Coyote Blog

When I see stuff like this taken seriously, I know it is time to replace capitalism's marketing team

Capitalism loves to paint prehistory as savage chaos, where only the ‘fittest’ thrived. But hunter-gatherers lived in deeply cooperative bands, sharing food, shelter, and care. The system erases that truth because it exposes capitalism as the real outlier in human history.

— borkedsys (@borkedsys) July 5, 2025

In the first part of this post I will discuss why this quote misses the heart of capitalism, and then I will come back to why this represents a level of historical ignorance that only a modern $200,000 college education could achieve.

The core of capitalism is cooperation

Virtually every task that human beings need to perform both to survive and to thrive (which I define as making one's life more fulfilling) requires both cooperation and coordination.  For the smallest of survival tasks, like say a 5 person group stalking a mammoth, it is possible to imagine that cooperation can occur entirely among peers using direct communication.

At some point it does not take long for this loose cooperation approach to get complicated.  Did everyone make their own spear?  Did it make any sense for the best hunters to waste their time chiseling spearheads, or could there be one expert?  If there is an expert, what share of the food would he get?  What if everyone wanted to be the spear maker?  What about that guy who always had some excuse not to go on the hunt with the team, should he still get food?  If the lazy guy (called a free rider in economics) got food, why would anyone face the dangers of hunting?

One can see all these problems in the history of the communes formed in the 1960s and 1970s in the US.  These communes were formed under a theory of pure cooperation, where the group would share all the labor as well as the product of the labor.  Most of these communes broke down because participants had not realized just how much freaking work subsistence farming entailed and the group broke apart in rancor over the free rider problem (if you are getting a share of the food anyway, why work?).

As the goods or services produced get more complicated than subsistence hunting or farming  -- ie if one wants things like vaccines or iphones -- then the cooperation problem gets harder because it requires the cooperation of people who may never even meet face-to-face or be able to communicate with the whole group to coordinate actions.  How do those of us in the Eastern Mediterranean felling giant cedar trees know how much wood the folks on the Upper Nile need, and when?  Such coordination is easy in a hunting team of four people, who know each other and their skills and can divvy up roles in an attack by just talking to each other directly.  But it becomes exponentially harder as the production task gets more complex.

These problems of coordination and cooperation have been solved throughout history just two ways:  By voluntary action driven by prices and profit or by bosses (called chief, king, premier, Caeser, fuhrer, etc) using force.

Emergent behavior in a boss-free society is for people to voluntarily trade their products or labor to others for what they need  -- this is the simple core of what we call capitalism.  This is not a system imposed on people, but the natural state into which free people evolve.  The hunting party gladly trades part of the catch to the best spear-maker whose efforts make them more successful and increase the time they can focus on hunting. Folks who can't or won't hunt must find other ways to be valuable to the group to get a share of the food.  Some inevitably innovate, discovering new food sources or hunting approaches.  As production and transactions get more complex, people move from barter to money, with prices for goods and services single-handedly performing the coordination function in a completely distributed and emergent manner (see I Pencil).

Capitalism is the only approach in all of history to solving the cooperation and coordination problem without the use or threat of force (though beware than many have availed themselves of force while still inaccurately calling it capitalism -- another example of poor brand control by the marketers of capitalism).  Capitalism is the un-system, the default emergent behavior of rational self-interested humans allowed to transact freely.  Every other system is founded on force under the auspices of a Boss.  It does not matter how the boss was selected (or self-selected) or if they work through some council or bureaucracy, the Boss is ultimately forcing the cooperation and performing the coordination.  He (and it has almost always been a he) decides who is making the spears, who is going on the hunting party, and who gets how much of the catch.  If you don't want to be the spear maker, tough sh*t you probably aren't getting any food.

And you may soon find that the boss gets a special triple helping of all the food and that any female who denies the boss her sexual favors will soon see their family starving.  Feudal, fascist, royal, and communist bosses all shared in common that they were exponentially wealthier than their citizens and in most cases effectively the wealthiest person in their country with the most and best of everything.  Capitalist countries tend to be the exception, with elected leaders at best making upper middle class salaries (at least from legitimate public sources).

As production gets more complex, the boss model gets worse and worse because it not just hard, but impossible for any central authority to solve the coordination problem  On the funny end of this is the Soviet Union producing in one year, say, a million pencil erasers but only 100 pencils.  On the horrible and tediously repetitious side of this is the tens of millions of people who died in Mao's Great Leap Forward.  Happy-clappy modern Ivy League socialists will argue that this is just socialism done wrong, that well-intentioned people would never end up with this sort of outcome.  But it never works out that way.  In part because the folks leading these Marxist efforts are not as well-intentioned as they pretend, but even more so because super nice people who create a system where leaders have power over life and death (as must be the case in a socialist economy) are eventually displaced by the Hitlers and Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots.  Ho Chi Minh seemed to begin as a smart, well-intentioned guy, but Lê Duẩn who took power from him was a brutal dictator who impoverished the Vietnamese people.

Unfortunately, over time, even nominally capitalist countries like the United States seem to devolve to the force end of the scale**. As markets become larger and more complicated, helpful rules emerge for the markets and transactions -- being emergent does not necessarily mean it is without structure.  However, when these rules get adopted or coopted by governments, the rules can be modified in a messy political process to create abuses and corruption.  More and more force enters the equation, eg we will arrest you if try to sell your wine out of state or try to build too many housing units on your plot of land.  A surprising number of the defects in capitalism often cited by its detractors result from these flawed government rules, and not from capitalism itself.  Michael Moore's "Capitalism A Love Story" turns out to be almost 100% an indictment of government interventions in the market to favor certain cronies, rather than of true free markets (yet more poor brand control for those marketers of capitalism).

So if one wants pure cooperation in a voluntary system without the use of force, capitalism is the one and only choice.  But what about all this stuff about competition?  Through sh*tty marketing, capitalism is often portrayed as fundamentally about competition rather than cooperation, and occasionally competition is even fetishized by certain defenders of capitalism who seem about a half step away from Spencerian social Darwinism.   The role of competition in markets is not to cull the weak -- in fact, Ricardo showed 200 years ago that with free markets, even the weakest producers still can contribute to the group's well-being.  The reason that competition exists, and the benefits that flow from competition, are based on the fact that almost all resources (land, iron ore, oil, and most importantly human time) are scarce.

Back to our hunting example, the obsidian from spear points might be extremely expensive for a tribe, requiring a lot of trade goods sent to far away tribes.  So imagine that there is one person who uses twice as much obsidian to make a spear point than another person,  Everyone in the group is better off if the spear-making job goes to the more productive person.  The wasteful guy needs to go find something else to do.  And that is the heart of competition right there -- achieving efficiency in a way that makes everyone richer.  By the way, I can easily picture this same situation in the Boss-force model where the wasteful spear-maker is the Boss's brother (or other crony) and keeps the job to the detriment of the whole tribe but increased wealth for the Boss's family.  Only the use of government force in markets allows this sort of crony outcome.

Historical Ignorance of Fetishizing Primitive Societies

A few thoughts about the realism of fantasy quoted above, because this is already too long

• The subsistence food production likely employed by any of the societies the author above is pining for is WAY more work than any modern American could imagine
• These societies were POOR, which is why unproductive members were frequently left to die.  It was a poverty so extreme it is almost beyond our modern Western imagining.
• Life would have been horribly uncomfortable -- no heating, no cooling, constant fleas and lice, slow travel
• Life would have been intellectually impoverished.  You would never have experienced any land, any people, any climate more than a few hundred miles (at most!) from your birthplace.  There were no writers or artists or intellectuals because everyone who could work had to work.
• Life would have been short.  The smallest cut could get infected and kill you.  You would be a ready host for any virus or bacteria that came along.  You would watch many or most of your kids die young.

There is no happy, cooperative, simple, small-scale life that also has leisure time, iphones, blogging jobs, or vaccines.  Capitalism is the exception in history, because it is the only way we have become rich and long-lived.  Most intellectual advancement is all traceable to capitalism -- the Renaissance occurred when it did due to proto forms of capitalism that created wealth in private hands that allowed for people to be, say, full-time painters.   Remember that the "victims" or losers in capitalist competition, the 10th percentile poorest people in the US, are still well-off enough to be counted among the very rich  in many countries outside the first world.

I will end with this meme:

**Postscript:  There is a parallel to this in communist countries, as countries like China and Vietnam exited from communist impoverishment to some economic improvement by allowing more openness to markets and private profit.

In what has become something of an annual tradition, here is this year's response to Princeton's annual giving request

My short answer is that I am not interested in donating to the University. 

What follows is the longer answer.  I probably should have found a previous year’s version of this letter that was better organized and sent that again, but lacking access to my files here are a few thoughts.

When I was at Princeton, the University used to reject the idea that it was a “trade school” whose sole mission was to teach future professionals the details of their craft.  Instead, the University insisted its mission was to create better citizens – and I bought into that when I was there in the 80’s.  But I no longer believe this is true.   I don’t see many graduates of any Ivy League school participating in our polity in a reasoned and mature manner or bringing to bear a sophisticated understanding of history, economics, and political theory to public discourse.  Heck, in many cases I don’t even see them acting like adults.

I suppose it will be easy to write this off to being more of the same from supporters of the current US President, except that I am not a supporter of the current Administration and have been sending these same concerns in letters to both the current and former Princeton presidents.

A partial list of these concerns include:

• Reduction of standards in admissions, grading, and even the seriousness and rigor of the academic material itself. To some extent the meta problem is the complete collapse of K-12 education (and more narrowly K-5 education) but rather than highlight and push back against falling levels of preparation, Princeton has joined the parade to mediocrity and lowered its own standards to paper over the problem.
• Hostility to certain races and ethnic groups that became so bad it caused me to quit participating in Princeton recruiting in 2017 because I could no longer look qualified Asian candidates in the eye and tell them honestly they had a chance
• Lack of intellectual diversity in the faculty and administration. I find it astonishing that a university – which is primarily an institution of ideas – would focus primarily on diversity of skin pigment and reproductive plumbing rather than diversity of ideas. Universities like Princeton refuse to admit that a diversity of ideas and political outlooks/assumptions might even be important.  Such a monoculture is never healthy.
• Rewarding virtue signaling over rational debate combined with a rejection of reason in favor of some sort of emotional calculus. Not only has the university developed a monoculture, but it is one based on a post-modern, anti-enlightenment, anti-rational philosophy that ironically rejects almost every principle on which modern universities were founded.  It is almost like a return to medieval scholasticism, where students are taught to torture facts into defined narratives and dogmas.
• Emphasis on promoting activism over other paths to living a productive life, an emphasis that starts in the admissions process
• Releasing graduates with no comprehensive understanding of history or economics but with fabulous AI- and consultant-polished application essays and theses based on personal lived experience. Why are schools training students to wallow in their own experience when their mission is supposed to be (or used to be) about broadening knowledge and awareness – exactly the opposite?   Is this education or mental health therapy? The one thing I did NOT need Princeton for was to contextualize how much it sucked to be a 16-year-old academically focused student at my high school.
• Making all the personal political, with 100% litmus test scores necessary to avoid exclusion. I remember at Princeton we had a table of 8-12 shifting members (“creatively called ‘the table’”) who ate together every day for two years.  The group had everything from Christian Conservatives to Marxists and we argued about everything, but we have all been friends for life. 
• Lack of any sane control on administrative spending, which has caused costs to skyrocket. I know that due to the generosity of Princeton alumni, these costs are manageable, but just because the school can afford this administrative bloat does not mean that it should.  I would never donate to a charity where more than half the money goes to administrative overhead.

All this ignores more recent issues with which I am less familiar, such as the horrifying return of overt antisemitism and student use of AI to thwart both learning objectives and the honor code.  Princeton’s response to both of these seem puzzlingly slow, but I have lost some of my connections on campus and don’t want to speak from ignorance.

When I graduated from Princeton in the 1980s, I would have gladly hired any 10 random people in my class for a corporate startup (if I had such a thing at the time).  After 2003, when I did own my own large company of about 1600 employees, I would never have hired an Ivy League grad.  Many of my managers had no degree at all (up to my COO and director of HR) and if we needed a college grad we would look for a scrappy young community college student long before someone from the Ivy League, even without considering the difference in price.  As a minimum, the local kid was less likely to hold a sit-in in my office.

I would love someday to support higher education again and would happily fund any institution that was demonstrably taking a shot at even some of these issues.

Yes, it is "systemic" not "systematic".  Oops.  I will not re-edit the post because I am past feeling the need to cover up my dumber moments.

I pretty much hate the term "systematic racism," which is a clever rebranding by the DEI folks of the Christian concept of "original sin."  Try to tell the Church that you have behaved ethically?  Doesn't matter, you still need us to remove the stain of your original sin.  Try to tell the DEI trainer you don't have a racism problem?  Doesn't matter how you act, you are part of the systematic racism.

I want to go on a brief (but typical of this blog) digression.

Years ago, probably in 2017 after the Charlottesville / proud boys kerfuffle, I had a Jewish friend express his concern about rising Right-wing antisemitism.  He and I don't really talk politics much but my sense is that -- like many Jewish voters in the Northeast -- he is a reliable Democratic vote.  I remember telling him that I really did not think the sort of knuckleheads at Charlottesville presented much of a threat.  He asked me why.

I had to think about if for a minute -- I had a gut feel my statement was true but I had not really thought about it carefully enough to understand why.  After pondering it for part of dinner I finally said that I didn't think the antisemites (and overt racists) on the Right were a threat because most of them were low-status.  They did not have the power to do anything.  It's not like they were hiring for Bank of America or on the admissions committee at Harvard.  People with any sort of status or authority on the Right did not respect or follow these people (they might shill for their votes, but politicians of all stripes pander to the most absurd fringes of their part for votes).  [Almost without thinking about it I said that if I were he, I would be more worried about antisemitism from the Left, because the folks in the BDS movement (for example) on universities are just the opposite of antisemites on the Right -- they are among the elite.  I seldom am very prescient on cultural trends, but at the time I was very involved with the issue of discrimination against Asians at Princeton, and I thought I saw some parallels with Jews.  I think we have all seen the explosion of antisemitism that has come out of the mainly Leftish elite over the last year].

When I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, racism was overt.  Things began to improve remarkably in the by 1980, though I remember at that point my dad could not get the Exxon CFO into our country club because he was Jewish and there was pushback when George Forman tried to buy a house in tony River Oaks.  By 2000, a generation later, much of that crap was gone, or at least way better.  But they key change that should have made these changes sustainable was that racism was not only isolated to lower-status groups, but it became seen as a marker for being low-status.  Demonstrating racism became the reverse of virtue-signaling -- it marked one as a loser.

If there is such a thing as systematic racism, then it has to be perpetrated by people who are part of the system.  People like the proud boys are outsiders -- I guarantee they are not on any country club membership committees.  They are not determining Ivy League admissions.  They are not hiring at Goldman Sachs.

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systematic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.  So here lies systematic racism, right?

Well, here lies the systematic failure to help African-Americans towards prosperity.  But it is hard to call it racism when in most of these cities the entire school board, the city council, and the mayor are all black or mostly black.  Here is the school board in E. St Louis -- not many proud boys there.  Here it is in Chicago.  Both of these districts are lavishly funded -- East St Louis spends over $25,000 per student and has a 12:1 teacher ratio  (the national average is about $18,000 per pupil and 14:1).  The student body is 96% black and US News report that in E. St Louis  "4% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 7% tested at or above that level for math."  Well no surprise that Blacks are struggling when freaking 96% of them graduate from public school systems like this without being able to read.  No affirmative action plan ever invented is going to magically create a future for adults who can't read or do math.

This is a f*cking crime, and it has nothing to do with racism or funding.  Trump can make headlines getting rid of DEI programs -- fine, they were a fix for this problem that was never going to work.  But until we seriously talk about public school education, we are not serious about fixing the systematic problems blacks face.  And the system is going to fight back hard.  Already folks in the system are telling us that the testing that shows blacks doing poorly should be eliminated.  Why?  Well they say it is to help blacks but that can't possibly be true.  Its like telling me that I am better off not getting a cancer test and finding out I have cancer.  The push to eliminate testing is a push to cover up this absolute tragedy by the insiders who are a part of it.

Anyone think there are some smart people out there with access to capital that could provide a better education privately for $25,000** a year in a school choice system?

** Postscript:  $25,000 is an average.  Typically in most school systems elementary school costs might be half the average and high school 150-200% of the average.

I won't go into all the details (one of many articles on this incident here), but the Yale Law School administration attempted to blackmail and intimidate one of their students over a party invitation he sent out, the main complaint seeming to be the party was sponsored by a right of center legal group (Federalist Society).  The audio, if you have time, is outrageous.  It is a good thing the student recorded it, because I am not sure many people would have believed the b-movie authoritarian dialog coming from the Yale executives.

I had two reactions I don't see written very many places:

1. The law profession strikes me as a particularly confrontational profession, and with the exception of perhaps law enforcement and first responders, one in which it is almost impossible to shelter oneself from a wide variety of craziness.  So how is Yale Law possibly doing its job to train the next generation's best and brightest attorneys when they actively support the kind of mental and emotional fragility that led to the complaints?  If we take the complainers at their word, they are hiding under their bed because they got an email party invitation sponsored by a group they don't agree with.
2. Top attorneys frequently find themselves in high stakes negotiations where their opponents try to bluff and bully them.   On this dimension, the student who refused to be blackmailed by Yale appears to be the best prospective attorney of the bunch.  I would certainly hire him.

Of course, a more likely explanation for the over-reactions among a very small number of students to the email is that Progressives have discovered that feigning more extreme fragility than that of a fainting woman in a Victorian novel is a useful tool for exercising power because university authorities (and increasingly a broader range of authorities) will act as the useful idiots who can be manipulated by such claims.

There are lots of ways to learn and grow skills and college is just one -- historically, most Americans have gained skills and improved their lives through learning and development in the workplace.  Stop the crazy over-credentialism of work.  Stop demanding a $100,000 education expenditure to qualify for a job where zero of the relevant jobs skills were taught in college.   I understand that college is used as a proxy for being long-term focused and goal oriented, but those can be demonstrated at least as well through work.  This is term would (hopefully) ease the pressure to dumb down education for the truly gifted.

Millions of jobs requiring a four-year college degree can be done without that level of education, some corporate leaders say. They suggest that companies shake up their approach to hiring and consider unconventional candidates. https://t.co/XyJQ1HhzXL

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 5, 2021

Postscript:  I will add that a good portion of my executive team and field managers never went to college.  Has zero effect on their performance, except it gives some of them an inferiority complex I have to keep trying to overcome.

It is hard for me to imagine anything that white surpremacists could do to permanently impoverish African-Americans than some of the things the woke are supporting.  Case in point is this story from Oregon:

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics." The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms." Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

Steve Martin used to have a comedy routine where he would say something like, "wouldn't it be funny to teach your kids how to talk wrong.  On their first day in Kindergarten class they would walk up to the teacher and exclaim, "Mumbo dogface in the banana patch!"  That had a certain dark humor to it but teaching kids to do math wrong in real life is simply insane.

There are a lot of things that set the groundwork for this, and I am not an expert on post-modernism and critical race theory.  But one factor that is not often credited is a cargo cult mentality.  Folks look at successful white people and observe they all went to college, and then infer that if we just get all the black kids into college, they will be successful too.  Their resulting plan is to reduce or eliminate standards that are perceived to be keeping black kids out of college.

The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits -- focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4.  This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity.  There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prospecity -- eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don't know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so -- but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.

This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions.  The government push for home ownership is another -- middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class.  Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up.  But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people -- it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.

@kevindrum writes this yesterday at his blog:

How long will taxpayers put up with threats to stop doing their job every time police forces are asked to make even the smallest change or sacrifice? It’s childish stuff and before long it’s likely to create a backlash that does the police no good.

Long time readers know at this point I am fed up with everyone in the debate on police.  I have been frustrated for years, long before the advent of BLM, at the structural and cultural barriers to holding police accountable for violence against citizens.  But I am equally frustrated at BLM and the Left for frittering away the moment, focusing on violence and looting Apple stores rather than the hard, city by city work of real reform.

Drum is right that the police and their unions tend to oppose even the smallest reforms.  But I do think he is unfair in that he is leaving out the background that the Left is demonizing their entire profession and threatening to cut budgets and salaries -- a lot of folks would get snippy if the world were suddenly demonizing their profession.

But it is an interesting exercise to take the two sentences I quote from Drum and substitute "teachers", another group of government employees currently refusing to fully do their jobs, for "police".

Postscript:  It is interesting to note in this comparison that no one has suggested that police stay home and get paid because of COVID threats, even though their risk is certainly far greater than that of teachers.  I can't believe it, but after years of being a critic of abuses of police and prosecutorial power, the Left is this close to having me leap to the defense of police.  Incredible.

I thought this was a really interesting idea.  The COVID lockdowns and colleges going to remote classes has revealed a pretty strong preference among folks paying for the college experience -- they want the classes (or at least the piece of paper that comes from attending the classes) and they want the social experience.  With classes going online, many college students are deferring college for the year, hoping to get both parts of the package next year.  But what if someone unbundled the experience, providing the group social experience in location A while all their customers were taking classes remotely at colleges B, C, E, etc.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to temporarily — or perhaps permanently — alter the college experience, two Princeton graduates have come up with a new idea: instead of students taking online courses from their bedrooms and couches, they'll take them from a luxe "bubble" hotel full of other students in the same boat.

It's called The U Experience; come fall, it may be hosting 150 students at hotels in Arkansas and Hawaii — and it's currently accepting applications.

The idea began, according to 24-year-old cofounder Lane Russell, when Harvard said it would shift to remote learning for the fall, but would continue to charge full tuition.

"It really made us think about, 'What is the thing that college is offering, and what are students getting out of it?" Russell said. "And we think that, even if a college is announcing something that indicates that the experience is actually worth $0, a lot of students probably do value it much higher than that."

And in the social and extracurricular void that colleges shifting to remote learning leave behind, "disruption and unbundling is called for," according to 27-year-old cofounder Adam Bragg.  That "unbundling" will take the form of two bubble "campuses": one in Waikiki, Hawaii, and the other in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Both are in hotels that Bragg and Russell said they have bought out.

"Something like this could have never been done before — mainly because the separation of a college experience from colleges was never possible. They held the college experience for ransom, and now that they've shifted to online learning, there is an opportunity to do something like this," Bragg said. He added that, pre-pandemic, a complete buyout "wasn't necessarily an interesting thing for a lot of the hotels, or at least they didn't know they had the interest for this thing. And so on both sides, the levels of coordination are a lot higher than was ever possible before."

Postscript:  yes, I know that with poor execution this becomes the Fyre Festival, but I am always a sucker for unbundling models

Here is John Hinderaker at Powerline:

In 2017, Professor Knijnenburg wrote that “all Trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum.”...

Why should the people of South Carolina fund this bigot? Why should they allow him to teach their children? They should fire him. Yeah, sure, tenure. But tenure should not protect a professor who is guilty of this kind of overt bigotry.

I am racking my brain to figure out how Hinderaker's plea for a public institution to fire a tenured professor is any different from the run-of-the-mill Leftist cancel culture that the Powerline bloggers often lament?  Narrowly defining an Overton window based on one's own beliefs and then demanding that anyone whose speech falls outside that window should be muzzled and denied a living sure sounds like cancel culture to me.   And there is not even a hedge here like, "well it's a private institution so the 1A does not apply" -- this is a public institution.

I have only seen selected bits of Professor Knijnenburg's academic work that have been cherry-picked by critics such as Hinderaker, but I am willing to believe that this professor does not represent the values I would want to see upheld in an institution of higher learning.  But the solution is to ignore Professor Knijnenburg as the trivial scholar he likely is and go after the folks that run these institutions and demand that they justify their standards for putting together the faculty and awarding tenure.  The problem here is not speech, but the absurdly low standards that obtain in much of academia, even at Ivy League Universities.

I got this note from the head of alumni affairs (or something like that) at Harvard:

I write to share with you a message President Bacow sent this afternoon to Harvard faculty and staff. He also sent a similar message to students. His message is one he and I would like to extend to all of you.

This is an unprecedented moment for Harvard and for the world. The last week has brought uncertainty, but also great resolve and resiliency. I am heartened by the way members of the broader Harvard community, extended beyond the campus, are coming together to support each other.

I have never been prouder to be a part of the Harvard community.

Attached was a letter (sorry, no online version but this roughly mirrors its content) from the Harvard President about bravely making the decision to send all the students home.  There is a lot of uncertainty in the right response to COVID-19 and so I am generally open to difference of opinion, but the smug tone of making a brave decision in the face of adversity just rubbed me the wrong way.  So I wrote this in response.  Note I am not an expert, just one person's opinion:

FWIW, since you sent this, I will say that I think what Harvard has done is exactly the wrong thing and its actions are a victory of virtue-signaling over rational responses.

In particular, it is clear that the mortality rates for people aged 18-25 from COVID-19 are trivial -- and would be even more trivial except that we don't measure most of the COVID-19 cases in this age group because they are so mild (this from the South Korean experience where they had more measurement and they found many asymptomatic cases in this age range). When in university, these students are gathered together in a pocket of other people in their same age range and also with minimal mortality risk.

By sending these kids home, you have created a massive diaspora of folks from one of the US viral hotspots (Boston) all over the country. Students that would have been living with other low-risk people are now living with parents and grandparents who are very much at risk. Add to this the anecdotal evidence I see on the news and social media of young folks of college age flaunting quarantine and social isolation rules, and I believe that Harvard and other institutions have increased risk rather than decreased it. Also, given that Boston may have the best hospital network in the country, for those of your students who might get sick you have sent them from this location with strong medical services to one which almost certainly has an inferior medical network. Finally, given just how low the risk is to people of this age, it is amazing how panicked people in this age range are today, perhaps because they have a stronger presence on social media where there are panic positive feedback loops. An adult response would have been to tell the kids that they are going to be fine, and that their job was to stay clear of their family members who are far more vulnerable.

A better solution would have been to keep students in school and then to minimize their exposure to the older administration and professor body through online classes. Students if online but still at university could still have access to educational resources and could still hold group discussions that are much harder to do online.

I will add as a final note, because Harvard today seems to be inordinately focused on issues of class and intersectionality: I believe there is an ugly class issue built into the current panic. You can see a class gradient in the panic itself -- AJ's and Whole Foods in San Francisco have empty shelves, whereas everything is normal at the Family Dollar in rural Alabama. What I see are rich people with good amounts of savings and professional jobs at well-capitalized companies where they can work remotely asking that the jobs of low-wage restaurant, factory, and retail workers be sacrificed through quarantine for their incremental safety. I will make my assumptions explicit -- for a variety of reasons from under-counting asymptomatic cases to academic and media incentives that cause skeptical voices to self-censor or be overwhelmed, I believe the US potential mortality from COVID-19 is being grossly overestimated. One might say that it's better to be safe than sorry, but in public policy (I assume they teach this at the Kennedy School) there are always tradeoffs. What, for example, is the human misery and mortality associated with, say, 20% unemployment? I can't remember CNN interviewing many out-of-work restaurant employees about why we should quarantine cities for 2 months. I will bet you that those Harvard professors who are focused on intersectionality will be writing about exactly this a year from now -- and when they do, remember this old white cis European dude told you first.

Warren Meyer
MBA 1989

The Varsity Blues admissions scandal along with the lawsuits by Asian Americans against Ivy League schools' admissions processes have brought new scrutiny to private university admissions standards.  I was thinking about a small proposal to respond to this scrutiny that particularly falls on legacy, large donor, and athletic admissions.  I think this proposal would help restore some trust in the process.

I have a lot of problems with my alma mater Princeton and their admissions, so much so that I have dropped out of the recruiting process after participating in it as an interviewer for 20 years.  But one good thing that they and others have done is to apply some of their massive endowment to allowing need-blind admissions, and more recently, to making all financial aid grant-based so that kids can graduate debt-free and do whatever they like with their education, irrespective of how much money it makes.

Here might be a next step:  Draw a line in the admission pool designating kids (by grades and test scores) who we might designate as "Ivy-ready."  Many of these kids will not get admitted, because there are too many of them.  Most won't have the extra-curricular activities  or sports or alumni connections or rich donor parents that differentiate the 1450 SAT that got in and the 1450 SAT that did not.   In current parlance, all of these resume items are likely markers of privilege (including the extra curricular activities, many of which are driven by knowing parents more than real interest).

Proposal:  Save 20% of the spots.  After the other 80% are allocated by the traditional means, throw all the other folks who clear the Ivy-Ready line and throw them in a lottery and lottery the final spots.

Of course, these 20% will have to be freed up from current uses.  Princeton just had a 20%-ish increase in class size by building more residential college capacity, and I wish they had adopted this approach at the time.  I am not sure where it would come from, but my personal starting point would be athletic spots.  I think the Ivies spend way too many resources (including most especially valuable admissions slots) trying to be more competitive at college athletics.  And I say this despite my son having been a student-athlete at Amherst College.  (By the way, tiny Amherst uses so many admissions spots on athletes that pretty much everyone on campus is one.  The kids actually have a term "NARP" -- non-athletic regular person -- for the few unicorns not actually on a varsity team.)

I am perfectly willing to believe that some school districts somewhere have spending too low to ever provide the education we expect in 2019.  But after sending my kids to a private school that did a fabulous job with kids and whose tuition was lower per student than the spending in most public schools, I have become suspicious of pleas for more and more money.  It seems that lack of money is ALWAYS the claimed problem at public schools.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced the problem is not lack of money but how the money is spent.  As the percentage of staff in most public schools who are administrators rather than teachers climbs over 50%, many public schools are doing exactly what every other government bureaucracy does -- starve spending for actual public services in favor of feeding a growing, increasingly well-paid administrative staff.

Here is this week's example.  Via Zero Hedge:

The Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has set up a donation page on their website to raise money and supply classrooms with fans this school year because of 60 Baltimore City School (BCS) buildings don't have air conditioning.

"It's no secret that Baltimore's students have had to weather the spectrum of extreme temperatures in their classrooms. We've all seen the photos of kindergarteners sitting in their coats and mittens at their morning circle. The reverse is true when school is back in session at the end of summer, when schools' internal temperatures have been measured at over 100 degrees. The Baltimore Teachers Union knows that educators' working conditions are students' learning conditions," BTU said on the donation page under the title "Donate to the BTU Fan Drive."

You see this all the time -- teachers begging the public for donations to help them through shortages of basic school supplies.  The blame is always put on public funding -- obviously Baltimore public schools are starved for cash and forced to beg for simple infrastructure items like fans.  But wait:

Of the 100 largest school systems based on enrollment in the United States, the five school systems with the highest spending per pupil in 2017 were New York City School District in New York ($25,199), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($22,292), Baltimore City Schools in Maryland ($16,184), Montgomery County School District in Maryland ($16,109), and Howard County School District in Maryland ($15,921). Maryland had one additional school system in the top 10, making it four of the top 10 school systems in the United States.

In the public recreation field, I call this borrowing from the infrastructure.  Infrastructure maintenance and spending is starved in favor of richer deals for growing administrative staffs.  That is why most major parks agencies have billions of dollars in deferred maintenance.  Transit agencies apparently do the same thing.

As I wrote before, the College Board is going to award "adversity" scores to its college-bound test-takers (essentially the inverse of a privilege score).  As I wrote earlier, beyond self-identification questions that can't be trusted, the best data for this will be the student's address.  I predicted that rich people would quickly hack this system:

The obvious hack for this is for parents to buy or lease an empty room somewhere in a high adversity zip code and report this as their child's address.  To get away with this, probably will need to have also given this address to the school, which might be hard for public schools but is perfectly possible at a private school.   "Ah, Ms. Huffman, what was it like growing up in Watts?"  I am sure there are already folks gearing up to sell this service.

Several people, including my wife, criticized this concern as overwrought.  First, I would like to say I am not only not overwrought, I am not even wrought.  Frankly, I am past caring what happens to colleges.  I consider their model so broken that they deserve whatever they get.  The faster their whole model falls apart, the faster we can rebuild advanced learning (only part of which should be on a campus).

Second, read this and tell me that my hypothesis was exaggerated:

Well-off Chicago residents have been exploiting a legal loophole to obtain need-based college financial aid and scholarships by giving up legal guardianship of their children. 

The tactic, which has been used by dozens of families (and maybe more according to Propublica Illinois), involves handing over guardianship to a friend or relative during the student's junior or senior year in high school - allowing them to declare themselves financially independent from their families. This qualifies them for federal, state and university financial assistance, according to the report.

"It’s a scam," said Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Wealthy families are manipulating the financial aid process to be eligible for financial aid they would not be otherwise eligible for. They are taking away opportunities from families that really need it."

Based on this, if anything my suggestion was too modest.  Accommodation address?  Hah, that is for middle class wannabees.  We are going to rent an inner city family to take guardianship of our kids.   "Wanted:  single-parent impoverished household with history of drug problems and homelessness wanted for temporary adoption of our honor student.  Past incarceration a plus.  Whites and cis-gendered need not apply."

Postscript:  Yes, I did read Kurt Schlichter's novel People's Republic and found it a bit light fairly entertaining, though I am a sucker for dystopia novels of most all flavors.  At the time I thought his privilege score idea to be, uh, overwrought, but it appears he was fairly prescient.

Postscript #2: I am trying to figure out what conspiracy theory I can craft and spread on social media based on the fact that "dystopia" is not included in the Chrome (or the Brave version of Chrome) spell check dictionary.

Postscript #3:  A reader reminds me of this story of the disproportionate abuse by rich people of special needs test taking accommodations.

From Weston, Conn., to Mercer Island, Wash., word has spread on parenting message boards and in the stands at home games: A federal disability designation known as a 504 plan can help struggling students improve their grades and test scores. But the plans are not doled out equitably across the United States.

In the country’s richest enclaves, where students already have greater access to private tutors and admissions coaches, the share of high school students with the designation is double the national average. In some communities, more than one in 10 students have one — up to seven times the rate nationwide, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

In Weston, where the median household income is $220,000, the rate is 18 percent, eight times that of Danbury, Conn., a city 30 minutes north. In Mercer Island, outside Seattle, where the median household income is $137,000, the number is 14 percent. That is about six times the rate of nearby Federal Way, Wash., where the median income is $65,000.

Combine two recent news stories:

1. The College Board is going to report an "adversity score" to colleges for each of its test-takers.  I believe that the woke intend this to be sort of the inverse of a "privilege" measurement.  This will almost certainly be based at lot on the child's address, since self-reported data on "adversity" would be too easy to game
2. In the recent college admissions scandal, rich parents demonstrated they were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars not to just game the admissions system, but to outright cheat it.

The obvious hack for this is for parents to buy or lease an empty room somewhere in a high adversity zip code and report this as their child's address.  To get away with this, probably will need to have also given this address to the school, which might be hard for public schools but is perfectly possible at a private school.   "Ah, Ms. Huffman, what was it like growing up in Watts?"  I am sure there are already folks gearing up to sell this service.

Middle class kids in good public schools will likely end up with the worst adversity scores.

In an authoritarian regime, those in power demand obedience but not necessarily agreement from their subjects.  Even if many of their subjects might oppose the regime, the rulers are largely content as long as everyone obeys, no matter how grudgingly.

Totalitarians are different.  They demand not only obedience but lockstep belief.  In some sense they combine authoritarian government with a sort of secular church where attendance every Sunday is required and no heresy of any sort is permitted.  Everything is political and there is no space where the regime does not watch and listen.   Even the smallest private dissent from the ruling orthodoxy is not permitted.  Terror from the state keeps everyone in line.

I have tried out a lot of words in my head that are less inflammatory than "totalitarian" to describe the more radical social justice elements on modern college campuses, but I can't find a word that is a better fit.  The attempts to drive out dissenting voices through modern forms of social-media-fueled mob terror are both scary and extremely disheartening.

I was thinking about all this in reading an article about Camille Paglia and the students and faculty of her own university who are trying to get her thrown out.  I find Paglia to be consistently fascinating, for the very reason that the way her mind works, the topics she chooses to focus on, and sometimes the conclusions she draws are very different from my own experience.  The best way to describe her, I think, is that we have traditional axes of thought and she is somewhere off-axis.

Anyway, after horrifying Conservatives for many decades, Paglia has over the last few years run afoul of the totalitarian Left.  One example: (emphasis added)

Camille Paglia, the controversial literary and social critic who identifies both as queer and trans, is drawing fire yet again. Students at her own institution, the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, are calling for her to be fired. An online petition, currently with over 1,300 signatures, reads in part:

Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color. If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.

Another demand in the petition is that, if she can't be canned, the university will stop selling Paglia's books on campus and permanently disallow her from speaking on campus outside of her own classes. Although it's mostly non-faculty speakers who get deplatformed, Paglia is merely the latest target being attacked by students from her own institution. Students at Sarah Lawrence, for instance, are calling for political scientist Samuel Abrams to be fired for writing an op-ed in The New York Times calling for ideological diversity among administrators.

Paglia's critics claim that, despite her own alternative sexual identity, she is so hostile and bigoted towards trans people that her mere presence on campus constitutes an insult or threat. There's no question that she has been dismissive of some claims made by trans people and, even more so, dismissive of students who claim that being subjected to speech with which they disagree is a form of trauma.

What I got to thinking about is this:  How far away are we from "her mere presence on campus" constituting a threat to being threatened by "her mere presence in the same country?"  I fear it may not be very long.

Postscripts:  I wanted to add a couple of postscripts to this story

1. I find that the "mere presence is a threat" argument being deployed by LGBT activists is extremely ironic.  In the camping business I run we have always had a disproportionate number of gay couples managing individual campgrounds.   Fifteen years ago I remember twice getting push back from people in the surrounding community (both times in southern, more traditionally religious areas) that the very presence of gay men around young children constituted a threat.  I thought this argument was complete nonsense and basically told the protesters to pound sand.  But it is ironic for me to now hear LGBT activists deploying the "mere presences is a threat" argument that has been used against them so often in history
2. We have clearly dumbed down what constitutes a threat when speech is equated with violence.  But have we also dumbed down the concept of terror?  People -- particularly university administrators but you see it all over -- constantly fold under the pressure of negative comments on twitter.  This sure seems a long way from the SS showing up at your door at 4AM, but amazingly social media terror seems to be nearly as effective an instrument of control.  Years ago my dad ran a major oil company and he did it with a real sense of mission, that they were doing great things to keep the world running.  But he endured endless bombing threats, kidnapping threats, existential threats from Congress, screaming protests at his doorstep, etc.  After being personally listed on the Unibomber's target list, I wonder what he would think about the "threat" of social media mobbing.

It should not surprise us that the folks in Hollywood are disproportionately represented in those arrested in the academic bribery scandal.

The first reason for this is related to law enforcement -- if given a choice of investigating and arresting Joe Schmoe and investigating and arresting, say, Martha Stewart, the FBI is going to invest resources to take down the big name every time.

But the second reason is related to Hollywood itself.  I don't have stats on this, but I am willing to bet that, with the possible exception of politics, Hollywood is the most nepotistic industry in America.  Look at the IMDB descriptions of the actors, producers, and directors in some recent movie.  Some will be first generation talent out of nowhere.  But a huge number will be the Tori Spellings of the world, kids who got their start in part due to family connections.

In this sense, making it in Hollywood is very similar to getting admitted to Harvard -- they are both brutally hard and low likelihood events that have enormous payoffs.  So it should not be surprising that people in Hollywood, who every day see family connections being used to short-circuit difficult entry processes, would apply the same philosophy to university admissions.

In the college admissions bribery scandal that is unfolding (with almost certainly more to come), parents were willing to spend up to $500,000 for something whose list price is like $50 (ie the application fee).  When I see this happen, I immediately think that there must be some sort of artificial shortage.  After all, why wouldn't new suppliers jump into the market when such demand is apparently going unmet?

For years I have been pestering my alma mater to spend more of its endowment increasing capacity.  For example, several years ago I wrote:

...the Ivy League needs to find a way to increase capacity.  The number of kids that are "ivy-ready" has exploded over the last decades, but the class sizes at Ivy schools have remained flat.    For years I have been campaigning at Princeton for this, and I am happy to see they are increasing the class size, but only by a small amount.  Princeton has an endowment larger than the GNP of most countries.  To date, it has spent that money both well and poorly.  Well, because Princeton is one of just a handful of schools that guarantee that if you get in, they will make sure you can pay for it, and they do it with grants, leaving every student debt free at graduation.  Poorly, because they have been overly focused on increasingly what I call the "educational intensity" or the amount of physical plant and equipment and stuff per student.  In this latter case, we have got to be near the limit of spending an incremental $10 million to increase the education quality by .01%.  We should instead be looking for ways to offer this very high quality of education to more people, since so many more are qualified today.

To illustrate this point I used this example in another post on the same topic

Let's say an Ivy has 5,000 students and a 10 point (on some arbitrary scale) education advantage over other schools.  Let's consider two investments.  One would increase their educational advantage by 10% from 10 to 11 (an increase I would argue that is way larger than the increase from investments they have recently made).  The other investment would double the size of the school from 5,000 to 10,000 but let's say that through dilution and distraction it dropped the educational advantage by 10% from 10 to 9.   The first investment adds something like 5,000 education points to the world (5,000 kids x 11 minus 5,000 kids x 10).  The second adds  40,000  points to the world (10,000 x 9 minus 5,000 x 10).  It's not even close.  In fact, the expansion option is still favored even if the education advantage drops by 40%.

Here is a test.  Quick:  Name a well-known liberal arts college or university with a high academic reputation that was founded in the last 100 years.  Tick tick.  Give up?  The only one I can come up with is Claremont-McKenna.  When I started asking this question 10 years ago the answer also included Rice University, but it is now out of the window.  Compare that to top art schools -- some like RISD go back to the 19th century but CalArts and ArtCenter are both less than 75 years old and probably the hottest current art school SCAD is less than 50 years old.  SCAD is a great example.  SCAD is growing like crazy -- it owns half of downtown Savannah, it seems -- and has a great reputation despite its youth and despite its admissions policies that are far less restrictive than other colleges or even other art schools.   It is innovative and responsive to students in a way that few liberal arts colleges are.  It has clearly tapped into a huge unmet demand.  Why can't anyone do this in the liberal arts world??

The cynical view, which I lean towards more as I age, is that Ivy-type university degrees are all about signalling and not the education itself, and thus expansion just defeats the purpose because it dilutes the signalling value.  For years when I met gung ho kids who were impressed that I went to Princeton and depressed that they likely would not, I would tell them that Princeton differed from their state school in this way:  At your state school, you can get a really good education but you may have to work for it;  if you choose to slack, you won't get it.  In contrast, at an Ivy League school, you are going to get challenged whether you want to or not.  At least that is what I used to say.  I am not sure that is true any more of the Ivies, if it was ever true (I may have just been fooling myself).  We used to use "went to college" as a synonym for "educated", but I think that relationship is gone.  It's very clear you can go anywhere, Ivy League included, and fail to leave educated.

Some of my thinking on this was fast-forwarded given the experience of one of my kids.  We had classic suburban expectations for our smart kids, and were proud our daughter got into a top 20 university.  She really even then wanted to go to art school, but we worried she would end up living in a refrigerator box on the street with an art degree (well, not literally, but that was the family joke).  But after a year she hated the university**.  She did fine academically, but it wasn't what she wanted to do.  And after she took the reigns and worked on a do-over for herself at art school, I started thinking a bit more about it.  She works really hard at art school -- way harder than I or her brother worked in college -- and she is learning an actual craft that people value and pay for.  She has a heck of a lot more prospects on graduating than the Brown grad who majored in Ecuadorian feminist poetry.

I don't want to be disingenuous here -- I traded on the value of my degrees and the schools they came from until I was 40 (after that I was running on my business and they became largely irrelevant, even a bit of a handicap). But when I think back on what I gained most in my education, I would list these three things first:

• The ability to clearly define a problem -- drawing a box around the system, defining inputs and outputs, etc
• The ability to write (some examples on this blog notwithstanding)
• The joy of learning -- at last count I have complete about 85 Teaching Company courses of an average 36 lectures each and 13 Pimsleur language courses of 30 lessons each.

By the way, if I had to define my main privilege in all of this, Princeton would not be first, because in fact I really developed the three above in a great private high school my parents were able to afford.

Postscript: Many have assumed these kids who got in fraudulently displaced some low income minority.  I find that hard to believe, knowing how admissions offices work and the general philosophical outlook of universities.  Much more likely that the marginal candidate cut was a midle class Asian-American.

** One of the interesting features of top schools is that it may be hard to get in, but they work to get every kid over the finish line.  That is why the real credential of an Ivy League school is as much admission as graduation.  To illustrate this, my daughter is in her third year at art school but her university she started at is still sending her emails saying that its not too late to come back.

For a while now, I have  had a theory that the zero-sum nature of academic success (competition for a fixed and perhaps shrinking number of tenured positions) affects the larger world-view of academia. (This article that compares academia to a harmful cult demonstrates this zero-sum thinking pretty well.)

It is pretty well-established that the American academic community is disproportionately of the Left, and in fact tilts pretty strongly in many cases to the far Left / progressive side.  People debate a lot about why this should be, but I think one contributing factor (but certainly not the only one) that I have never heard anyone discuss is the zer0-sum game these academics must play in their own careers.  I think that many of them incorrectly assume that all professions, and all of the economy and capitalism, is dominated by this same dog-eat-dog zero sum game -- remember, for most, academia is the only industry they have ever experienced from the inside.  And once you assume that the whole economy is zero-sum, it is small step from there to overly-narrow focus on distribution of wealth and income.

One of the mistakes folks on the Left make about capitalism is to describe capitalism as mostly about competition.  In fact, capitalism is mostly about cooperation, its a self-organizing process where people who don't even know each other cooperate to deliver products and services, facilitated by markets and the magic of prices.  Sure, competition exists but it is not the fundamental feature, but an enabler that makes sure the cooperation occurs as efficiently as possible.  Capitalism in fact is about zillions of voluntary trades and transactions every day that each make both parties better off -- or else both sides would not have agreed to it.  Capitalism in fact is a giant positive sum game, a fact that many on the Left simply do not grasp.

Never in my business life have I thought any company I worked for was playing in a zero-sum game.  Sure, individual sales to an individual customer might be zero sum -- UPS is going to order its bearings from Rockwell or Emerson and winning and losing that one order is zero sum.  But as a whole no business I have been in has ever felt zero sum.  In my business running campgrounds, I want our campgrounds to be the best but our growth is generally not at the expense of some other campground -- it is about attracting more people for more days to camping and offering those who do camp more value-added services.

Postscript on Metrics:  As an aside, it struck me that one improvement to the dysfunctional academic experience described in the Washington Post article linked above might be to an a measurement of the professoriate that went beyond just counting published articles and their citations.  Start counting the number of advisees each professor has that lands teaching and tenured positions and you could change some behavior.

Quillette had an interesting article about a scientific paper, that was mostly a presentation of math and statistical tools, that was essentially suppressed, apparently because it does not fit with current social justice talking points.

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

I am not an expert on this and don't really take a position on whether this is truly genetics or nurture, but it does tend to explain a lot of phenomena, like the distribution of boys vs. girls math SAT scores.

But some feminists and SJW's are deeply, deeply invested in the hypothesis that differences in representation of men vs. women in the top tiers of anything are entirely due to misogyny and patriarchy and other bad cultural and societal things (not sure how they explain disproportionate numbers of men in the bottom of distributions).  So a partial genetic explanation is not going to make them happy.  So:

But, that same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?

In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper. And so I emailed Professor Senechal. She replied that she had received no criticisms on scientific grounds and that her decision to rescind was entirely about the reaction she feared our paper would elicit. By way of further explanation, Senechal even compared our paper to the Confederate statues that had recently been removed from the courthouse lawn in Lexington, Kentucky.

The interesting part to me is that I have heard a parallel theory of greater genetic variability applied to Africans, though from a different cause.  Rather than being a selectivity phenomenon, it is argued that because Africa is likely the original birthplace of humanity, every other group of people was started by essentially an African splinter group, made up of just a portion of the range of African genetics.  Thus on a global basis Africans should be disproportionately in the extremes -- tallest and shortest, smartest and dimmest, fastest and slowest, etc.

Interestingly (and I admit I am not active in this field so I may be missing something here) the general reaction to this seems to be almost celebratory -- look at all this genetic diversity, to go along with the cultural diversity, in Africa!

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone. People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates. Even I, who have by extraordinary luck options outside of academia, fear what being vocal will bring.

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”

Avital conducts herself as if someone somewhere is always persecuting her. She learned this, I imagine, in graduate school. No woman escapes the relentless misogyny of the academy. The humanities are sadistic for most people, especially when you aren’t a white man. This is understood to be normal. When students in my department asked for more advising, we were told we were being needy. “Graduate school should destroy you,” one professor laughed.

The irony is that those who survive this destruction often do so at the cost of inflicting the same trauma on their own students. Avital, now a grande dame of literary studies, who Reitman alleges bragged to him of a “mafia”-like ability to make or break the careers of others, still feels persecuted. She makes it the job of those around her to protect her from that persecution: to fawn, appease, coddle. The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse.

If you plotted my "certainty" curve over time, it probably hit a low point in high school, climbed to peaks during college and just afterwards, slid over time as my face got pressed up against the glass of the real world, and dropped even lower when I discovered RSS readers and put a wide variety of feeds into it.  That is not to say I am not confident -- at least as long as we are talking about intellectual and not social skills -- but I am more open to being wrong than I have been since I was about 18.  I am fairly sure I still greatly overestimate my own correctness.

I was thinking a while back about why I perceived myself to have had this period in high school when I was less certain of my infallibility.  One reason had to be my finally coming to terms with nagging questions about the religion I grew up with.  Another was probably due to high school debate, where after vociferously defending a policy position for an hour one immediately had to walk into another room and defend the opposite side.  Even then high school debate was becoming broken, but being forced to argue both sides of every issue was a great experience.

All this is an introduction to a nice work by Charles Chu called "The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong."  It is hard to excerpt, because it covers a lot of ground, but I wish in retrospect my high school had printed something like this on my locker door.  If I had a billion dollars and wanted to found a new university**, I would make the ideological Turing test the core of the educational philosophy.  Think of what goes on in colleges nowadays and being a professor and saying "OK, class half over.  Nice discussion.  Now everyone switch sides."***

** Name a major private university with a national reputation or that your friends' kids have considered attending that was founded after 1900.  I can come up with only a couple: Rice University in Houston and several of the Claremont Colleges (e.g. Claremont-McKenna) in California.  Only one school in the Ivy League is less than 250 years old. Most folks can perhaps name one in their local city (ie Grand Canyon University here in Phoenix) that is newer but does not have a national reputation.  I guess that it could take a while to develop a national reputation, but 100 years?  Really?  In the art school world (which aren't generally considered universities) I can name at least 4 schools with a national reputation (at least in the art world) that were founded much more recently, several in my lifetime (SCAD, Ringling, Art Center, Cal Arts).

*** I did very well at Harvard Business School, better than I have done at anything else in my life (they did not have class ranks but I was pretty damn close to #1 out of 900, after being literally the last person they let in off the waiting list).  It helped that I love the format and loved the subject matter.  Also, to be honest it helped that I could do math (which held back half the class but led to my marrying someone I was tutoring) and that English was my first language (I had great respect for foreign students who even attempted to survive the case method in a second language).  But the real trick to success was to shine in the discussions, which were 70% or so of the grade.  And I did so with a simple trick.  I watched the discussion, and jumped in on whatever side was losing or had the fewest supporters, irregardless of what I might believe.  Not only was this a ton of fun, but it was appreciated by the professors -- they did not want to intervene in a discussion but felt like they had to if the argument got too unbalanced.  I took all kinds of positions against my true beliefs.  I argued that the only mistake "neutron" Jack Welch made at GE was not firing more people.  I slammed Steinway for ignoring new technology and fetishizing hand craftsmanship.  And I convinced everyone I must hate Canada when I opened a rant on the nation with "Canada is like a whole other state," riffing off the then-current Texas travel ad that said "Texas: It's Like A Whole Other Country."  I am not sure how one would do such a thing today when comments in class are seen more as virtue-signalling to your crowd than they are thought-out policy positions, and when taking the "wrong" side, even as an intellectual exercise, can lead to nationwide social media shaming.  By the way, my keys to succeeding at HBS are embedded in my novel BMOC, currently free on Kindle.

This is great news from my alma mater, which I have criticized in the past:

Much of the news regarding free speech on campus is enough to make anyone despair. Year after year more people and ideas are muzzled.

But some very heartening news of late comes from Princeton. Due largely to a new book promoting free speech by Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington and the unusual support and campus-wide promotion of the book by Princeton’s president Chris Eisgruber, Princeton is now in the forefront of those American colleges and universities that have said “stop” to the onslaught of thuggish campus militants intent on shutting down free speech. This latest development comes on the heels of several other very positive developments on the free-speech front at Princeton.

Three years ago, in April of 2015, the governing board of the faculty at Princeton adopted the main body of what has come to be known as the Chicago Principles of free speech and free expression. Originally drawn up by a committee of the University of Chicago chaired by law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, these principles condemned the suppression of views no matter how “offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed [they may appear] by some or even by most members of the University community.”

The title was my first thought when I saw this over at Kevin Drum's:

The Gates Foundation has spent about $200 million since 2010—in addition to other sources who kicked in about $400 million—on an education initiative designed to increase student performance:

The school sites agreed to design new teacher-evaluation systems that incorporated classroom-observation rubrics and a measure of growth in student achievement. They also agreed to offer individualized professional development based on teachers’ evaluation results, and to revamp recruitment, hiring, and placement. Schools also implemented new career pathways for effective teachers and awarded teachers with bonuses for good performance.

They helped out all teachers; fired bad teachers; promoted good teachers; and paid bonuses to effective teachers. So how did it work out?...

Long story short, there was no improvement at all in student achievement, despite the fact that funding was far greater than it would be in any real-life reform of this nature. There may have been some other successes in this program, but if the ultimate goal is better students, it was a complete failure. Whatever the answer is, rewarding good teachers and firing bad ones sure doesn’t seem to be it.

The organizations around these teachers must really suck because no reasonable person would expect that, in a service business, increasing employee accountability and upgrading the employee base would have no effect on customer service.

I have written before about how bad, senescent organizations destroy the value of good employees.  For example, in the context of the General Motors bankruptcy:

A corporation has physical plant (like factories) and workers of various skill levels who have productive potential.  These physical and human assets are overlaid with what we generally shortcut as "management" but which includes not just the actual humans currently managing the company but the organization approach, the culture, the management processes, its systems, the traditions, its contracts, its unions, the intellectual property, etc. etc.  In fact, by calling all this summed together "management", we falsely create the impression that it can easily be changed out, by firing the overpaid bums and getting new smarter guys.  This is not the case - Just ask Ross Perot.  You could fire the top 20 guys at GM and replace them all with the consensus all-brilliant team and I still am not sure they could fix it.

All these management factors, from the managers themselves to process to history to culture could better be called the corporate DNA*.  And DNA is very hard to change.  ...

Corporate DNA acts as a value multiplier.  The best corporate DNA has a multiplier greater than one, meaning that it increases the value of the people and physical assets in the corporation.  When I was at a company called Emerson Electric (an industrial conglomerate, not the consumer electronics guys) they were famous in the business world for having a corporate DNA that added value to certain types of industrial companies through cost reduction and intelligent investment.  Emerson's management, though, was always aware of the limits of their DNA, and paid careful attention to where their DNA would have a multiplier effect and where it would not.  Every company that has ever grown rapidly has had a DNA that provided a multiplier greater than one... for a while.

But things change.  Sometimes that change is slow, like a creeping climate change, or sometimes it is rapid, like the dinosaur-killing comet.  DNA that was robust no longer matches what the market needs, or some other entity with better DNA comes along and out-competes you.  When this happens, when a corporation becomes senescent, when its DNA is out of date, then its multiplier slips below one.  The corporation is killing the value of its assets.  Smart people are made stupid by a bad organization and systems and culture.  In the case of GM, hordes of brilliant engineers teamed with highly-skilled production workers and modern robotic manufacturing plants are turning out cars no one wants, at prices no one wants to pay.

Postscript:  From some experience with private schools, I would say the biggest difference is that private schools set higher expectations.  Even starting in kindergarten, my kids were doing WAY more advanced work than in public schools.  I understand that public schools are public and thus tasked with teaching everyone, so there is pressure to pace the work to the slowest student.  But the slow pace of public school starts even in the early grades before the school reasonably knows who the slowest kids are.  Public schools that have low expectations for student performance are not going to be suddenly improved by better teachers.  Putting Gordon Ramsey behind the counter at a Long John Silver fast food restaurant is not going to make the food suck any less.

Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, is going to remove pictures of medical luminaries from the walls of its auditorium because they are mostly all white guys.  Now, I don't really get freaked out about this the way some folks seem to.  I can totally understand why a University might not want to give the message to an incoming class that they somehow need to look like those pictures to be successful.  But I am exhausted with the notion that the way to handle uncomfortable things in society or in history is to hide them from students.  This seems the opposite of education.  I have had several great teachers in my life who would use uncomfortable facts as a springboard for learning.

I can't necessarily match the teaching greats, but here is how I might handle it.  Imagine a speech to an incoming group of Harvard Medical Students in this auditorium.

Welcome!  And congratulations!  All of you have followed very different paths to get here, but the one common denominator is that every one of you has the demonstrated intellectual and personal excellence required to meet the rigorous standards of this institution.  As I look around today, I see an incredible diversity of people -- a diversity of genders and ethnicities and home countries and family incomes but who all share in common the desire to help mankind through medicine.

If you look around the room you will see a bunch of paintings of medical luminaries who all made great contributions to medicine and this institution, and in the process helped save lives and make the world a better place.  But the odds are that you will also notice that the men -- and they are all men -- may not look like you.  There is a reason for that.

The issue is not that these 30 men should not be on this wall -- they all made important contributions to the study of medicine and everything you study over the next 4 years will build in part on their work.  The issue is not with these pictures, but the ones that are missing.  For every one of these pictures there should be at least one more of a woman or a person of color.  But those pictures are missing.  Even worse, the contributions of those people are missing.  They are missing because our world, our country, and even this institution made it difficult or impossible for brilliant people who were not white and male to reach the place where you are all sitting.  Medicine -- and our society -- are far poorer for this loss.

There are those who have suggested that we take down these pictures and hide this legacy from you.  These people have good intentions and want to avoid demotivating people who might look at these paintings and assume success will be impossible for them because they look different.  But I say that these pictures-- and all the ones that are missing -- should be your motivation.  All of you who might have been left out of this institution in the past are here now.  Look around the room, the world is truly changing!  This is your chance to make those advances in medicine that we lost in the past because we so short-sightedly excluded so many outstanding people.

Imagine you are back at this school 50 years from now with your grandchild.  You have spent the day dodging Harvard's frequent entreaties to donate money and you duck into this auditorium for shelter.  You point up to the walls and tell your grandchild, "do you see, about halfway along that wall where all the faces go from looking the same to being quite varied -- that was when your grandma was here at school."

Long time readers will know that several years ago I became convinced that Princeton was discriminating against Asian-Americans in their admissions process, a process I had participated in for over a decade.  Princeton, as far as I am concerned, can bake its academic cake for whoever they want, but I in turn don't have to participate in it so I quit.  I found the disconnect between Princeton's pious words on diversity and the reality of their actions to be distasteful, and I really really did not like having to toe the party line when Asian interviewees asked me if I thought they had an equal chance of admission with other students.

More data on this issue is just becoming public as various briefs that have been filed in a lawsuit representing Asian-American students against Harvard are being released.   I thought this bit from the Wall Street Journal looks pretty ugly.

Asian-American applicants have higher academic and extracurricular scores than any other racial group, as well as the highest overall rating from alumni interviewers, according to the plaintiffs. However, Harvard’s admissions officers assign Asian-Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating, which includes a subjective assessment of character traits such as whether the student has a “positive personality,” the plaintiffs said.

Do you think they mark them down as "inscrutable?"  Remember, this is from an institution that criticizes pretty much everyone else on the planet for propagating racial stereotypes.