That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.
The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
America's post-war strength was built on unusually strong education. After the war, America had far more schooling overall than other countries. It was one of the many factors that made America a powerhouse in the 50s and 60s.
Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.
>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.
High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.
India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.
>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.
Hmmm, I don't see the outstanding part of the rebuttal. While it raises real evidence, it doesn't address the elephant of overeducation. The cited countries, for example, are faltering in myriad ways that their electorates have decidedly reacted against; enormous education sold to too many, falling far short of its promises.
Like many of us here, I've been overeducated and I'm against overeducation. "Not letting your education get in the way of your learning" summarizes that view, which I think use to be a tenet of the hacker ethos underlying this forum.
"The cited countries, for example, are faltering in myriad ways"
... as if higher education is somehow to blame, or conceivably capable of preventing countries from having any problems? Your comment provides not a shred of evidence that "overeducation" is even connected to said problems, let alone the "elephant". Respectfully, the burden's on you there.
Part of the problem with the way India wants to be seen is those that go to IIT, etc., get into white collar jobs that elevate them well above the norm in India want to ignore the rest of the country. Abject poverty.
The US has severe issues as well, but many countries that want to be seen for their techonological advancement want to hide the less successful parts of their communities.
I see very little evidence for this abundance of American "common wisdom". If anything, America has always had a deeply anti-intellectual vein running through it, whether it was the Scopes monkey trial, the Know Nothing Party or what you see in the present political scene. Higher education, especially the affordable kind at public universities, has been a bulwark against the paranoid delusions that often dominate societies that revere superstition and "common sense" over reason, empiricism and humanism.
The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.
Huh? Little evidence? Prosperity in America was built by millionaires that drove 20 year old white pickup trucks (because base color was $100 cheaper). They were very "common wisdom". Almost all had to understand and operate within the commodities markets(where reason and empiricism meet head first with humanism and human behavior), head multi million dollar organizations, negotiate multi million dollar deals, and tried to build multi-generational (not next quarter) businesses.
And every one I knew made sure their children went to University and were educated, because they understood it's value. So did every farmer, factory worker, bus driver. Their kids didn't understand the value, they just new they had to go. Just like todays kids don't understand the value. I don't think that's changed, other than parents aren't forcing life choices on their kids.
You are either very young and only exposed to the modern Audi driving millionaires, or had zero interaction with the actual industrial/ag/creative space/inventor America pre 2008/pre MAGA brainworms. But these people used to exist and were building blocks of this country AND local communities (unlike their zero community loyalty replacement leased Audi millionaires).
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.
The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.
To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.
> maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
I will give full credit to the golden generation of Americans and the generation before that. They built America on true merit and efforts. However, maintaining the position was easy for the boomer and subsequent generations - break the Bretton-Woods agreement and shatter the gold standard after the USD obtained the throne of the world's reserve currency. This enabled the US to print infinite amounts of money and pile up unlimited debt and use the cash to sponsor any investment, any amount of social-security, buy anything and have the largest defense budget - so they can stomp anyone they want, heavily sponsor "regime change" - and still have relatively low inflation. The rest of the world just needs to grin and bear it.
As a non-American, I am really hoping for de-dollarization and fully independent payment networks completely separated from the West. The Russia-Ukraine war and Trump sanctions has gotten us around 10% of the way there. Only then shall one see the real effect of that $33 trillion debt.
I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
> In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
The piece you're missing is that the man has to pick between 10 indistinguishable men with backhoes, of which some unknown percentage are charlatans who will dig a hole, put some pipes in it, then disappear with the money. The original man will now have a puddle of human waste next to his house, no septic system, and be $20k poorer ($10k+ in cleanup, then $10k to someone to build an actual system).
Regulation ensures that the charlatans can't operate and that everyone who pays $10k for a septic system actually gets one that works for decades. This also protects the original man's neighbors who also suffer when his property develops a cesspool. Regulation also protects against well-meaning but incompetent operators, who are also common when regulation is weak or non-existent.
There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales.
The extra taxes paid by all will (theoretically) improve the schools, roads, military, and services. The regulations will (theoretically) decrease the risk of poisoning ground water and injuring someone, which adds even more value to the local community.
The distinction is just that the septic tank is twice as expensive in the developed country. But that money can lift people out of poverty. The exception is when the company owner is hoarding the majority of the money tax-free instead of paying it to people who will spend it.
>There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales.
That's the grade school analysis and in reality we are all poorer for it.
If ten people pay $5k to avoid getting a substandard service that has a 1/10 chance of happening and will cost $20k to remediate if it does that is a massive loss to the overall economy because that money otherwise would've been spent elsewhere else.
This isn't just septics, it's every widget and service. And it's not just a government and tax problem (though those cases are frequently most flagrant). Private industry requirements cause the same problems.
And in some areas it's even worse than that - construction quality for housing can be very poor. You basically need an independent building inspection to not get scammed by poor quality construction.
The person who wanted the septic tank almost certainly would spend that $5k somewhere else if he had it. Except in that circumstance he would spend it on something that he thought provided him value, instead of overbearing regulation.
As someone with a septic tank, I'd rather spend more on a system that won't fail and won't kill anyone. I'd grumble while paying so much but I'd still do it. Just like I'd rather pay more for a car from the over-regulated EU than one for half the price from a country with no safety or quality regulations.
I realize I don't speak for the more cash strapped population, and I agree that overbearing regulation can be a problem. The problem is not regulations themselves, which save lives, but the perverse execution of new regulations in countries like the US (often written by market leaders to cement their moat, with the power of lobbying.)
This is a wild take imo. Yes, I am sure there there are definite cases of overreach and I generally sit squarely in the libertarian camp but most permits, studies, etc are there for a reason. Maybe you have lived in a developing nation but I have and I can say you are at much higher risk of death because of the lack of oversight. The number of commercial building fires, risky electric installations, lack of common code is highly dangerous.
I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
It comes down to the amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.
And this isn't just insurance. Just because someone who work is being made for by law or by rule says that their work output reduces the failure rate from X to Y doesn't mean that the cost of their work when applied to everything isn't a massive loss compared to just not paying for that and cleaning up the mess X times instead of Y times.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
Costs to clean up a mess from an underregulated industry can be bigger then the whole industry causing it. This is not even untypical.
Examples: Leaded gas, tobacco, CO2 emissions, dam breaks, reactor meltdowns, air pollution (really pollution in general; river/groundwater contamination for your septic tank example)...
If you underregulate, you end up with frequent cases where not even imprisoning and dispossessing everyone remotely involved/culpable is gonna get you sufficient compensation; this is extremely undesirable.
Companies are frequently gonna steer towards such scenarios, too, because they can allow them to externalize costs.
Compare against the typical OCED nation, US spending ~18% gdp on health, about ~8% higher than OECD average, i.e. 2T+ rent extraction per year for net lifespan that is statistically worse than OECD average. 6 months of US excess health spending buys you entire HSR system in China that's frequently being panned as overbuilt and wasteful. Meanwhile look at recently built Brightline Florida, with ~120 deaths per billion passenger km, normalize that to EU, JP, PRC HSR billion passenger km, you'd get 15k, 50k, 310k fatalities per year. Imagine PRC losing Cincinnati every year due to rail deaths. Now Brightline extra dumpfire execution but just to highlight at some point there's too much red tape, and red tape doesn't always buy you value. Sometimes the system is so broken and you end up the worst of both world quadrants: high cost rent extraction & less than first world outcomes because the accumulation of redtape itself is leading to substandard outcomes. AKA premium medicore. Extra worse in some sectors when it's not simply opportunity cost inefficiencies, i.e. you lose on something else. A sclerosic money flow recycling maximizer can also makes the thing it's pumping money into worse than expected.
You can build as many electric cars as you want, it's not going to resolve 8 hour workday or the cost of living crisis or the housing crisis. All of that is a social coordination problem, and the tools to resolve that will emerge from the humanities and the finance industry, not hard engineering.
Furthermore, people want those white-collar jobs you detest, and not everyone is inclined to R&D as this forum might think. The real problem is how technological progress has not been properly applied to improving white-collar productivity as opposed to just filtering, funnily enough of which this very thread is about regarding university.
Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
My purpose was to cast doubt on Rayiner's assertion that "Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today."
I was not commenting on whether the world would be better off if the US were less economically dominant.
And I’m saying that that dominance is mostly in irrelevant categories like ads and entertainment, so it would be at best an annoyance if those companies were to disappear.
There’s very few internet companies doing truly unique, irreplaceable work.
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage.
Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.
However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
Another major feature of Risk (more or less whatever side rules you're playing with around alliances and so forth) is the role of the cards which pretty much dominate everything else in the endgame.
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
Your arguments are irrelevant at best and whataboutism at worst because the Japanese were specifically attacking the US Navy as they saw it as a threat to their own expansion plans - which were far worse than anything the US did, even compared to the worst parts of Native American policies (which were very, very bad). The Japanese saw Hawaii as a US territory to attack. Whether or how Hawaii became a US territory is a complete non sequitur in the context of World War 2.
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
On geopolitical scale, you either need to have big guns or big friends. No one has any true right to any land. If you don't have the foresight to recognize that, you probably don't have a place in the future.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then are upset when they get eaten...
> They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities
Well they had zero issues going after the native peoples in all the places they conquered (or even their own country, the stuff they did in Okinawa…). They just didn’t have enough bombs in Hawaii.
Let me guess you also don’t think the Japanese killed, hurt, raped or did anything else bad to a single Filipino, right? Because they never hurt any one except the occupiers…
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the short term. They certainly don't have a military option to use against that grouping. At least not one that hasn't already been used in the case of Russia and failed to coerce them into cooperating.
America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
> You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age
As you said Ukraine’s demographic situation was quite horrible before the war. Very few people in their 20s. Hence the conscription age being 27 earlier in the war. They lowered it to 25 later (which is kind of the inverse of what happened historically in other wars).
Russia had way more manpower, then the cannon fodder from North Korea and the foreign mercenaries. Russia can afford even 1:1.5 or 1:2 casualty rates (of course they have other concerns and seemed to be very politically unwilling to send actual conscripts there and the pool of willing volunteers is not infinite).
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
I think this is impossible to answer for now. All you can do is look at known data and draw probable conclusions with an extremely high degree of uncertainty. So what do we know for certain about each side and the current state of the war?
Russia: Invaded with less than 200k soldiers. They later on mobilized approximately 300k soldiers. This mobilization was extremely unpopular and resulted in mass resistance within Russia, Russians emigrating and so on. Since then they swapped entirely to a 'voluntary' system of deployment, with some reported incidents of coercion. Benefits for soldiers are extremely high which is likely driving a significant rate of enlistment. Soldiers are demobilized after their contract ends, which is a very important issue for a war entering into its 4th year.
Ukraine: Had approximately 300k soldiers before the invasion. After the invasion they closed their borders, prevented men of 'fighting age' from leaving, and declared a general mobilization so that anybody between the ages of 27-60 could be forcibly conscripted and deployed to fight. They have carried out this mobilization very aggressively as well as constantly lowered the minimum age, and standard, of mobilization in a country that already had a severe demographic crisis before the war. Demobilization is somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent.
Current: Both sides seem to agree that Russia has a significant manpower advantage with an army of approximately 700k soldiers remaining in Ukraine.
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To even begin to create comparative casualty measures you need to create estimates for how many soldiers Russia was able to 'voluntarily' enlist and estimates for their contract length to account for demobilization. And then you need to contrast this against how many people Ukraine was able to conscript and mobilize. You can find numbers for these online, but nobody's even pretending to try to be remotely objective and there's highly organized propaganda abounds, so the numbers are completely meaningless.
And then on top of that you also need to somehow figure out how many are actual casualties and how many are desertions. For instance Ukraine has apparently filed more than 300,000 criminal cases over desertion. Of course they also have numerous major motivations to avoid KIA classifications. So basically yeah - you're not going to be able to realistically estimate casualties on either side, with anything even resembling a reasonable degree of confidence, until the war is over.
Probably not but it’s unlikely to be that massively different, Ukraine wasn’t that much less willing to engage in “meat grinder” style tactics earlier in the war. Even 1:1.5 rate would be pretty horrible given the demographic disparity.
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
> Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues
The scariest thing is that even in the best-case scenario, this may no longer be possible. Even before the war, Ukraine's demographics were dire, then young people left, and no matter how the war ends, there's no objective reason for them to return.
It depends on what happens. If Europe/US just shrugs and moves onto the next thing after the war, which is probably the most likely outcome, then yeah. But there is a real chance that they try to go full Marshall Plan with the goal of weaponizing Ukraine. If so, then there's going to be a lot of money flowing about there with some big opportunities.
With what surplus resources? Europe seems to be suffering from some pretty catastrophic looking political blowback with groups like Reform, AfD and a host of similar-looking parties gaining popularity because people don't think their interests are being prioritised. The US has a Trumpism phenomenon that might be matched by a left-wing revolt (crazy policies waiting in the wings Mamdani prioritising New York over Israel. The gall of the man).
On paper the US is broke. I'm not sure about the Europe situation but I doubt they're doing well either the growth statistics I saw last were a joke. They're all struggling to even arm Ukraine for this war.
If I were a Ukrainian strategist I too would not count on some sort of vast infusion of resources appearing after the war. These are not the conditions of the Marshall Plan where Europe had massive economic potential and the US was the world's leading industrial superpower with wealth to spare.
Literally yes, because they haven't started an actual war. If the US manages the same in Venezuela then they'll be doing a good job there too.
The difference between China and the US is China (humorously, probably because of US pressure) keeps re-investing their economic surplus and the US keeps blowing big chunks of it on meaningless wars. That seems to be the big factor of why China had this huge industrial economy appear out of nowhere and the US has been sort of lurching along for the last 20 years.
Hard to believe it, but trillions in investment is better for people's wallets than trillion dollars in making life horrible for goat herders in the middle east.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
In March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
Another thing the US did in the post-war world was apply economic leverage to dismantle European empires. This can also be viewed as defending nations against external coercion.
I think it had something to do with 9/11 being an act of war from Afghanistan against the US. Nations are responsible for the actions of groups inside their borders against other nations.
It was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.
I hope you see where the problem with this is - the US had an enemy in a supranational organization, the Al Qaeda, which resided in many countries including Afghanistan.
The government of said country was unfriendly but not actively hostile to the US and on good terms with AQ, but not outright allies. This could've been said to apply between many Middle Eastern governments and radical groups at the time.
The US decided to invade, and antagonized the formerly unfriendly Taliban to become actively hostile.
The US managed to temporarily win over the Taliban but failed to permanently displace them.
AQ leadership, including Bin Laden moved out of the country almost immediately.
The 'war on terror' went on almost without end, then Bin Laden was killed a decade later, in a different country the US didn't declare war on, thanks to US special force action.
While AQ got weaker, ISIS got stronger (honestly I don't follow ME insurgent groups that closely, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a rebrand/reorganization in part).
So the US-initiated invasion totally failed to reach its stated result while leaving a huge collateral in its wake.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Unfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
I think we may be at peak Trump though which will limit his power to bail out Putin. The midterms won't go well, the Epstein stuff is embarrassing, the Republicans are starting to get unruly.
> They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship led by the communist Putin. As if communist dictators care. Look at North Korea, it's just the results of an unremarkable year.
I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
I don't agree on the Russia Ukraine motivations. Ukraine is not part of NATO and was not going to become part of NATO. There were already two NATO countries bordering Russia near Moscow and St P if NATO had wanted to invade which they had no thoughts of doing. Russia lies constantly on this stuff. I think they basically regarded Ukraine their land as part of the Russian empire they were restoring.
It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was where we were willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over it, and that was an even lighter weight version of this event since there isn't even a land route from Cuba to the US obviously!
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
> Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
It would be a very foolish idea, because it's no longer the Napoleonic era. Concentrating your forces close to adversary's border makes them easy targets for destruction by long-range artillery and airstrikes. The Finnish chief of defence forces recently made the same remark when the Russians moved their weapons closer to Finland for intimidation: "It only makes them easier for us to destroy."
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was
Not at all. The Cuban missile crisis was only about nuclear missiles. The USSR continued to provide a large number of conventional weapons to Cuba, including submarines and fighter jets, until it collapsed in 1991, without any of your invasion fantasies coming true.
It is a Soviet-built MIG-23 fighter jet carrying Cuban insignia. MIG-23 first flew 5 years after the missile crisis and the first batch was delivered to Cuba in 1978.
> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (besides the fact that it relies on dubious assumptions about a counterfactual) is that the only reason Ukraine resumed its long-abandoned pursuit of relations with NATO was a direct result of the invasion by Russia in 2014.
Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up protesters come rioters, almost certainly with further black ops organizing going on behind the scenes.
Following Yanukovych's successful overthrow figures favorable to the US/UN/EU, including those hand picked by Victoria Nuland in her leaked conversation, ended up in power. In fact the person Nuland hand picked for Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was one of the authors of Ukraine's initial formal request for a membership action plan from NATO.
Can you tell me that you genuinely think that if Russia hadn't annexed Crimea (which happened after all of the above) that Ukraine would have chosen to stay "neutral" in this context? And I put neutral in quotes because what does that even mean when one bloc is driving the successful overthrow of democratically elected leaders and hand picking new ones? Imagine Lavrov et al were on the ground encouraging pro Russian protesters to topple the Ukrainian government (alongside comparably likely black ops organizing behind the scenes), they ended up successful, and then leaders hand-picked by him end up in power. Is that somehow still just Ukraine deciding their own fate?
There's a huge problem with this narrative. The Russian government's public tender database shows that they ordered the production of campaign medals for the invasion of Crimea months before any of this happened. Oops.
I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
It's not about missiles in this case. That's a strategic battle that Russia has largely already lost, though the advent of highly capable ICBMs/MIRV/etc with hypersonic maneuvering also makes vicinity less relevant in modern times. In this case it's about a land route for invasion and subsequent logistics. There are already NATO countries bordering Russia, but the land between them is extremely unfavorable - swamps, forests, and so on. It's simply not fit for what would be a large scale conflict.
Invasion into Russia would ideally go through Belarus, which is part of the reason that Belarus is such a critical ally for Russia, and now even hosts their nuclear weapons. Since that's not possible, the second best route (and third and forth and...) is through Ukraine, likely towards Kursk or Belgorod.
There's even something of an equal but opposite here on NATO's side - the Suwalki corridor [1]. It's a narrow stretch of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad (a Russian exclave) that, if controlled, would cut off the Baltic states from NATO. So if war ever breaks out between NATO and Russia, it would be a key strategic point and unsurprisingly, it's been heavily fortified by NATO - there are even hundreds of American troops there.
The idea of an invasion of Russia from Europe is utter nonsense and completely detached from reality. Tell it to Russian military experts and you will get sighs and eyerolls in response. Not even Russian military exercises like Zapad simulate such a scenario. On the ground, the border remains completely open - you can walk straight into Russia (and lost mushroomers often do so by accident) because there isn't even a chainlink fence or a cleared sand strip marking the border.
Contrast that with the European countries that actually fear an invasion: they are preparing bridges for demolition, scouting suitable areas for minefields, digging anti-tank ditches, installing reinforced pillboxes and bunkers. Last week, Latvian media reported that the government is even considering tearing up railways near the Russian border to slow the invading force.
The scenarios the Russians are preparing for include, for example, mass unrest in Belarus that would lead to Russia invading the country to keep its dictator in place, like they did in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956. In 2020, this almost happened in Belarus over fraudulent elections and mass protests that were ultimately suppressed without requiring a "brotherly military intervention" by Russia.
> it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded
Very unlikely.
Also Mexico wasn’t never exactly that aligned diplomatically and politically with the US to begin with.
Russia on the other hand views that it has some inherent right to subjugate and dominate all of their neighbors and turn them into puppet states if not outright annex them.
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis
In fact this is outright drivel. The US hardly viewed Russia as their actual opponent before 2014-22. Remember Romney- Obama debate (and Obama generally bending over backwards to appease Putin most of the time).
> Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands
Russia (i.e. Putin but also Russians in general) wanted to rebuild their empire from the beginning. Anything else is just an excuse.
> interests between them and the West
Of course this conflict has been mostly one sides till the 2014, with Obama and Merkel bending over backwards to appease Putin.
Also the implication that Russia has some God given right over dominion of half of Eastern Europe is a bit appealing..
> our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
That is a very Ruso-Imperialist mindset. A society pretty permanently stuck in the 1800s politically and psychologically… e.g. Germany, France, Britain were somehow able to step over their ambitions and are doing relatively fine (even without having millions of foreigners subjugate)
Thank you for repeating Russian propaganda. But the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future and give a fuck about Russia feelings. Russia is the aggressor and blaming anything on NATO is laughable propaganda.
> In all honesty, would you hold that argument if Mexico decides to host Russian or Chinese troops?
Ukraine wasn't hosting foreign troops (except Russian troops, some of whom were were the spearhead of the invasion) when the Russo-Ukrainian war started with the Russian invasion in 2014.
(They did start hosting some that were involved in training and advisory assignments after the war started and before the major escalation in 2022, but those can hardly justify the war which started with the 2014 invasion.)
In all “honest” how is that relevant when Ukraine never did that nor was US willing to deploy their troops there to begin with. To what end? Not a single US administration between 1990 and 2022 was particularly antagonistic or expansionist towards Russia..
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
Are you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough?
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
>The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.
The US military's "ability" is very contextual - for instance, the US could easily obliterate Iran with a MIRV or two, but for various geopolitical reasons they choose not to. Likewise, the US navy is of limited use against Iran due to the literal mountain range between their only coastline and the bulk of their landmass (and population), much of which is quite mountainous.
If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys. And the "various geopolitical reasons", on examination, includes possible outcomes like the US being pummelled through the stone age and out the other side, or more mild ones like New York being flattened. It isn't really much of an option in any foreseeable scenario where their goose isn't already being cooked.
So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.
[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
Re: US military quality, it's both. Massively corrupt jobs program on the weapons acquisition side, combined with an incredibly effective devolved leadership structure on the logistics and combat side. Tested frequently over the last few decades. The bet in favor of them is that the weapons corruption gets sorted out once it really needs to be.
> If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys.
What a nonsense. Really, if we're assuming a nuclear war then the remainder of the sentence no longer has any relevance.
Note that even the idiot in the Kremlin has been given reasons enough to consider that one off the table no matter how much he might want it (assuming he still can).
First strike is a non-starter for every sane country, so you better hope that sanity lasts long enough to get to the '.' at the end of your sentences. Because if it does not the best you can hope for is live near ground zero.
> Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.
So far all of the recipients seem to be fairly happy with the deliveries and most nations would quake in their boots if the USA set their sights on them with intent to punish, bar none, and to suggest otherwise is seriously ignorant.
> If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.
I'm not thinking of anything specific, but if you want to talk gear it is notable that US gear has failed to stabilise the front-line in Ukraine so it obviously isn't that amazing. I'm reading fairly consistent reports that the US has lost the manufacturing base to compete against the Russians [0] and Asians [1].
Compare that to the nominal spending figures [2] and the official figures for how strong the US is appear to be overstating their ability to actually win in a conflict. The money spent doesn't seem to be going in to creating a strong military as much as overcoming deficits in their ability to produce stuff.
And "questions" in the plural generally means someone asked more than one question. It's "just asking a question" in the singular.
> And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
With respect, Russia is being decimated (literally, at least the "big fortresses" that Russia has been gnawing at for months such as Pokrovsk have insane loss rates) by Ukraine's army who are mostly using donated shoddy Soviet-era remainders and decades old Western surplus.
If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
India is different but they're at least a democracy that's reasonably worth calling it that (despite Modi doing his best to dismantle it). I don't see any attempts of India to project power anywhere other than in its immediate neighborhood (i.e. the border disputes with Pakistan and China). They're no threat.
> If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
> evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength
What kind of evidence? US is not destroying countries because its citizens don't want it to, and are generally not willing to pay the price for it.
If "the US" actually wanted, it could kill every inhabitant of continental Europe within less than a decade in a conventional war; the price in American lifes would be very high, but the outcome (without external intervention) seems pretty certain to me (speaking as a European).
I think you’re burying the lede there: this hypothetical war would be fought in Asia because China is completely incapable of projecting force to the North American continent. Without that ability to credibly threaten America China could not possibly win a war against it.
The conflicts which superpowers have withdrawn from have been against occupied nations which were in no position to ever become a future threat, this would not be true in a conflict with China, as China could conceivably develop the ability to project force and would be certainly motivated to do so during or after a real conflict.
India has been gently aligning [0, 1] with the Russia-China bloc that the US has been encouraging to form over the last couple of years. Nothing crazy but that looks like undermining the US to me. It certainly isn't supporting US policy and the US has been trying to pressure them over it without much success.
It's not undermining, it's asserting/showing off their independence. India doesn't want to play for anyone's team, so they play on everyone's team. It's a reminder to all sides that they are not an automatic partner to be taken for granted.
The US is the second largest manufacturing power, the largest economic power and the largest military power, but those things aren't even what makes it a scary threat.
There are things that make up the US that vastly increase its potential for self-organization when it is given an organizing principle. Yes, dynamism has taken a hit over the decades, but there are also a lot of aimless purposeless people right now that do have an appetite for purpose if given one.
Major modern countries today have red lines defined that they won't cross in order to keep the peace. Russia says don't attack Moscow or otherwise attempt to replace their government or they will nuke you. Nukes do change the structure of future wars between nuclear powers, which might actually make some aspects of it less extreme.
If Ukraine had nukes, they could have a red line like, "If you keep hitting hospitals and schools, we will nuke you. Powerplants and railroads we understand, but if you show us with your actions that you have no mercy for the weak and innocent, we will end you." Instead, they have nothing of the sort.
All the US has to do is wait for the enemy to make catastrophic moral failures and it's game over, because it rallies the people, the companies, the innovative talent, the allies, etc to reject it with force. It crystallizes the purpose.
We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
India is far more US aligned than with China, regardless of tensions. Neither North Korea nor Russia trust China, but they are forced to deal with it despite the buddy-buddy optics.
Failing to benefit from so many possible optimizations at the basic strategic level in their local region, any confidence in a favorable outcome for the CCP seems misplaced. Their failings probably cascade down into the other levels of preparation as well.
“Forcing our allies to become more independent” is a HILARIOUS way to say “we’re destroying our allied relationships, reducing our intelligence capabilities and the chances that they would form a coalition with us in any armed conflict”.
I’m just imagining someone getting a divorce saying they’re “teaching their spouse the value of independence”.
Why are you trying to rephrase something I said to mean something it doesn't? That's not what I said. We're not destroying our relationships and we're not ditching our allies. I think you're too caught up in the politics and rhetoric.
> We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Translation: we are getting rid of our allies.
It does not make sense for a country to pay another country their "fair share" for military protection. That is literally why the American Revolution happened. Americans fought a war on behalf of the British and were thanked for their service with enough taxes to destroy the local economy. The push to make the colonies pay for "their war" drove the colonists to turn their guns inward and start shooting British regulars.
To be clear, it's one thing for NATO to tell countries to actually meet their 2% targets. But that is not what the current administration is doing. What it's actually doing is disrespecting them and foisting costs upon them. That is not how you run a military alliance.
> We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
So our government is advancing the cause of energy independence by... what, exactly? Trying to shut down as many solar and wind projects as possible? Renewables (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear) are the best path towards energy independence, if not abundance, that we have. The current administration is bankrolled by Saudi oilmen whose only plan for energy independence is to shout "drill baby drill".
Meanwhile China is churning out solar panels like it's no tomorrow. This has some interesting effects. Like, there's parts of Africa that are just now getting reliable access to electricity because they can buy cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries. Renewables can be provided at basically any scale and can work without infrastructure. Which is making the current American governing coalition shit their pants because they're all oilmen. The American military is built to run on oil. And oil is going away.
> Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
I'll give you that China is bad at making friends. However, for their hegemonic goals, they don't necessarily need big American style alliances. They just need America's allies to look the other way while they steal Taiwan.
We're not getting rid of our allies, but it's long past time that they invested more in the common defense and it's important that they do, because it could be a valuable contribution to deterring war. Focus less on the soundbites. Yes there's messy dealmaking happening, but there's what's said and then there's what actually ends up happening.
Solar and wind are only okay, but they aren't reliable and subsidizing them mostly benefits China since they are by far the major supplies. Yes, it creates American jobs, but those people could be doing more important jobs without creating a foreign energy infrastructure dependency. I don't think we actually care that Africa has solar panels from China, except that it makes them energy dependent on them and increases foreign trade in Yuan. It's more of a way to create Chinese jobs, which is a huge priority so they end up with an oversupply.
Traditional nuclear has potential, but the costs, extreme complexity and lengthy lead times hurt the scalability. The newer fusion projects are interesting and I'm hopeful, but even if they work they take forever and are hard to replace quickly once they're up. It's more likely that we'll have a variety of all of these things.
There have been advancements in geothermal that are amazing, cheap, quick, less encumbered by supply chain risks and require way less land so we should see that scale out over the coming decades.
We do also have abundant oil which helps to reduce inflation and exporting it can offset some oil instability in the market. Yes, oil is eventually going away and that is why a renewable energy push was important, but a lot of oil remains untouched. The US military could also operate for years on just oil reserves and can get priority access to it. It would make plenty of sense for major countries to set aside oil for strategic and military purposes long after it stops being used for general transportation.
As for Taiwan, it is fair that dependency on exports from China can cause countries to tow the line, but it would mostly be optics with nothing preventing other forms of support. Also, the pain of losing Chinese exports in many ways would be less than the pain of an expanding China that goes unchecked, so I think those influences are only strong up to a threshold.
Give Trump a few more months then? The USA has shown itself so far be unreliable, and if not quite an enemy also not quite an ally while demanding 100% loyalty the other way around. This obviously will not hold, you can not combine those two and expect a static situation as the outcome.
An ally's reliability is relative. And relatively speaking, the United States is a very reliable ally.
I mean to what are we comparing America's reliability? To the reliability of the European Union? Which calls Ukraine not just an ally but also its shield, and then pays Putin more money than it provides aid to Ukraine. And this after we've been paying 50 cents per kwh for decades, while talking about how we're moving away from oil dependence and toward green energy.
Could China attack US? Why would US try to attack China in asia? Not an expert but that feels like losing proposition. I think people confuse proxy wars with wars. US is under no threat of being actually attacked.
It counts as an attack, but how close was US to actually being taken over? Usually when you fight a war the real risk is that you cease to exist as a country. I know nothing about war strategy, but seems to me US is in a great position as long as you get along with Canada and Mexico.
Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
> Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain.
I’m supposed to be scared of the military who has spent the last 80 years losing wars against nations a fraction of its own size? The US couldn’t “seize” afghanistan in two decades, what makes you think it could “seize nearly every country on earth in days”?
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.
What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.
The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities.
By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals.
A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school.
A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation.
Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail.
And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place.
Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
Nonsense.
Universities are just part of culture, it's tiny and most people do not participate and only receive the "products" coming out of universities. Culture is a broad concept and very region specific, it is not tied to academia. Universities have influence on culture but that's pretty much it.
Universities are supposed to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Outside of STEM fields they are increasingly failing at that task.
Relativism is in full force and we are in the "post-truth" world largely because university produced some of the most garbage theories you could think of.
And universities have no business inserting themselves into moral arguments, otherwise it is basically a state sanctioned religion. But this is basically the problem, universities have become the ideological arm the power in place, exactly like it was when the Catholics dominated Europe and gave legitimacy to kings.
Unsurprisingly there have been complaints of "neo-feudalism" which is just a repeat of the middle-age, that happened after the rise of Christianity, when universities were de facto Catholic institutions.
> but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
Passive-agressive much ? Instead of attempting cheap low blows, maybe you can go through the trouble of explaining.
Morals can guide you for science and engineering choices but the whole point of those fields is that they shouldn't be limited by morals. I think you are confusing ethics and morals but it also seems like you are just arguing for some form of censorship.
>The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
Vapid narcissism is an inherent human behavior and doesn't have much to do with universities but is largely linked to consumerism. I guess you could say that people go to university for credentialism in order to get a good pay to finally express their vapid narcissism. But the universities have nothing to do with the process and just a middle point in route to the goal. Which is basically the argument: credentialism is nonsense and cost a lot of money for no good results. If universities would be successful, one could easily argue that vapid narcissism should be going down actually but instead you get just another marker of uselessness. As for the MBAs, they can't be that big of an influence in the universities, it's mostly about bachelors and masters; why even bring this up ?
> DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
DEI take its roots in universities, via feminism, gender studies and all kind of social sciences bullshit. Those fields were created precisely to fill the ranks because it was statistically impossible to have enough people clearing the bar for the hard studies even if they had wished to expand capacity. It was just a way to make people pay for a piece of paper that is supposed to give them legitimacy even though what happened is nothing short of endoctrinement.
Of course the universities are a vector of it, they created the dysfunction out of ideology and greed. It is just some a proto-religion that is trying to establish its authority.
Nothing can tell you that better than the divide between the university "educated" women, voting left and the common man being either right-wing or closer to the center. Historically women are often the first followers of new religions (just go check who is doing new age bullshit) and they constituted the majority of early followers of Christianity.
So DEI was hardly a response, it was the result of a new religion that has no name trying to cement itself in the establishment.
But it can only work if the men play along and so far the sentiment has been quite negative to say the least.
> Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem
This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.
> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".
This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)
The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s
You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.
But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though.
I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
Depends how you measure, surely. They had less TVs and computers and prepackaged food, the same amount of sunlight, and more freedom (as measured by average income to rent ratio).
Not true, the share of income going to living necessities has steadily dropped. Even not true for sunlight - the air quality was so much worse that you couldn't see much of the sun anyway
It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.
> Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process.
It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.
If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges.
But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
> It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.
You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn. People largely don't need school to learn most things. I would argue that most good learners actually hate school. It would be challenging to self-teach your way to advanced math/physics but that does not concern the vast majority of education.
Being motivated to learned is deeply linked to having a reason for learning. I actually wouldn't trust people who were too industrious at school for careerist reasons because it mostly means they are able to tolerate bullshit and rote learn without much pushback on nonsense.
STEM is somewhat immune to this because you need at least some form of understanding to solve actual problems but plenty of field have a legitimacy issue resulting from this effect.
Notably the medical field is full of hard working idiots and most of the social sciences are infested with ideological parrots.
Allegedly it is supposed to select for conscientiousness but since I have faced specialised doctors who schedule 2 interventions when it could be done in one for billing purpose, I would argue it's mostly self-interest or a very perverted form of conscientiousness.
> If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk edging.
It's funny you take that example because a while ago there was a news in France where an architect had sentenced because he practiced without the required diploma. The guy was 60 and he had designed some big building, even for the public market (his mistake); he had learnt on the job with a mentor and never got around finishing the school curriculum.
Le Corbusier famously didn't have any formal architectural training yet seventeen of his projects are on UNESCO list. So I dunno, personally I would hire Le Corbusier regardless of his training if I ever could afford it but the point is that everyone should be free to choose for themselves, not the powers that be of the education establishment.
> Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation?
Yes, it doesn't mean anything, just that they got bored with education system or had some other problem.
Two of the most valuable companies were founded by drop outs, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (not high-school, but first year of college is basically the same).
If it was just a problem of competence, you could have some sort of certifications for most things, where one could take an exam to prove that he knows what he is doing.
But this doesn't happen because it is about enriching a specific class, restricting access to high level jobs to people who will submit to the dominant ideology. Most certifications/exams have a specific education level/diploma as requirement for entry. This is just supply control in favor of the most fortunate.
You just cannot reduce ability and motivation to the willingness/capacity to submit to the education system.
> But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff.
Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated.
On top of that, the issue is clearly a disconnect between what is needed in the market and what type of curriculum has been sold in universities so it's clearly not working.
In any case it seems insane to me that you are arguing for the isolation of training risks for the benefits of business.
What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect. In an healthy labor market, people would find jobs and the required training much easier.
Schools are just a way to offload the cost to the private individual at best or to the public at worst. That's just bad, business have no reasons to exist if they are just to leach of public benefits, might as well go full on communism at this point.
> You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn.
You can call it obedience or whatever libertarian talking point you like, but the ability to negotiate social systems is an important skill for functioning in society, whether as an employee or entrepreneur.
It's always been the case, even before industrialization. The most effective STEM workers are the ones who understand the social context they work in, not the narrowly technically focused STEM nerd.
> Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk [h]edging (sic)
It's absolutely risk hedging, and that's just how most employment works. Most employers are not looking for special snowflakes, that would be really inefficient. They want a likely average competence above a certain level, which varies by industry and company.
> That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff.
If you think business are interested in assuming any more risk than absolutely necessary to improve maximize financial outcomes, you haven't been in business much. We live in an era of lean operations (for better or for worse), and it's only getting leaner.
Companies want to solve the problem they focus on (i.e. build a farm combine), not run a basic education program for understanding the units of torque values on the bolts that hold it together.
> Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated.
The public gets taxpayers and a population who can afford to raise a family, which is essential for the continuation of "the public".
> What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect.
We already have relaxed regulations today. The existence of noncompete and at-will employment agreements means that even highly educated workers can be fired without cause.
Furthermore, many companies try to hire people as contractors for as long as they can get away with it in the labor market. The number of 1099 workers is growing lately, largely due to reduced labor leverage.
Relaxing employment regulations isn't going to make employers invest in education. They would sooner invest in automation (like automated paint shops for car manufacturing), which is what they have done for generations now.
Back to to the original point, automation is a major why they don't have need for less educated workers anymore, as anyone who has visited a modern factory can see for themselves.
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
> Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing.
It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost.
Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK.
We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem
Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itself.
> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects.
The people you’re pretending to be harbingers of truth believe that men can get pregnant.
> or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic.
So why is the bias the strongest in the least rigorous fields (communications, anthropology, music) and weakest is the most rigorous (mathematics, engineering, medicine, physics)?
Well they can. Some transgender men can get pregnant AFAIK.
This bias might be strongest in humanities because of self selection - conservatives think those are useless, but can see the utility in engineering - among other reasons.
How very brave of you to create this new account just to post something "obvious". I'm guessing it's "obvious" because of cyclic definitions, and deliberate imperviousness to the idea that chromosonal sex, phenotypical sex and gender aren't strictly equivalent.
I don't subscribe to the sexist belief system that women and men are defined by collections of cultural stereotypes or as mere identities to be opted into.
Quite astounding that people sincerely believe this nonsense and end up so proudly expressing stupidity like "men can get pregnant" because of it.
That happens in conservative circles
too. But instead of 4 years, Americans like myself are stuck with 40 years of business indoctrination from pro-business and conservative “leadership”.
The same leadership, by the way, that largely insisted on college degrees in the first place.
> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities
Yes - and?
Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.
> I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unlikely), or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives; this is far more likely as they have been explicitly stating that this is what they are doing for decades now.
This theory is further corroborated by where you see this bias; it’s the least pronounced in quantitative, technical fields (mathematics, engineering, chemistry), and most pronounced in fields that are almost completely qualitative.
I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out.
By comparison, is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?
> I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out.
> is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?
I’m not sure I understand your question. I would presume if people are self-selecting out of any organization it’s because they believe it isn’t a suitable place for them, and if this division is along party lines then politics is likely to be the cause of that belief. In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.
I'm not sure what you're pointing at in the links: I don't see any "explicit roadmap" to exclude mainstream conservative thinkers from professorships documented there. The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.
> In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.
The FBI very dramatically skews conservative compared to the American base, and I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.
It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case. The reality is always far messier, and nearly all bad things stem from complex emergent systemic outcomes with no X-Files Smoking Man at the center of it all.
Any claim of an affirmative explicit decision for the bad outcome requires exceptional justification, because it's just such an appealing thing to want to believe and its almost never true.
> The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.
I’m pointing you towards the trends; you aren’t going to find documentary evidence stating: “We didn’t hire this guy because of his voting history” because a) it’s illegal and b) it’s very unlikely these biases are coordinated between institutions. The Long March article is instructive because the departments where the bias is strongest are all frequent washout degrees for critical theorists.
> It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case.
I never made any assertion as to the existence of a “shadowy cabal” nor any other organized concert. This is an inane attempt to make my claims look ridiculous because you can’t refute them on their own merits. To wit:
> I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.
If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy? Because that’s what we are talking about here. Note that you have not accurately represented my claim: There is no FBI-style organization in my model that is coordinating the exclusion; it’s intentional, but happening at a local level, not as part of a centralized effort.
I may have misinterpreted "explicit roadmap", to be that implied a directing/organizing entity that is coordinating the exclusion of right-leaning people from professorships, versus your reply here clarifying you mean something different.
> If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy
Yep, I would. I think we are in the world where FBI agents are skewed as dramatically to the right as university professors are skewed left (which is to say: very). I don't believe either one as the deliberate exclusion of interested individuals from those positions based on their voting records, but instead more likely that both are self-selection and direct correlation to political views effects even when it's too such an extreme degree.
It's the same effect as theater having way more queer people in it than football, which is also not due to any conspiracy.
> or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives
What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research? While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
> What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research?
DEI has likely had a minor influence. In the articles I linked above, the bias towards liberalism is weakest among Asians, then whites, and then strongest among blacks and Latinos. I don’t know what the racial composition of professors looks like, so this is just a hunch.
The primary mechanism would be to simply avoid hiring those who fail to signal that they are sufficiently liberal, and avoid funding research that would reach illiberal conclusions. I can’t point you to any evidence of this besides the paper I linked above, but which seems more likely:
1) Republican opinions just so obviously conflict with the study of communications that there are zero professors of communications who are registered Republicans.
2) Democrats took control of these positions and did not care to invite anyone who didn’t signal that they were ideological fellow travellers?
> While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
Being interested is not the same as being competent.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Conservatives are split into 2 groups. Conservatives who are in it for the money and conservatives who are in it because they don't know any better.
College professor is not a well paying job for the level of skill required nor is it a job that someone who isn't very knowledgeable could do. That excludes most conservatives from the position.
> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power
To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.
This is not true. Whole conservative departments do well and exist. Moreover, whole ideologically pure christian conservative universities exist. Literally kicking off students for "infractions" that go against evangelical orthodoxy.
Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.
Being segregated into different universities is exactly the thing you need not to happen, and your attitude is the exemplification of the problem. Who is going to feel welcome if their concerns are blindly maligned as prejudiced and in bad faith by default?
It is not like liberals would created religious colleges. Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious". If what you want is ideological purity of evangelical Christianity, then yes, you have to create own institution. Which is exactly what conservatives did.
Because it is extremely valid for other institutions and students to NOT be subject to the above. They were not kicked off other universities and less radical Christians still go there. Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough. These conservatives do not want to share space with other nor to welcome anyone except those who are as conservative as them.
Your argument is typical "up is down and down is up" reversal. Conservatives want to create their own segregated spaces, because places that accept and tolerate non conservatives are just not acceptable to them. Somehow that is framed as problem with those other places not accepting conservatives (meaning not punishing non conservatives enough).
> Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious".
Which is dumb, but we're talking about the major schools everybody knows that used to have ideologically diverse faculty and don't anymore, not the ones of lesser influence founded by Baptists to begin with.
The point of freedom is that other people are allowed to be fools without requiring you to be, not that everybody be required to choose which major brand of zealot they have to be.
> Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough.
It's people saying "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" completely oblivious to the fact that freedom of speech literally is the thing where we don't punish people for speech. And then punishing people for expressing controversial/unpopular/heretical ideas.
> When academics were pushed out of Soviet and Chinese universities they had to leave to other locations or stop being productive.
That is not what happened with Soviet nor Chinese academics. They did not started new ideologically pure universities. Maybe you should read more on history rather then making up an alternative one.
Moreover, these "new" universities are not run by academics.
> The disparate impact is clear.
The only disparate impact is affirmative action for conservatives. In fact, most universities you complain about are run by rich and conservative boards. They make decisions to please rich and conservative donors.
But, they accept gay, women are treated more equally and that is something conservative christians cant stomach.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally?
The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r.
The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that.
So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?
The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to"
When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers.
I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes…
China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room.
The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also.
One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
