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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.

Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “

Say No To School. Choose Life.

People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

Multipolar trap. The only way to signal you're intelligent, dilligent, and agreeable is to spend four years purchasing a $100k piece of paper. The best way to know you're hiring someone who's not dumb, lazy, and/or antisocial is to fish from that pool of people.

Appoint Bryan Caplan Education Tsar (and overcome ideological aversion to tests that reveal population differences), and you can solve this signalling problem quicker and cheaper. By a lot.

If the purpose of college is mostly signaling, yeah, you can just require high standardized-test scores, cut a few courses, load students up on lots of credits (21 credits per semester was standard at West Point 50 years ago), and basically speedrun college. Two years of hard-ass work, three 20-credit semesters a year.

There is also a socialization/talent-search part of college, too...centuries ago it was a place for the brilliant to mingle with the rich. Isaac Newton had to work his way through college, waiting tables for his richer classmates.