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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

Except it's not at all like this. Sure, maybe only one finds a chemistry job, but they all eventually find decent jobs, if the stats are any indication. College grads have half the unemployment rate compared to high school grads, and make considerably more money too , especially for STEM. This is the problem with these theories of society. They start with the theory and then everything must bend towards it or viewed through the lens of it.

I agree about consulting. Same for the financial services sector, and also the advertising industry. There are large sectors of the economy in which people are being paid large sums of money to produce mediocre results, or in which there is no way to track or quantify results, like with ad spending. It's a problem of asymmetric information. The firm knows its overcharging or overpromising, and the client doesn't.

I think there's a strong divide between undergrad and grad. Undergrads seem mostly content to socialize and party for a few years while getting the stamp that demonstrates that they were at least conscientious enough to get most of the work done on time. Grad students are often the ones thinking that they can push science forward, become long-term, impactful academics, and such. I think this theory is primarily about the latter, while your counter-consideration is mostly about the former.

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