September 22, 2021

China Seems Determined To Destroy The Things That Have Made It Relatively Successful

September 22, 2021/ Francis Menton

Is China in the process of “winning” the battle for the future of the world? Certainly, Xi Jinping thinks so. So does everyone else in China if you believe what they say. (But then, nobody in China is allowed to dissent on this point, so in truth you don’t really know what they think and you have no way to find out.).
Zillions of statism-loving American journalists and pundits also think that China, through its tightly-state-and-party-controlled crony capitalist model, represents the wave of the future. As a prominent example, there was the unforgettable Tom Friedman of the New York Times back in 2009:
“[W]hen [a country] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can . . . have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”
Or, to consider something from a pundit on the right, there was David Goldman of PJ Media writing in March 2021 in a piece titled “Why China Is Winning.” Goldman’s answer, in a word, was “meritocracy.”
But in several pieces over the years, I have offered a different perspective

September 20, 2021

Renewable Energy Crunch Comes To The UK

September 20, 2021/ Francis Menton

Anybody who looks with a critical eye at the madcap push toward increasing amounts of intermittent renewable electricity generation in the U.S. and Europe quickly realizes that eventually this has to hit a wall. But when will the crunch come?
Theoretically, with 100% fossil fuel backup you can keep an electricity system of majority renewables functioning indefinitely, albeit with consumers bearing the unnecessary costs of two fully redundant generating systems. But then politicians pledge to reduce and then eliminate the fossil fuel backup, and by dates that are rapidly approaching. Backup plants get closed and decommissioned. For how much longer can this really keep going?

I have written about this subject several times (for example here in June 2020, and here in July 2021); but, not wanting to sound like the boy who cried wolf, I don’t just keep harping on it every day. Better to wait for the inevitable crunch to actually hit somewhere.
In just the past few days, an early version of the crunch has begun to hit the UK

September 18, 2021

September 18, 2021/ Francis Menton

Are the “smart” people really very smart? That is, do the people who score at the top on standardized tests and then turn up at the fancy universities actually have a superior level of reasoning and rationality that they can apply to solving the problems of the world? Or are they instead just trapped in the same sorts of groupthink and mass irrationality as everyone else?
Well, let’s consider the latest information coming out of Harvard University.
Harvard — you can’t get any “smarter” than that. This is America’s premier institution of higher learning. You don’t get to go there unless you are at the very top of the top of intelligence. And the people who run the place have to be even smarter still. If you want to see what “smart” really is, this is where to look.
About a week ago Harvard President Larry Bacow decided it was time to send out one of those occasional missives addressed to all “Members of the Harvard Community.”

September 16, 2021

September 16, 2021/ Francis Menton

In this age of wokeness and cancel culture, an aggressive minority wields the weapons of demonization and stigmatization to trample all opposition. Undoubtedly you have seen many reports of dissenting conservatives and libertarians self-censoring to avoid everything from loss of friends to politically-driven college admissions or grades to getting fired from a job.
So today I want to highlight two conservatives of notable courage who can’t be silenced, and who are calling on others to join them in a more assertive push back against the forces of authoritarian wokism. The two are Mollie Hemingway and Tom Klingenstein.

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.