Unwinding Success

 Attempts at social engineering or “nudging” as Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler have generally ended up in a smoking heap.  Busing and other forms of forced integration failed and often were counterproductive.  Government’s push for a low fat, high carbohydrate diet in the early and mid 80’s, combined with sugar subsidies and the growth in fast food chains like McDonald’s led to an obesity epidemic, reaching a current astonishing 42% rate, with 70% of Americans classified as overweight.  The obesity rates, in turn, led to the high COVID19 morbidity rates during the pandemic.  The steering of our diets by government has ended in massive failure.

Social engineering has consequences and those consequences have been almost uniformly deleterious.

But I will admit that two movements—and only two,  aided and abetted by government have been enormously successful.

In the early to mid-80’s, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop waged a war on cigarette smoking.  There was a time when we could actually vest some trust in our public health administrators.  At the time 42% of the American population smoked cigarettes.  Cigarette smoking was ubiquitous.  The haze was permitted nearly everywhere—in restaurants, in the workplace and even in the back of airplanes.  I have distinct memories of flying to Las Vegas on my way to a hiking trip in Zion National Park in the back of the plane in a haze of smoke of drunk middle aged folks on their way to the casinos.  The curtailment of this public health hazard took time, however.  The government mandated warnings on cigarette packages in 1966, and cigarette advertising was banned in 1970. But the government didn’t get around to banning smoking from air travel on flights less than 2 hours long until 1988 and on longer flights in 1990.  Since then, smoking has been severely restricted in areas in which smoking was formerly permitted—restaurants and most public places were off limits.

Koop’s initiative was enormously successful. Today, only about 15% of the adult population smokes cigarettes, down from 42% in 1965 (51% among males).   Did this engineering eliminate smoking entirely? No.  But government taxed it, restricted it, regulated it, and brought a social stigma upon smokers, relegating smokers to the dark corners of our society, with its concomitant benefits to public health.  Smoking has been almost entirely driven out of society. 

The second social engineering project was headed by iconic Martin Luther King.  It took a long time, but as with cigarette smoking, racism was driven to near extinction in American society.  Legal structures were changed in the mid 1960’s with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the elimination of redlining.  Social changes took a bit longer to seep through society.  Loving v Virginia wasn’t decided until 1967 the same year  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released.  Star Trek’s interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhuru was still a big deal in 1968.  Blacks went mainstream  in the media the late 60’s and early 70’s with Diahann Carroll starring in the groundbreaking sitcom Julia and, later, with The Jeffersons and Good Times. 

Almost all of the people of my generation and younger had MLK’s words drummed into us like catechism.   Judging a person by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was dogma, an 11^th Commandment.   It was correct.  It was just.  And it ranked in importance with the other 10.   And, in large measure, IT WORKED.  Our citizenry probably observed this 11^th Commandment with more regularity than the other 10 over the past 50 years.  As with smoking, racism was probably not entirely stamped out, but it was definitely put on the run.

With so few successes to crow about, it is astonishing to me that these accomplishments are now being rolled back by the progressives.   Racism and segregation are definitely on the rebound under the guise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement.  Two generations of work in which people were explicitly instructed and indeed mandated by law not to take into consideration skin color are being systematically repealed and reversed.  At work and, indeed, codified by law, we are now being told that we must look at race as a primary consideration.   School admissions, job opportunities, promotions, contract bidding are all now tilted in favor of “persons of color”   in a sort of pathological reverse apartheid.  Universities now have separate dorms for black students, something that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago.   And it is being codified into law and spoken openly about by our politicians.  The Biden Administration provided aid to black farmers.  Oakland’s guaranteed income program was initially limited to BIPOC people.  Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is sponsoring a bill to make public transportation free to people of color, because “Black and LatinX commuters are disproportionately criminalized by fair evasion policies.” 

The list goes on and on.  But 50 years of progress in knitting together a social fabric are being torn apart again.

Similarly, the anti-smoking policies that were so successful in driving smoking to the margin are being resurrected, this time with cannabis (and the concomitant toleration of other drug use).   The Left allied with the libertarians to legalize pot and provide free needles to drug abusers, along with places for them to indulge in their addictions.   The result is a nice growth chart of marijuana use as tobacco is now being swapped out for marijuana as the smoking product of choice.  And unlike tobacco, which has limited effect on cognition and behavior, the growth in marijuana use will impact productivity and motivation, along with other side effects.   And we are seeing the effects of removing the social stigma from other drug use- crime, homelessness, and the littering of our city streets with used needles.  Oh, and by the way, the libertarian argument that legalizing pot and taxing it would take the black market out of it turned out to be a false hope as greedy government implemented tax rates on the product high enough to ensure that the black market survived.  Smoking is back and on the rise, but it’s not tobacco. And just as with tobacco, the government has as terrible incentive to push the habit.  It wants to hook you and your children because it is hooked on the tax revenues.

Most of the time, these social experiments fail.   I identified two that were actually quite successful.

Sadly, it appears that we can't leave success alone.

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

 

Ok, maybe they’re not really sweet.  Or little.

Americans are sturdy people.  We can handle just about anything.  But we are really struggling with the patent lies and manipulation that seem to be bombarding us from every direction.  And the amazing thing is that they lie so boldly and confidently, while looking at you straight in the eyes.  And if you assert something to the contrary on social media, you will get banished, at least for awhile.

Here are just a few:

·        Lia Thomas is a woman.   That’s a flat out lie, and Charlie Kirk got booted from Twitter for saying it.  Lia Thomas is a man.  He has man equipment, which his teammates complained about seeing swinging around the locker room..  He has spent most of his life as a man.  Yet, Penn, the legacy media, social media, and the NCAA tried to tell you something different.   Heather Heying, the noted evolutionary biologist got it exactly right, “The binary nature of sex in our lineage, which is at least 500 million years old, is recognizable by everyone. It is recognizable even if you’re a cat who doesn’t even have all of his parts anymore."

 How to deal with trans people in sports is an easily solvable problem—create a new division.  Here in Illinois, we have 8 football brackets and 4 in boy’s basketball.  Why? Because it is not fair for large schools to be matched up with small schools.  Sports is inherently about fairness, not “inclusivity.”  Permitting Thomas to wreck the lifetime efforts of these girls is inherently unfair.  Abigail Shrier correctly termed her smashing NCAA records as “vandalism.”  Thomas’s  presence in intercollegiate women's competition is simply a lie and I hope at some point, the competitors have a Rosa Parks moment.

 ·        CDC overstated child COVID deaths by 24%, claiming it was a “coding error” in its algorithm.  A few weeks ago, CDC director Rochelle Walensky couldn’t answer how many COVID deaths were deaths “from COVID” versus “with COVID.”  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki went further, stating that “we don’t know whether COVID harms older people more than younger people.” 

These are all apparent lies and attempts at obfuscation.  The overstatement of pediatric COVID deaths by that wide of a margin has wide implications.   Good data is needed to formulate policy, and the costs of bad policy are huge.   In the corporate world, if your earnings get restated by 24% because of an accounting error, your stock will take a hit, shareholder suits will follow, perhaps an SEC investigation and people will lose their jobs.  In other words, there will be consequences.  The CDC and the White House can have errors and misstate with impunity and there are no consequences whatsoever.

 ·        Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.  51 former intelligence professionals signed on to that lie, and social media squelched any skepticism about it.   Yet, there have been no consequences.  We were told that Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board of directors because of his business acumen, that his newfound profession as an artist was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that his literary genius was worth a large book advance.  They didn’t even bother trying to come up for a plausible explanation for why the wife of the mayor of Moscow wired $3.5 million into his personal account.   They just glided over that one.  So far, no consequences.

 ·        The Steele Dossier and Clinton spying on Trump.   The mainstream media scoffed when Trump asserted that he was being spied on.  And now we know that it was true.  And it started with ginned up, falsehoods presented to the FISA court.  The FISA court is a special court, without an adversarial process, and as such, demands special procedural protections. As Chief Judge, John Roberts has oversight responsibility for the FISA court.  Yet, we have not heard a word from him regarding the fraud perpetrated on the FISA court for political purposes so that something like this never happens again.  Again, there were no consequences in a most serious matter to face the Republic since Watergate.  

 ·        Then there are unresolved questions about the Las Vegas shooting, the Nashville Christmas bombing, January 6, the Whitmer kidnapping plot, the “Patriot Front.”  None of these events have been fully explained, and leave a great deal of lingering skepticism.

 With the government’s enhanced ability to mislead, obfuscate and outright lie on full display, we now are hearing about biological research labs in the Ukraine, and the need to keep them out of Russian hands.   The US is in full denial that they are bioweapon labs while Russia is finger pointing and China is demanding transparency.  Tulsi Gabbard has raised the alarm about this and was slammed by Mitt Romney as “treasonous”—quite a serious charge.  

For the first time in my lifetime, I am equally skeptical about assertions regarding these labs from the Russian government, the Ukrainian government, the CCP and our own.   That is quite a realization.

 

The Advantage of Uncertainty

 Putin should have called me first.

I could have saved him a lot of trouble.  Ukraine was never going to be a walk in the park.  I knew Ukrainians growing up.  These people are crazy.  There was a story floating around the internet that an old Ukrainian woman flung a glass jar of cucumbers out of her balcony and knocked a Russian drone out of the sky.  I don’t know if it’s true or not.  But it sure could be true.

The father of one of my oldest and best friends was a partisan and fought the Russians two generations ago.  He hid in ditches and sewers and when he died, he asked to be buried with his war companions in a special cemetery on the East Coast.  These people will not be subdued easily.

We stand at the crossroads of the most dangerous time since the Cuban Missile Crisis- and we stand with a foreign policy team that looks like it came out of a Monty Python skit and that is what scares me more than anything.  We have a dementia riddled president who already demonstrated his risk aversion by opposing the raid that killed Bin Laden.  We have a VP that doesn’t know who’s in and who’s out of NATO and is a national embarrassment.   We have a Secretary of Defense that is more consumed with pronouns than warfighting capability, and a Secretary of State that is aptly named.  He is mostly Blinkin’.

I have very little confidence in the steadfastness and judgment of any of them.

Bari Weiss’s  podcast on the wisdom of establishing a No Fly Zone is worth listening to.

Honestly with Bari Weiss: The Stakes of a No Fly Zone on Apple Podcasts

There are good arguments to be made in both directions, and I highly recommend this well-reasoned podcast.

But the worst part of all this is that Biden gave away a huge strategic advantage- simply gave it away.  That is the advantage of uncertainty in foreign affairs.   And Putin smartly grabbed it.

We wielded the powerful weapon of uncertainty under Donald Trump.  The press actually helped a great deal.  The press ran op-eds trumpeting the warnings that Trump was “unfit to be president,” that he was “impulsive” and would “start WWIII.”  When North Korea acted up, he shot back that North Korea “would be met by fire and fury” and said “I have a button, too and mine’s bigger.”  The press went wild.

But our adversaries took note.  While under Trump’s watch, our adversaries were mostly quiet.  Trump took measured, but firm steps in foreign affairs—responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the droning of Soliemani.  These smaller actions demonstrated that Trump meant business.  The MSM largely did his work for him, creating the image of someone that was just crazy enough to pull the trigger.  It registered with North Korea, Iran, Russia and China.  Trump was like that surly little guy that sat drinking by himself at the end of the bar.  You just never knew.

Now with Biden, everything changed.   Early on, Biden announced that there were 16 sites that would provoke a response if Russia hacked them (the implication being that nothing else was off limits, really).  The cut and run in Afghanistan last summer told the world that Biden had no stomach for a confrontation, and would even be willing to abandon his own citizens to avoid one.  Iran just fired missiles at the US counsulate in Iraq and provoked no response from the Biden administration.  Biden announced that there would be no boots on the ground or send jets to Ukraine, and continues to explicitly say what he will and will not do, all of which has entered into Putin’s mental calculations.

Advantage Putin.  

 Putin, on the other hand, has created a great deal of uncertainty over what he will and will not do.  He has rattled the saber on the use of nuclear weapons.  He has indicated that weapons supply routes are “legitimate targets.”  He has made other veiled threats at European countries.

Is Putin’s nuclear threat a bluff?  As with Trump, the MSM is helping Putin.  Much has been speculated regarding Putin’s mental health.   He just might be crazy enough to do it.

Early in his presidency, Trump said that he will not tell adversaries what he plans to do.  We can see how much value there is in doing that.

Putin has figured that out and is using uncertainty to great advantage.

University of Chicago's Steep Decline

 The Woke-ification of The University of Chicago is nearing its terminal phase.   I have to admit that I was amazed at how quickly this citadel to the creation of new knowledge and academic freedom crumbled.  Despite the eloquent and impassioned pleas from the likes of Dorian Abbot and Harald Uhlig, the university’s Senate voted to establish an entire Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (“RDI”) Department.  Not just a center, but an entire department.

As an alum of both the College and the Booth School of Business, I have watched with morbid curiosity as the forces of Woke chipped away at this once fine institution—an institution that I was proud to be associated with.  In watching institutions cave to this insidious force, there are some observations that I have made.  First, Woke-ism is a terminal condition.  I have yet to see an organization that started to go Woke reverse course.   Like termites, it gets into the foundation and eventually, it consumes the organization and demonizes anyone that rejects its ideology, even when the organization begins to do nonsensical things.   The Art Institute of Chicago fired all of its docents because they were too “white.” The American Writers Museum featured an obscure trans author along with Kathy Griffin in one of their programs.  The Newberry Library heralds drag queens as “role models” for children.   The English Department at The University of Chicago suddenly will only admit students that wish to do work in Black Studies.  That is the mid=phase, when organizations begin to do things that on their face are absurd. Second, as James Lindsay noted in his book Cynical Theories, it starts in the communications area and begins to take over the controls--- just as a virus does, bit by bit, then at an ever increasing rate.   Third, the symptoms are unmistakable.   The infection communicates its presence with clear words and symbols that are at one time, innocuous yet deadly to the purposes of the organization.  “Inclusiveness,” “Reimagine,”  and of course, “Equity” and “Diversity.”  It will celebrate the rainbow flag and email notifications from individuals always have pronouns in the signature.   Those are all sure signs that the organization has contracted Wokeness.

The cancel culture is inseparable from Wokeness.   Wokeness does not allow for debate and empirical evidence.  Debating the Woke is like debating a fundamentalist Baptist about the rapture.  Don’t waste your breath.

Let’s tease apart this new, grand department.  Its birth name has meaning and we have to assume that it was deliberately given a three part name, each of which could be a field on its own (although they believe that there is some synergy having them together). 

Race.  A department of Race is a field of study only a National Socialist could love.  It runs counter to everything those of us baby boomers and later have been taught with the words of MLK—to judge a person not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.  And this was remarkably successful, relegating racism impotent in all of our legal, housing, and employment structures. 

Diaspora.   A department devoted to the study of diaspora already exists.  Diaspora is the movement of peoples over time.  That study already exists in the history department.  Indeed, a quick gander at the history department faculty shows that it already has 10-12 faculty members whose interests and study involve race, diaspora, and immigration or such things.  So this department already exists.

Indigeneity.  True Wokeness in academics always involves a word or words not in common usage.  How many times in your life have you spoke or written the word “indigeneity?”  As with “Diaspora,” a department devoted to the study of indigeneity already exists.  It is called the Anthropology Department.

We must assume that the order in which the organizers chose to name this division was deliberate, and they chose to put Race first.  That is symbolic.  After a couple of generations of teaching our society that race should be one of the last things to look at, suddenly it is first.

Wokeness overtook the University of Chicago with surprising speed.  It began with the small concession of law school professor Geoffrey Stone, one of the authors of the Chicago Principles of Free Speech. After an Iranian student objected to his use of the “N” word as an example in his first amendment class and some students demanded that Stone lose his job, Stone conceded.   It was the beginning of the end.

After the George Floyd riots, the English Department announced that in the 2020 academic year, it would only admit students interested in Black Studies.  So much for Shakespeare and Chaucer.

And then economics professor Harald Uhlig had the temerity to suggest that BLM was making a mistake by demanding to defund the police.  The university’s administration responded to claims that Uhlig was a racist by conducting a full investigation into his social media posts.  It found nothing.

Since then, several departments have posted statements that amount to swearing fealty to the preachings of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. 

Scholarship and meritocracy are on the way out at The University of Chicago.  Equity and Inclusiveness are in.

It would have taken an exceptionally strong leader at the university to hold back the forces of Woke orthodoxy once they gained a foothold but President Zimmer was suffering from brain cancer and Wokeism began to flourish. 

Sure, there are some holdouts.  Professor Dorian Abbot is doing a courageous job of pushing back, as are a group of conservative students that established an online website The Chicago Thinker.  But they are mere holdouts.  The once great university has fallen.

I have a couple of predictions.  First, within three years, there will be demands for “common sense” amendments to the Chicago Principles of Free Speech.  Those amendments will make free speech and free inquiry less free.   Second, the new division will become a kind of commissar, and will begin policing other departments for signs of racism.  It will call out other divisions that do not have sufficient numbers of African Americans or women in their divisions, and will call them out for “unacceptable” research and study.  Eventually, it will elbow its way into a kind of super-division. 

Watching the Wokeification of The University of Chicago is like watching a parent go into hospice--a once vibrant, confident person important to your development withers away.