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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

The article notes one reason why:

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture

Since when? In them I see no love for wisdom and erudition, no study in perfection.

They love credentials officially issued by universities.

I think this is probably more accurate, and really of society as a whole. The dominant position seems to be “if you didn’t get college credit, it doesn’t count.” I get it for job skills, as college credits and degrees mean someone verified that you actually did the work. It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time. Instead, I’d have him write on substack or some other blogging platform and learn to communicate with an audience. Same with art. There’s enough instruction out there that you could learn the techniques of your chosen medium, and the rest is down to practice and getting feedback. But it seems like so many people want to get those kinds of degrees even when they don’t make sense.

But our society somehow bought the university marketing that told them that only learning something in a university classroom taught by a TA who has 500 students a day counts. If I pass a course on WW2 history, that counts as learning history. If I read every book I can get my hands on for that topic, read first hand accounts, looked at raw footage, etc. it doesn’t. Problem being that I’ve actually done a lot more work than the kid sleeping through their lectures in Turner Hall. And unlike him, I’ve actually done all the reading.

Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts

That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.

In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.

I don’t think autodidact works all the time for all purposes. And I would never recommend autodidact for things that you’re going to do for a living. At the same time, I think that for a person of average intelligence, you can probably teach yourself more than you think you can. Resources beyond just the books exist, and because you’re able to go at your own pace, you can slow down when you get lost or stuck.

It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time.

There used to be (and still is in some areas) a long, rich tradition of the humanities, passed down throughout the centuries via the academy and other institutions of knowledge generation.

This tradition and gatekeeping it is crucial, and keeping the chain of humanities alive is in my opinion crucial as well. If you just let the masses go at it as they will, art becomes diluted and we stop caring about the old great works of art. As we're seeing now...

I see things in sort of the opposite direction. I think shutting the great art behind the enormous paywall of university means that only members of the elite will ever see it or get anything out of it. It made sense in the era before printing, video, or the internet to keep the high classical artwork and literature behind the walls of a university. But just because I, a peasant, can buy and read a copy of Aristotle’s metaphysics doesn’t mean that you can’t. Nor does being outside the system mean that there are few helps to make the thing easier to learn. Furthermore, how does a culture keep interest in things that most people will never see?

If old great works are so great, why do we stop caring about them as opposed to yearning for the standard they had set? Sounds more like the traditional humanities were simply inferior to the new, "diluted" way of doing art.

Because we don't study history, and we lose the cultural understanding that made those works great in the first place. We forget the lessons our fathers learnt in blood when we forget the art that touched their hearts. We doom ourselves to falling into the same pits they did.

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