Wrote Quillette:

The first critic of the efficacy of degree-seeking was one of America’s earliest philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, he would have been proud to define himself as an “Americanist,” even though the United States was scarcely half-a-century old by the time he started publishing. Eager to cultivate a philosophical tradition wholly separate from European traditions, Emerson understood that past revered wisdom needed to be continually challenged. In his quest to establish the nascent American philosophical tradition’s bona fides...

Zzzzzz. How much simpler to say "The idea that all cops should require a college degree is risible, if not ridiculous"?

Why does Quillette publish these arguments that make the reader fight through cotton wool?

Causes & effects are obscured here. I've heard of a number of upscale cities which required cops to have degrees; they paid higher salaries and were more-pleasant places to work, so they got better cops.

Brains and virtue are not blood relatives, but they often travel together. A kid from a loving & stable home who can afford college and gets a degree may well have attractive qualities that communities want when hiring cops. Insisting on sheepskins isn't by itself going to bring good cops into being.

College degrees have an inflated value to a certain segment of society. It's kind of like an economic "bubble." I think (and hope) our current bubble is on the verge of bursting, because the true value of a college education is, on average, rather minimal. It can be absolutely the right thing for some people, but I suspect it's about 5-10% of those that actually attend college.
I would venture that someone with certain MOSs and an HD from the military is a much better fit for your average LEO.

Fifty years ago, Peter Drucker (born and educated in Europe) tried to warn Americans about this sort of thing:

"The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can."

Drucker specifically warned about the danger of so-called “elite" institutions which have "a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy."

See my post Drucker on Education, 1969:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/26133.html

An education, like most lessons in life, is basically a crap shoot. Some will take from it an ability to think and adapt their thinking to changing circumstances, continuing to learn; while others will take their education as dogma and rigidly adhere to it. The degree itself does not separate the two; and requiring a degree does not guarantee one result over the other.

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Furthermore, the ever-expanding realm of credentialism further shrinks the available pool of quality jobs for working-class Americans, who, despite the increasing technological complexity of the economy, remain the largest economic and cultural bloc of the general population.

And people wonder why the working class is upset.

It used to be that a person who graduated from high school, but did not pursue higher education could find a job that paid enough to support a family. These jobs were often in the local factory or the local police and fire departments.

Our politicians have largely abandoned industrial policy, preferring to promote "clean" industries like software and a service economy. That abandonment will have serious ramifications for the country.

As Loren Thomspon put it in a recent Forbes article about the latest Pentagon study on American industrial decline:

"The bottom line here is that the United States is not competing effectively in industries that will largely define the future of the global economy. Whatever President Trump’s failings may have been, and they were many, he saw where this was headed and put industrial policy back on the national agenda."

A sad truth about education is that it's not quite a crapshoot: For reasons about half each of genetics and environment, we're getting ever-better at identifying kids who'll do well in school. This is both discomforting and perhaps an opportunity: We'll know which might benefit from extra instruction, should we care to provide it.

> It used to be that a person who
> graduated from high school, but

I don't know what going to become of the United States economy, but it doesn't seem like anyone's concentrating on a plan to exploit and reward the labor of the less intelligent.

A quarter-century ago, Kaus flamed Murray hairless for acknowledging the indisputable influence of genes on brains. On precisely these topics, he's recently shown reconsideration: 'What Makes the Middle Class Ticked.' As noted here so often before, substantially more Americans have left the MC by climbing than by falling.


I'm gonna look up the Thompson piece, but…

The last argument I read for coherent industrial policy came from Grieder (I think) in Rolling Stone circa '83. Paraphrase: 'These Japanese, with their conniving MITI, are beating our basksides! My niece loves her Sony Walkman! We need a plan, a centralized plan, because we can no longer compete!'

In short order, the quintessentially American microcomputer revolution swept across human enterprise at every scale, and short years later, the Japanese economy was in the toilet for entrenched banking corruptions (whence it has yet to fully emerge).

Holy Moly, the Thompson piece is available in the clear!

I think Thompson is wrong but can't concentrate to explain while Cleveland, which I've never been to, is being humiliated that way.

A recent girlfriend had a bridesmaid from Cleveland.

I mean one of her best friends did. Long story, not interesting… Much like the Forest City herself. okaylater

"We'll know which might benefit from extra instruction, should we care to provide it."

Gattaca! Gattaca! Gattaca!

The last argument I read for coherent industrial policy.... ~ Crid at January 17, 2021 1:03 PM

I haven't read the Rolling Stone one.

I generally don't favor arguments calling for centralized industrial policy, but I do favor some sort of broad-based coherent policy that would make our government more friendly toward industry.

Same with the other areas of our economy that our government is tasked with managing. Our government is, to our long-term detriment, operating under a series of seemingly random and often conflicting directives - in many areas - enacted by lawmakers under a compulsion to "do something."

I think Thompson is wrong but can't concentrate to explain while Cleveland, which I've never been to, is being humiliated that way. ~ Crid at January 17, 2021 1:28 PM

I'm afraid the threshold for humiliation is pretty high for Browns' fans.

TB vs. NO could be even better

But also, the title of this blog post is funny. Amy's been doing that for a long time.

Well that was a depressing article.

But hell, just last year sport's team owners were having to fly the company jet to China to get masks, so he's not wrong.

It's not that Thompson's wrong, it's just that since this crisis struck, it's been blindingly apparent that we've left ourselves vulnerable to Chinese production in materials large and small. And having infected us so recklessly with respiratory disease, it turns out the Chinese don't take our needs any too seriously.

But it was also appalling, as March turned to April and summer turned to fall, that local and state governments had no idea how to turn local businessmen and industrialists loose on these problems.

This has been the pattern for two or three generations now, parallel to the education problems described above. Government fast-tracks the smart kids (likely to be successful anyway) into colleges with minimal subsequent debt.

And government prefers big businesses, because you can push them around, demand benefits for gays and time off for adoption(!) in families, and it really won't show up (clearly) on the bottom line. Ford Motors will roll on, one way or the other.

But if some smug regulator or state lawmaker tries to build a career out of dropping a new burden of employee support (or licensing or equipment certification) on a birthday card shop or a hair stylist or a small production line for surgeon's masks, the business will often die… So nobody's needs get met. (Fear not for the regulator or state lawmaker, they can always find a new project for your tax dollars.)

America hates 'the little people' in both contexts; China at least uses theirs productively.

A few things going for us: Our schools and researchers are still the most respected on the planet. (Here's a fun account to track these patterns day-by-day.) I live near a campus that has had 6 or 8 thousand Chinese students, most of whom will return to the Mainland for their working lives… But as far as I know, no Chinese scientist has ever won a Nobel Prize in China. Their efforts to come up with masterful (and presumably government-manipulable) microprocessor and OS designs have not yet borne fruit. (Meanwhile, there doesn't seem to be a single government database that hasn't been hacked by either Chinese or Russians.)

An important consideration is that our economies are so intimately connected at this point that if we go down, they'll go down with us.

I think we'd have to read the Pentagon report Thompson is describing to know what he means by "industries that will largely define the future of the global economy."

But it's only halftime in New Orleans, and they're tied.

I don't care enough to look up the list of recent Nobel winners: If I'm wrong about that, speak up