This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools; I think it was an extremely irrational thing to do which will prove to have had lasting negative repercussions on a generation of children. But the reason we did so wasn't because of a cynical desire to boost the economy at all costs, but rather because people were panicking about the virus and were desperate that Something Be Done. Many, many people were completely unwilling to consider any course of action except for the maximally safe one, and so we closed down the schools even though I don't think there was ever a significant risk to leaving them open.
Schools weren't closed for the children, they were closed for the faculty. The public school educator and management class is dominated by progressive anxiety superspreaders.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure when it should have been clear to the authorities that prepubescent children were very low risk, not only for serious illness but also for transmission. By the start of the new school year in autumn 2020, and probably earlier, it was obvious to intelligent onlookers that you could have reopened schools up to age ~14 with negligible additional transmission (and of course high schools should have reopened once the vaccine was available to teachers and pupils who wanted it). But my memory of the public conversation at the time was that people were incapable of grokking that virus spread is based on physiology and that teens are physiological adults, not 'children'. The logic of "15-year-olds can spread the virus (which they could, even if they were not going to get life-threatening symptoms), so 'children' can spread the virus, so we need to lock down 7-year-olds" was irrefutable in both policy-world and normie-world.
The US (though not other countries) did a particularly bizarre thing where many states kept the schools closed long after entertainment venues and suchlike had reopened. Education Realist had some excellent posts on the politics of this - the reason is that it wasn't establishment COVID panicans keeping the schools closed, it was a coalition between the teachers' unions and every parent demographic that didn't trust the government apart from the red tribe COVID minimizers.
The U.S. was not monolithic. Red states reopened schools pretty early (with much condemnation from the prestige media and the democrats). This includes high schools (which again costs of closures did not justify any benefits from closure). Red states did just fine compared to blue states.
But the NEA got a lot of perks for their members and the NEA is stronger in blue states. COViD was an excuse for the NEA to extract value.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.
Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.
It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.
The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.
Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.
Greg Abbott had created a task force specifically about their staff shortages in Texas in 2022. In Oklahoma, they used employees across various state agencies as substitutes.. In Iowa many schools have moved to (and many are still at!) four day school weeks. And here's a story from 2024 about Florida still dealing with staff shortages of teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.
In specifically Florida, the shortages were so bad that they had to draw substitutes from non traditional sources. One district even emailed the parents asking for them to step in as substitute workers. Some shortages are still ongoing! Like last year some parents were dealing with delays in school bus pickups due to shortages of workers
Honestly the school week probably should be 3-4 days a week like college. It’s more efficient.
Those areas did open
Do you even read your own links? Florida is quoted as paying $10-13 an hour for substitutes. Or just google a bunch of links for staff shortages? If this was important they could hike pay. You can make double walking into a Chipotle.
Florida schools perform fine so it’s probably not a real issue. Though the demographic adjusted stats don’t account for Flordia Hispanics being white Europeans while California is filled with Amerindians.
OK, this bears repeating, even though I thought everyone knew the point of the US public school system is not education. It has many purposes to many different people; social engineering(mainly by shifting the default choice for middle class women away from 'housewife' rather than anything to do with the students, it's not good enough at indoctrination for that- although it has been in the past), free daycare, giving older kids something to do other than being rowdy, etc. Hell some of it is just very expensive signaling. But 'actually educating kids', let alone doing so efficiently, falls very low on the list of priorities, and US school systems which prioritize it over all these other goals(creating employment demand for college educated women, warehousing teenagers where they'll be less annoying, etc) perform much better than public schools.
50% agree. It’s primary mission is still education at a minimum it’s what drives the economy getting the top 20% educated and into the professional class.
But yes it does all that other stuff. And in certain areas the education part is the least important. Assimilation use to be important but we seem to have given that up.
As far as Covid goes staff shortages were not important for educating. A reduced schedule with off-day homework accomplishes that.
The top 20% would be educated regardless- their parents can afford private school.
The system panics when teachers aren't going to get paid, when the free daycare isn't being provided it's a big deal, job cuts are a horrible tragedy, but when the kids don't learn it's a shrug and a demand for more money- interventions to provide school lunches during the summer, even outside of the school setting, are very welcomed by the system. Interventions to educate kids better are not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes that's basic economics. Having to raise your pay in a shortage is the default thing expected in a shortage. Supply goes down but demand stays the same = price goes up. That doesn't change that supply went down.
This was about pandemic caused shortages of labor. Not states refusing to hire workers.
Your articles come closer to proving my point by Bayesian logic. You went google searching for “teacher shortage” and the best articles you could find were school districts offering wages 50% of no-skill wages which is essentially no different than just deciding not to hire.
It’s like saying I want a Ferrari and my bid is $15k. I don’t actually want a Ferrari.
If workers currently cost X part of the budget, and then a supply shock causes them to cost 1.5x the budget in order to maintain the same quantity of workers, then it is a problem of shortages. Price is the result of supply and demand. Yes you can pay more to help make up for the shortage and get new supply, but that you have to pay more is because of a supply shock.
The same way if you were to buy cheese every week for 2 dollars and then suddenly a disease spread through the cows and less cheese could be made this year and it now cost 4 dollars. Yes you can pay more to get the same amount of cheese for yourself. There is still a cheese shortage.
Wages going up were not a result of the pandemic. They are still up. It’s government handouts. Military disability. Food stamps. Etc. but $13 an hour for someone with a bachelor degree was never a serious attempt to get workers.
Same story in everything run by Dems. Why can’t we build housing? Regulations. But nuclear is too expensive. Why is that? It’s creating a problem and then complaining we can not doing that thing after you created the problem.
We spend 225 billion a year now on military disability. Honestly I was stupid not joining the military. Spend 4 years and get $5k for life. 15% of the working age population is now on food stamps.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sûre, there’s a shortage of school workers- but there’s also a general labor shortage, and schools don’t pay exceptionally well(especially in non-teacher roles, school maintenance and driving and nursing roles pay much much less relative to skill set and qualifications than teaching does). That doesn’t distinguish schools from thousands of other things that did reopen on time.
Well some things are better at reopening under capacity than others. A hardware store might be able to handle 3/4th the workers by just letting some tasks go undone and having customers not served as fast. But a school with 3/4th the teachers means classrooms getting crowded, and especially with younger children who are gonna be more rowdy and energetic in general, harder to control. Likewise 3/4th the cafeteria crew and all of a sudden you don't have enough food being made in time for the children or food safety requirements aren't being met. If it's not too bad, you can get away with just telling the few kids at the end "sorry we out of X, gotta have Y" but it doesn't have too much leniency. Schools are still making up for staff shortages in this way. Large bus driver shortages mean kids don't get to school but the smaller bus driver shortages just mean some kids get to school 40 minutes later.
But still there's only so much that can be worked with, especially when dealing with the young children and legal requirements that politicians were hesitant to change over temporary issues, that during the height of COVID they just didn't have much choice.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).
That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.
One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also to, beat a dead horse, closing schools is not confining kids to their rooms. At least in the US. It's not enough that people in Australia were under house arrest, we must pretend that was the case everywhere.
That's... not what happened in Australia.
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.
Okay. I exaggerated. In reality, NSW and Victoria residents (over half the country) were only permitted to be within 5km of home (unless the Melbourne night curfews were in effect).
More options
Context Copy link
Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?
I think Olive meant being able to go for walks at any time.
Late answer but in Paris, where I lived during most of the pandemic, there was a curfew at 6 pm, after which you were not allowed to leave your house without a valid reason (medical emergency, work, etc.) Your daytime movement was also heavily restricted to 1 hour at a time, and within 1km radius of your apartment. You had to fill out and sign a specific form clarifying your reason for being outdoors every single time you left your home.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-france-requires-form-leave-house-walk-shopping-2020-3
I assume it maybe wasn't quite as extreme in Australia, but in Paris we most certainly could not leave home to go for walks at any time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.
@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.
I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
I've looked into the swedish response back during Covid and as far as I can see, they did mostly the same: They made a lot of recommendations to minimize social contact, they just didn't force you. And this worked: If you look, for example, into mobility data such as usage of trains and subways, it went down just the same as other large cities across the west.
The big problem with mandated legal lockdowns such as the UK and germany, both of which I'm more directly familiar with due to having lived in both and having family & friends in both, was their pointless tyranny and nonsense rules. I have a friend who got a massive fine in the UK. His crime? He took a walk with his flatmates through a forest - which was further than his allowed distance. He lived in central London of course, so he was allowed to take walks there. I, too, got told to move along and go home again in the UK. I was sitting on a park bench in a mostly-empty park reading a book.
Germany I at least didn't experience any problems going outside - but I was deliberately living in the countryside with my parents & girlfriend. My mom constantly reminded us, every time we technically were breaking the law, such as driving too far from home or staying outside too long or whatever. The situation in the cities was, of course, very different. Plenty of friends barely left their rooms and actually got stopped and controlled by police when they did, getting questioned to make sure they had legitimate reason to be outside.
Not to mention the insanities on the day care and school system and their still-lingering effects. Frequent & long closures threw back parents and children months to years in their career and education, respectively. Worse, the new culture of 1) always taking sick leave no matter how weak a cold is and b) always having to stay home two extra days after the cold passed "to be safe" is still on the books in many places and makes everything unworkable insofar as people actually follow the rules.
Again, my mom is a day care worker herself and she is extremely pissed about her younger coworkers constantly taking sick leave, always for a full week. She is staying even when seriously sick, because otherwise it would mean all the parents who depend on them couldn't work. This is still going on. Our own daycare also still has these rules on the book, and a few of the workers do seem to take advantage, but at least not as many. Several of our friends with older kids tell similar stories of schools with constant "teacher shortfalls" which are entirely due to teachers constantly taking sick leave by sticking to the letter of the current rules.
More options
Context Copy link
Good for y'all. The US version was that public parks that had gates were chained shut, people were fined for going to the beach, etc. In the UK your neighbors would snitch on you for being outside.
In my state of Washington they banned fishing. Not congregating with others to go fishing, fishing in general. Casting a line off of your own dock was illegal for awhile.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, US and UK were retarded about it. That does not mean that the only options were "do nothing" or "be completely retarded" and we have examples of western nations that had generally sane responses that didn't involve locking everyone indoors or forcibly shutting down workplaces but also didn't literally tell people to go out to bars and restaurants (which Sweden did in 2020 spring) or keep elderly and other high risk groups during the highest case peaks without masks or any visiting restrictions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sweden did great if you look at excess deaths over a two year period. And no, it wasn’t because everyone stayed home.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link