in productive labor: the BLS household survey for June 2024 was 10,000 LESS than July 2023. Rightly or wrongly, I interpret that as 3 million more on various forms of welfare.
Some liberals have answered my opening question with Social Security (aka socialist Insecurity). Once I stop laughing, I ask if they have even heard of the time value of money – to which I knew the answer in advance. I then point out that they have to dig back most of a century to find anything.
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