January 04, 2024

In The New York Times, "Colonialism" Explains Everything

January 04, 2024/ Francis Menton

Why, oh why, is the world so unfair and unjust? In one of the latest narratives of the left, “colonialism” has recently become the trendiest part of the explanation. Or maybe it’s the even more evil variant, “settler colonialism.”
But didn’t colonialism end just about everywhere around 60 or more years ago? Sorry, but that doesn’t matter. Something as evil as colonialism has magic tentacles that can cause injustice and unfairness and ruination extending out multiple generations beyond the time when it came to an end.
This can go to quite absurd lengths.

March 26, 2023

Pursuit of the Green Dream Will Make Inequality a LOT Worse

March 26, 2023/ Jane Menton

There are different ways of looking at the issue of human inequality.
The modern Left obsesses about inequality as measured in dollars of income. But if one measures inequality based on quality-of-life, it quickly becomes clear that we have achieved great progress toward equality on the things that really count.
Much of that progress is at risk of reversal from imposition of the green dream.

January 05, 2023

January 05, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here’s a question where I’ll bet you think the answer ought to be completely obvious: Should the purpose of government “anti-poverty” programs be to help the beneficiaries rise from poverty and become successful and independent, or alternatively should the purpose of such programs be to entice the recipients of aid into a life of permanent dependency upon government handouts?
From the earliest days of the anti-poverty programs back in the 1960s, the programs were sold to the public as being a temporary boost by which the poor could be helped to escape from poverty and achieve self-sufficiency. And yet, about six decades in, the rate of poverty never seems to go down, and the number of program beneficiaries grows inexorably. Did something change along the way?
The answer is yes.

March 25, 2022

March 25, 2022/ Francis Menton

If you have followed the news coming out of Yale — and why would you, really? — you would know that it’s one ever more embarrassing thing after another for the seemingly “smart” people at this elite university.
Wokeism run amok; overt racism in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”; an uproar over a professor who offered a gentle defense of “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes; and on and on. Most recently, a couple of weeks ago it was 100 loud law student protesters shouting down a free speech debate while the Dean of the Law School (Heather Gerken) stood by and did nothing.
But if I had to pick the very worst thing about Yale, a good candidate would be how Yale has inflicted its progressive/socialist ideology on its home city of New Haven, Connecticut, to the great harm of New Haven.
Unlike many of the events listed above which are frequently in the news, the consequences of these progressive ideas on a city take the form of a gradual decline that can pass unnoticed until one day you stop to take stock

September 14, 2021

September 14, 2021/ Francis Menton

In response to Saturday’s post, several commenters remarked that it is not appropriate to blame “bad schools” for the poor academic performance of many children from minority groups, particularly black children. These commenters suggest that there are other factors that play a principal role, and that these factors are things that schools can do nothing to change, particularly low IQ and/or a culture that does not value education.
The problem with this contention is that there is actually substantial and even definitive evidence that schools can make a very large difference in the educational outcomes of minority children. I previously discussed some of that evidence in this post from August 2020. That post focused on the issue of school discipline, as well as on Thomas Sowell’s recent book Charter Schools and Their Enemies.
Today I’ll focus on some data generated by the State of New York.

September 11, 2021

September 11, 2021/ Francis Menton

As we have seen, corporate American has now fully bought in to the mantra that “any racial disparities are the result of racist policies.” See Friday’s post focusing on Google for one example of a company whose “antiracist” training materials use just that language.
Essentially every major institution in the country — corporations, professional firms, universities, you name it — is on a mission to get the percentage of minorities in high-paying technical, professional and executive positions up to the percentage that those minorities represent of the population as a whole. That goal particularly applies to African Americans.
Yet despite all the pledges and commitments, change occurs at a glacial pace. As Friday’s post reported, the likes of Google and Facebook, despite seemingly having adopted “diversity and inclusion” as the single most important focus of their operations, have only moved the ratios of black “tech” workers and executives by about a percentage point or two over eight years of reporting data. At Apple, the percentage of black “tech” workers has actually gone down by 2% since 2016. In my own field of major law firms, some fifty years of affirmative action have only brought the percentage of black partners overall to about 2-3%.
Perhaps there is a problem that the pipeline is just not producing a sufficient pool of potential candidates for all major institutions to hire 13% blacks into all high-ranking positions at the same time.