The NEA Ignores Obama’s Advice On Race

Ex-President Obama recently gave a speech in which he said,

Democracy demands getting inside "the reality of people who are different than us."

"You can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you because they're white, or because they're male...that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters."

This bit of obvious advice seems to have escaped the mandarins at the NEA, who recently published their 2018 statement of resolutions, which includes this howler:

White Supremacy Culture
The National Education Association believes that, in order to achieve racial and social justice, educators must acknowledge the existence of White supremacy culture as a primary root cause of institutional racism, structural racism, and White privilege. Additionally, the Association believes that the norms, standards, and organizational structures manifested in White supremacy culture perpetually exploit and oppress people of color and serve as detriments to racial justice. Further, the invisible racial benefits of White privilege, which are automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, and other factors, severely limit opportunities for people of color and impede full achievement of racial and social justice. Therefore, the Association will actively advocate for social and educational strategies fostering the eradication of institutional racism and White privilege perpetuated by White supremacy culture.

Of course, no evidence is given for this, but none ever is; the power and ubiquity of racism is taken as axiomatic, and unstoppable. Even if Obama — or, if you have that limber an imagination, Hillary Clinton — had said something to this effect in 2016 (as some of the commenters in the thead in Cathy Young’s tweet suggested), it’s hard to imagine how those words wouldn’t be drowned out by “deplorables” and the sheer mass of the diversity-industrial complex within the Democratic Party.

An Attempt To Bridge The Feminist Rhetorical Gap

Stuart Reges' brave jeremiad opposing the modern feminist orthodoxy in STEM fields (computer science particularly) comes from someone whose work in mentoring young women in the field is, apparently, unimpeachable. Having spent his life as an academic teaching computer science, first at Stanford, and later at U. Washington, he describes himself as "a champion of using undergraduate TAs in introductory programming classes" who has "helped hundreds of women to learn to love computer science". He writes that he is a "a strong advocate of many aspects of the diversity agenda."

He digs in:

When I tried to discuss [fired Google employee James] Damore at my school, I found it almost impossible. As a thought experiment, I asked how we could make someone like Damore feel welcome in our community. The pushback was intense. My question was labeled an “inflammatory example” and my comments were described as “hurtful” to women. When I mentioned that perhaps we could invite Damore to speak at UW, a faculty member responded, “If he comes here, we’ll hurt him.” She was joking, but the sentiment was clear.

One faculty member gave a particularly cogent response. She said, “Is it our job to make someone with those opinions feel welcome? I’m not sure whether academic freedom dictates that.” She argued that because we know that women have traditionally been discriminated against, perhaps it is more important to support them because the environment will not be sufficiently inclusive if they have to deal with someone like Damore. She said it “is up to us” to decide, but that, “choosing to hold a viewpoint does not necessarily give you the right to feel comfortable.”

Which is to say, the faculty doesn't understand the whole point of academic freedom, and its relationship to tenure. Reges then covers the same ground Damore did, and with similar reactions to Damore's. The official response was, more or less, hang the science, we have a diversity agenda to promote. Luckily, being a tenured professor, he has somewhat greater protection than Damore did, and so continues to pull a paycheck.

So now Gideon Scopes peers into the abyss. Can we talk the diversity mavens off the ledge? He observes, rightly, that people like Milo Yiannopoulos inflame and degrade the standard of discourse. But is a more neutral tone enough? What of Damore's well-researched paper that got him fired? (Emboldening mine.)

[D]espite its scientific validity, the document in its present form was unlikely to persuade anyone who wasn’t already at the very least skeptical of the politically correct narrative.  Given the degree to which emotions ran high around this issue, simply presenting the factual evidence could be perceived as hostile.

This has been going on for some while. Scopes cites the appalling misrepresentation of Larry Summers' 2005 remarks on the subject:

When the story broke that that Dr. Summers had attributed the STEM gender gap to a lack of aptitude on the part of women, I was puzzled.  What was he thinking?  Wasn’t he accusing certain people of being incapable of doing something that they had been doing for decades?  It wasn’t until two years later than I finally read his speech in full and came to understand that what he had actually said was far different from what I had believed he had said.

What he said was radically different from the funhouse mirror version that made the press headlines; using Scopes' paraphrase, "he was saying that the small percentage of the population with the highest levels of aptitude in science might contain more men than women."

But will it move the opposition? I doubt it. The Upton Sinclair axiom applies: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" The commercial feminists have strong reason to downplay actual research, as much as the DEA has reason to ignore and impede drug research. They will need to be fought to ground over this, and more.

The New York Times Wonders Why San Francisco Waiters Are Disappearing, Blames Everything But $15/Hr. Minimum Wage

The New York Times struggles vainly to blame everything but San Francisco's $15/hour minimum wage (which goes into full effect on July 1) for the disappearance of table waiting jobs:

So burgers get more expensive as houses do. But even wealthy tech workers will pay only so much to eat one. “If we were to pay what we need to pay people to make a living in San Francisco, a $10 hamburger would be a $20 hamburger, and it wouldn’t make sense anymore,” said Anjan Mitra, who owns two high-end Indian restaurants in the city, both named Dosa. “Something has to give.”

If customers won’t buy $20 burgers, or $25 dosas, and the staff in the kitchen can’t be cut, that something is service. “And that is what we did — we got rid of our servers,” Mr. Mitra said.

This brings up an important point: productivity increases are a prerequisite to rising real wages. Today's waiters have the same productivity, more or less, as their predecessors a century ago; there's only so many people one person can feed in an hour. It's basically an unskilled job, so the competition for labor is essentially infinite.

The second quoted graf above brings up something Brian Doherty wrote in Reason back in 2013: if there is a social obligation to pay a "living wage", why does it only fall on business owners? In other words, if business owners need to raise prices to meet the new, higher payroll, why is there no similar obligation on the part of patrons to spend more? The circle-squarers of the left never consider these kinds of problems. Their utopias rely upon ignoring second-order effects.

Also:

The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.

I guess if those jobs don't exist, then it doesn't matter what they're "guaranteed".

The Insanity Of Maxine Waters' Mobs

So, a rural Virginia restaurant named the Red Hen refused service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president's press secretary, and her party. The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, did this on the grounds that "the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation". Sanders and her party left without further incident.

Public establishments appear to have the right to eject people based on their political leanings, and thus Robby Soave's defense of Wilkinson's ejection in Reason. I do not think this is a terrific precedent, one that is likely to backfire in numerous ways. Particularly, that became obvious after long-time Representative Maxine Waters called for an escalation:

Waters said, “If you think we’re rallying now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You have members of your cabinet being booed out of restaurants. You have protesters taking up at their house. We say no peace, no sleep. No peace, so sleep. And guess what? We’re going to win this battle, because while you try to quote the Bible, Jeff Sessions and others, you really don’t know the Bible. God is on our side. On the side of the children. On the side of what’s right. On the side of what’s honorable. On the side of understanding that if we can’t protect the children, we can’t protect anybody, and so let’s stay the course. Let’s make sure that we show up where ever we have to show up. If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

The first problem I see here is that of charitable reading of Waters' statement. It is in no way clear that she intended for mobs to attack, although it is easy to read it in that way. ("Push back" is not the same thing as "push", i.e. physical assault.) But mobs do not do nuance. They are also not in charge of the venues she mentions. As Soave put it,

Waters seems to be encouraging people to form angry mobs to harass Trump officials; if such a practice became normal, it could very well get out of hand quickly. Besides, Waters doesn't get to decide the rules of engagement in department stores, gas stations, and restaurants—the owners of those properties do. I bet a lot of them would prefer if people didn't harass other customers, regardless of whether those customers work for Trump.

 The plain problems raised by such incendiary gabble sparked a response from no less a figure than Nancy Pelosi:

In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea. https://t.co/vlpqOBLK4R

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) June 25, 2018

Leaving aside the problem of whether America is beautiful with only the right political leadership, Pelosi's tweet was as close to a public (if coded) rebuke as another member of the same party could ever offer.

Conor Friedersdorf Clanks Again: The Anti-Male Agenda Of Modern Academic Feminism

Conor Friedersdorf and his milquetoast attacks on feminist extremists (viz., his response to the Scott Aaronson fracas) continue with a review of Suzanna Danuta Walters’ two-minutes’-hate against men in the pages of the Washington Post, of all places. (Imagining that paper publish a screed against women — can anyone do it?) Friedersdorf argues that her

argument is actually a perversion of “Team Feminism”—that is, the web is awash with feminists earnestly dismissing the notion that “Team Feminism” hates men, and the view is so unrepresentative of the various strands of “in real life” feminism that it is encountered more commonly among ideological enemies trying to parody or undermine feminism than among earnest advocates like Walters.

The problem with such gabble is that none of it is true. Pen poison pieces like this, and it gets you multiple tenured professorships — including as the founder of Indiana University's Women's Studies program. Presume men are always guilty of sex crimes, and you get to head the Title IX bureaucracy in a perverse redefinition of "civil rights". Vote for anybody other than Hillary Clinton as a Democrat, and you're slandered as a sexist ("Bernie bro"). Go off the ideological reservation, and get canned by a corporate feminist political officer. Offer criticism of a beloved comedy franchise's clumsy, unfunny, political reboot, and get waylaid as misogynist. "Team feminism", in reality, is the majority in the trade, if not the only kind on tap.

Perhaps my assessment of causality is wrong; perhaps Walters wasn't extreme enough in her prior writing, perhaps she is doing this as a plea for help, or attention. The only way men can win this game is not to play. Friedersdorf fails to even survey the landscape.

"Check Your Privilege" Meets The Royals: The Surprising Compatibility Of Modern Feminism With Monarchy

Joanna Williams in Spiked explains why "Monarchy And Feminism [Are] A Perfect Marriage". "Bold declarations of feminist intent do not show that the monarchy has changed: instead, they show how much feminism has changed."

Today, feminism ... doesn’t call for an expansion of democracy, but for democracy to be tamed. All-women shortlists and quotas for women on company boards deny people a free choice in appointing anyone they choose. They move us away from seeing gender as an irrelevance and treating people as equals. Instead, we’re told that women need to be afforded special privileges. In the past few weeks we’ve had calls for the banning of sexist adverts and the criminalisation of street harassment. Rather than calling for women to be recognised as adults, today’s feminism insists women are treated like children.

The only question campaigners and commentators have so far raised about Meghan’s feminism is whether she’ll get away with it. Is it realistic to think she can be both a feminist and a royal? Of course it is. Feminism today poses no threat to the establishment. Feminism is the establishment. Feminism is now concerned with enforcing etiquette, telling boorish men how to behave, and calling for censorship and regulations. It is elitist and condescending – a perfect match for the monarchy. Today’s younger royals reveal all about mental-health troubles and want us to know that despite wealth and privilege, they suffer too. Again, a perfect match for a feminism that allows rich celebrities to swap stories of disadvantage.

(Emboldening mine.) The advantages of being rich collide with feminist ideals:

Where Meghan differs from other women is that she has given up her own career for marriage. Today, over 70 per cent of all women and 90 per cent of female graduates are employed. Yet on the royal website, details of Meghan’s acting career – presumably earned through her own merit and tenacity – are given only a cursory nod.

The New Feminist Woman may have never materialized in the real world, but the old one — class-conscious as ever — still sets the rules.

Burning Down The Medical Village To Save It: The Folly Of Big Data In Medicine

Rena Xu's recent piece in The Atlantic on physician burnout is mostly interesting for its between-the-lines reporting. Yes, Big Data (i.e. medical coding) is driving a lot of physician burnout:

Regulations governing the use of electronic medical records (EMRs), first introduced in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, have gotten more and more demanding, while expanded insurance coverage from the Affordable Care Act may have contributed to an uptrend in patient volume at many health centers. These changes are taking a toll on physicians: There’s some evidence that the administrative burden of medicine—and with it, the proportion of burned-out doctors—is on the rise. A study published last year in Health Affairs reported that from 2011 to 2014, physicians spent progressively more time on “desktop medicine” and less on face-to-face patient care. Another study found that the percentage of physicians reporting burnout increased over the same period; by 2014, more than half said they were affected.

But won't we need ever-more new physicians to deal with the aging US population? Yes, we will, but —

A quarter of U.S. physicians are expected to retire over the next decade, while the number of older Americans, who tend to need more health care, is expected to double by 2040. While it might be tempting to point to the historically competitive rates of medical-school admissions as proof that the talent pipeline for physicians won’t run dry, there is no guarantee. Last year, for the first time in at least a decade, the volume of medical school applications dropped—by nearly 14,000, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. By the association’s projections, we may be short 100,000 physicians or more by 2030.

And this despite modest, recent upticks in new physicians, even despite Medicare's meddling in internship slots. In addition, the article cites the "Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act ... [which] would add 15,000 residency spots over a five-year period." That's a 1.6% increase vs. the 2014 physician population of 916,264, but nothing compared to the gaping hole implied by 100,000 missing doctors. Mandated medical coding — the raw material of Big Data in medicine — contributes to a physician burnout we can scarcely afford.

But this kind of insanity is to be expected. The people who imagine they are helping very frequently do not subject themselves to the consequences of their "help" (viz., Jonathan Gruber, who is not a doctor). The meretricious belief that big data will somehow "bend the cost curve" is deeply embedded, including, especially, in service providers with something to sell. There are costs to acquiring that data, and that cost is, more administrative overhead (emboldening mine):

...[D]octors are most valuable when doing what they were trained to do—treating patients. Likewise, non-physicians are better suited to accomplish many of the tasks that currently fall upon physicians. The use of medical scribes during clinic visits, for instance, not only frees doctors to talk with their patients but also potentially yields better documentation. A study published last month in the World Journal of Urology reported that the introduction of scribes in a urology practice significantly increased physician efficiency, work satisfaction, and revenue.

And who pays for that increased revenue? Ultimately, it's the patients, of course, or the government (taxpayers) if it's Medicare/Medicaid.