Why We Do Not Need Professional Bloggers.

Now bend over.

I read that Washington DC is now going to require all child-care workers—kindergarten teachers, ECE, daycare workers—to have college degrees.

It’s a terrible idea.

At the same time, I keep reading pieces about the decline of the American “working class,” how those without a college degree can no longer find decent work. How this has become a social crisis, with a frightening rise in suicides, drug abuse, family breakups, and tearing of the social fabric. Witness the voter rebellion that just elected Trump.

We keep reading that this is caused by globalization, and by automation. Maybe, but there is another obvious cause, which is far more under our control: creeping credentialism. We now require a college degree for all sorts of jobs that used to be available out of high school.

Leaving vast swathes of the population without a living wage.

Since World War II, this disease of credentialism has been growing. Everybody wants to be a “professional,” and everybody wants to go to college. And those who do not, or cannot, are thrown to the curb, as “deplorables.”

According to studies (e.g., Brookings Institute), the net result, along with rising unemployment and declining prospects for so many, has been a rise in costs and a deterioration of services for the general public.

Nor is this surprising. Any certification regime is really a cartel in restraint of trade. By limiting competition, it forces consumers to pay higher prices.

Those in the given “profession,” the “experts,” love the idea. They get more power and more money. Hence the virus has passed quickly from one job to another.

But it is not good for the general public. Besides rising costs as a consumer, for inferior service, he is barred from more and more jobs for which he will not have the specific qualification. And, if he is poor, cannot afford to get. And a lot of funds and energy are ploughed into useless education instead of productive work. The rich get a bit richer, the poor get a lot poorer.

In some jobs, mind, it does make sense to have specific academic qualifications: medicine, law, engineering, accounting, dentistry. Or at least, to have specific qualifying exams testing necessary knowledge. In sum, the traditional professions, as we knew them before World War II.

But for most jobs, it does not make sense.

Take ECE, the current example. Caring for children is a talent. It is not really something you learn: you have a maternal or paternal instinct, or you don’t. You empathize with kids, or you don’t. There is probably nothing at all you could get by sitting at a desk for four years that would make you any better at it. Instead, such an academic qualification directs you away from all the skills you need for the job, and requires skills unrelated to it. Anyone who is really good with children and enjoys being around them is going to find it hard to ignore them entirely and instead devote four years to isolation from them. The ability to do so does not bode well for their commitment to kids.

So such accreditation selects for those less cut out for the job. At the same time, it reduces the pool of employees available, and forces employers to select on grounds other than actual ability to do the job.

No surprise, then, if the quality of day care begins to fall. While the costs go up.

We have seen the same thing happen, over about the last generation, to journalism. The skills that make a good newsman—a refusal to defer to authority, a restless curiosity, and an ability to write well—are either not teachable, or antithetical to the requirements of an academic journalism degree. So the rise of journalism schools has kept good journalists out of journalism, and fairly quickly destroyed the field.

That chicken is now roosting. Amateurs on the Internet are now able to wipe the floors with multi-million dollar media enterprises.

We have seen the same thing happen, over about the last generation, to el-hi teaching. Costs for education at all levels have been spiralling upward, since we started requiring education degrees, and the quality of teaching has been drifting downward.

Academic ability is indeed a valuable prerequisite here—you cannot teach what you do not know, and the best learners are the best teachers. Nevertheless, by requiring a specific qualification, a specific education in “education,” instead of subject knowledge and overall academic ability, the field has been destroyed.

The problem here is that anyone who has attended schools at various levels for twelve or sixteen years, and has been an able student, necessarily knows a lot about how to learn and how to teach. That’s a lot of hours of classroom observation, discovering what approaches work and do not work, and so forth. There is really no valid knowledge about how to teach thet might be transmitted in an education degree that he or she is not by then already going to know.

In order, therefore, to narrow down the number of prospective teachers, and so establish their cartel, “education professionals” have had to create an entirely bogus field. It is not just that education degrees are content free: in order to teach something new that marks their graduates as “trained professionals,” they have to constantly come up with something they have not seen before. Inevitably, they gravitate to teaching and requiring techniques that are proven not to work in the classroom.

Now schools must hire based on holding this degree, at the cost of both teaching ability and subject knowledge. As with ECE courses, any good teacher would find sitting through a typical ed degree more or less intolerable: they would have to put aside for the duration any of their natural teaching instincts, and any of their natural learning instincts, to do something that violates everything they care about.

So again, the education accreditation process systematically weeds out good teachers.

This is probably going to be the next chicken to arrive home. We already know that private schools that do not require teachers to be certified do consistently better; and complete amateurs, homeschooling parents, do consistently better; than the “professionals.” Just wait until online education gets widespread.

Another problem with accreditation for any field is that it standardizes. Any work of standardization eliminates the bottom of the field; but at the inevitable cost of eliminating the top as well. Any unconventional methods will not pass muster, regardless of whether they are unusually bad or unusually good. So unless all that is required in a given field is competence, you lose as much as you gain.

For some fields, like accountancy or dentistry or copyediting, that works well.

Many other fields suffer from imposed conformity. Journalism is an obvious example: when all journalists write the same way, and think the same way, it becomes tedious to read a newspaper. Teaching is another: part of good teaching is inspiring interest, and when everyone teaches to formula, interest is the first thing lost. ECE would be a third.

Generally, any field in which talent or giftedness is important will suffer from “professionalization.” Professionalization tends towards mediocrity.

At the same time, the requirement that just about everyone spend long years at a desk to get a decent job is a cruel imposition on the young. There is a reason why the generation gap and teenage angst surfaced soon after the Second World War. In was then, thanks largely to the GI Bill, that higher education and the requirement for it became widespread.

As a result: widespread youth unemployment; young people perhaps being locked for life into an unsuitable career. Young people forced to delay marriage and family, forced to delay their financial independence and adulthood to jump for years through humiliating and essentially meaningless hoops. So a sense of existential angst, frustration, alienation, and a lot of destructive behaviours: loose sex, drugs, mental illness, suicides. So the teenager was invented; so the Sixties happened.

And we are training people to remain children, in permanent infantilism, by tacking on four or six more years of childhood dependency, instead of teaching them to be responsible adult individuals. This, as Jefferson pointed out, is antithetical to a democracy. This kills good citizenship.

The quality of higher education has also been devastated. College should be for the exceptionally intelligent. It does not make sense any more if it is for everyone. It becomes just a holding pen, a second high school, because people have to be pushed through who have no natural talent or interest for things like critical analysis, memorization, or the world of ideas. As it gets corrupted by this dumbing down, it is no longer available for the highly intelligent.

Here is a useful estimate of average IQ by college subject. This is fairly reliable, because SAT and GRE tests match up well with IQ scores. It seems to me a good rule of thumb that any subject not attracting an average IQ of about 120 or above would be better dealt with by a technical college, or apprenticeship. Folks functioning below about this level are not really going to be adept at critical thinking. Better for them to concentrate on learning the particular skills to do a particular job, instead of wasting their time.

Unfortunately—perhaps you’ve noticed—technical colleges keep disappearing. They keep morphing into universities. This is a bad tendency on two grounds: first, we need more technical colleges, not more universities, and second, it sends the message that even the technical schools think college is the goal.

The drive for accreditation has devastated the young. It has devastated the working class. At the same time, it has emphasized the gap between the poor and the rich. And at the very same time, it has ensured that the rich, and those in control, the “elite,” are less competent and less intelligent on average year by year.

This is not heading in a good direction. The working class gets less, and pays more, while they increasingly see they are being governed and lorded over by idiots.

I suggest that government should pull out altogether from regulating professions. Leave it to the free market. Pull out any regulations tending to favour professionalizing. If people see a need for quality control, they will demand it of the professions themselves, one by one. There is no reason for government to be involved.

To reduce the notion that college is for everyone, I suggest that government pull any funding—which is vast--to majors or universities attracting an average IQ below 120, or the equivalent SAT score. And no student loans for college for students below that level. Below that level, they and we would be better off with technical college, or apprenticeship.

Sure, give funding and student loans in the same proportion to those below that IQ level, But not for college. For technical school or apprenticeship, or loans to young entrepreneurs.

Some may be uncomfortable with using SAT score exclusively to choose university students, and not marks. Because it discounts individual effort. And intelligence is not quite the same as academic ability. Although the correlation is pretty strong.

But marks are fundamentally unreliable. Set a minimum mark, and all marks will probably rise to meet it. You could set a standard test of academic knowledge; but you would be penalizing people who go to bad schools in bad neighbourhoods—usually poor people. Another option would be to let just about everyone in for first year, but then flunk them ruthlessly. The problem there is that it is too much pressure: you are evaluating for steely nerves early maturity as much as ultimate ability.

But we must not go on as we are. We are heading for the abyss.

The Guaranteed Annual Income

Senator Hugh Segal, badly in need of a haircut.

The American working class is in full revolt. This is for many reasons, but one big one is economic.

The current popular surge for Brexit, for Donald Trump, against immigration, seems at least largely due to the concern that the working class is losing job opportunities.

Shutting the doors to immigration will not work. Neither will trade protectionism. Dog, that’s the wrong tree.

Building walls against newcomers only means jobs will move to other countries, as the developed world becomes less competitive. If you must pay a minimum wage of $15 in Canada, but you can get a Chinese or Indian worker to do the same work for $5, it is hard to see how to keep the work, or the money, in Canada. Better for our economy to have the jobs here, however low-paid.

Nor will trade protectionism work. It will raise prices for consumers, which will be a net loss. Only some of us are producers all of us are consumers. And it cuts us off from markets. You can only go so far on everyone taking in everyone else’s laundry.

Worse, even if these measures worked to protect the unskilled from globalism, they would be doing nothing for the real problem: automation.

In the past, improvements in technology have always led, overall, to more, not fewer jobs. The lower cost of production was cashed in mostly on a higher standard of living, with everyone buying more stuff. But there may be a ceiling to that: economists talk of the declining utility of income or wealth above a certain point, and I am not certain we have not reached it, at least in the developed world. My kids are not too interested in getting any more toys. Too much is available free on the Internet that is a lot more fun.

The same could be said for my old addiction to magazine, newspapers, and books.

Elon Musk, who tends to be a bit of a visionary, suggests most jobs will soon be take over by machine. So does this recent piece. Robots can do the same manual labour humans do at $2 an hour.

Nor can we escape this by concentrating on services rather than manufacturing.

The single most common job in North America is truck driving. That is already obsolete. Self-driving trucks are available now. Taxi driving is also gone. Cashiers can be easily replaced, and already have been in some places. In China, they have begin putting up buildings with 3-D printers.

Its not just blue-collar work either. The bulk of legal work is a matter of consulting past cases, or thumbing through law books. Infinitely easier by computer. The bulk of medical work is diagnosis. Easy, and more accurate, by computer. Bookkeeping, accounting? Easily handled by software. And, of course, the economies of automation here are much more compelling.

So now what happens? After all, the wealth is still there, and growing. It is just all in the hands of investors, not of labour.

The great political danger, too, is that the American working class, having put their faith in Trump's solution of lower immigration and trade protectionism, will not be terribly happy when they discover it makes things worse instead of better. They are mad now, and in a mood to disrupt. Imagine what it will be like then, if nobody has any solutions for them.

Welding robot.

Enter, perhaps, Hugh Segal’s proposal for a Guaranteed Annual Income.

I especially think right-wing parties should embrace it and put it in the forefront of their programmes.

The claim that the right wing does not care about the poor is a powerful argument against the right. It is time to address this. Give a strong push to the GAI idea, and call the left’s bluff.

In principle, GAI would cost less than what we are doing currently. Now, most of the money that is supposed to go to the poor instead goes to salaries for bureaucrats to administer the complex programmes. By simplifying the process, just giving money instead of trying to run the lives of the poor, we can let the poor live better for less. The money gets spent on more important things, and distortions in the market, always inefficiencies, are removed.

I have seen, as an argument against the plan, that it would only cause inflation in the price of basic goods like rent and food basics, so that the poor would end up no better off. But that is a problem with the present system, which the GAI would fix. Inflation happens when the seller can be confident of getting the asking price however high. As when the government commits to pay for housing for the poor, or medicine, or tuition. It is then a sweetheart deal, crony capitalism. It happens even if the government should commit to pay for a specified service up to a certain amount. The price will automatically rise everywhere to that amount.

But if the government simply gives the poor an adequate income, this will not happen, because the free market remains. Individuals, given the choice of renting a comparable apartment at either $600 or $800 per month, are naturally going to choose the $600 offer, and use the additional money on some other want or need. There remains a competitive advantage in building apartments and renting them for $600.

This incentive to go for the cheapest option, of course, declines with greater overall wealth. Then one can indulge in trivialities like preferred colour or neighbourhood.

In other words redistributing to the poor, instead of giving it to bureaucrats, should serve to lower the price of essentials, not raise it.

The next objection is more serious: that many, given an adequate guaranteed income, will stop working. That may be so—this is the main issue any pilot should be trying to determine. However, the incomplete evidence from an earlier trial in Manitoba is that it does not happen. The only people there who stopped working were mothers with small children—and there is a good case that society is better off having them at home in any case. It is an investment in our future.

And here, we should not compare the GAI in its effects with perfection, but with what we have at present. Our current system makes it difficult for those on social assistance to take work: they usually lose their social assistance. And it is not easy, if necessary, to get back on it again. Bureaucracy.

A well-crafted GAI could still make taking a job worthwhile—taking back, say, only fifty cents for each new dollar earned, up to a ceiling. If it did, there is reason to believe almost everyone, given the chance, would take one. Not only do most people find having more money better than having less; most people are not content having nothing in particular to do all day.

In any case, once again, this mat not even be an issue: there may be no more jobs to be had.

Would that be so bad? The ancient Greeks believed leisure was essential to the fully human life. That after all, was why God made slaves. This was also the foundational thought of feudalism and European chivalry. To work for a living was beneath the dignity of a gentleman.

We might all then devote ourselves to what life is really supposed to be about: to the humanities, so-named for a reason. And to the creative arts, the one human activity at which machines cannot replace us.

A renaissance of the humanities and the arts might be the single greatest possible improvement in our general quality of life. We do pretty well already on material things.

At the same time, if any other jobs remain at which humans might be of some special worth, those who already had their basic needs provided for might be happy to take them for a small consideration. They no longer need to make the proverbial “living wage.” Making our industries all more competitive.

There are worse futures to fear.

Welcome! I'm from the future, and I'm here to help.

What Is Your Social Class?

Upper class Burmese couple, 1890s.

I recently tried a quiz offered by the Christian Science Monitor, “What is your social class?” It put me in the middle class, which is just about spot on. Ain't nobody here but us bourgeois. But I found the analysis behind the questions shocking. It turns out that the current American upper class, based on real science, is the "small slice of society that tends to feel the least bound by the legal and moral rules observed by other Americans” In other words, the US has a corrupt and immoral upper class. 

If this is news, it is bad news. It seems to me that keeping the upper class honest is the sine qua non of civilizational success. This is the whole ball o'wax. It is what codes of chivalry, Confucianism, gentlemanliness, honour, professional ethics, are all about trying to do. That fight is always an uphill fight, because there are always fewer practical constraints on an upper class; self-indulgence is an eternal temptation. And the New Testament is no doubt right that the poor are always more ethical than the rich. But I do suspect things have gotten much worse since the Sixties, which were largely a rebellion by the upper classes against any constraints on their desires.

Police lead upper class New Yorkers through the slums of Five Points, 1880s.

A corrupt upper class is the sole difference between the Third World and the First. I suspect as well that the New Testament's persistent warnings about the corruptabiltiy of the upper class are the secret key to the Christian West's tendency to keep ahead of the rest of the world on most measures of social success. The upper classes are now in open rebellion against all that, in a way we have not seen for almost two thousand years.

On specifics, the studies behind the CSM quiz show that the American upper classes of this day are 1) more inclined to envy; 2) less inclined to courtesy (i.e., stopping for a pedestrian); 3) more inclined to steal; 4) more inclined to lie; 5) less inclined to trust or think highly of others; 6) less able to read others' emotions; 7) more inclined to spoil their children; 8) vastly less inclined to enjoy gospel music; 9) more likely to be atheist or agnostic; 10) less likely to give to charity; 11) more concerned about status in buying clothing. 

Hunting tigers out in India.

All bad traits, it seems to me.

Number six is particularly interesting: it suggests that the upper classes have less empathy for others. It also suggests that one does not get ahead in this culture by being sensitive to the feelings of others, but by being insensitive to them: that "emotional intelligence," to the extent that it really is a key ingredient in personal material success, is not a matter of learing empathy, but of learning psychopathy.

Uppity Rednecks

A view of the Zimmerman-Martin case from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

According to my sources, in order to reach one million readers, I am still supposed to be writing about the Zimmerman trial. Okay, so here goes:

The line that has been pushed in the media from the beginning is that Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black: that it was all about race. This is certainly incorrect, according to the facts. Who is pushing this lie so aggressively, and why?

The real truth seems to be that George Zimmerman's prosecution is all about class. He has been demonized in the media, and prosecuted beyond reason, not because of his race, which is completely unclear, but because he is working class--technically, lower-middle class. Worse, he is lower-middle class trying to get ahead. The ordinary working stiff was acting “uppity.” To read the comments and commentaries, those who want to see him hanging from the nearest tree are most enraged because he supposedly acted as if he were a figure of authority, watching and following Martin as a suspicious character.

Of course, this is more or less what the police would do; and it is obviously not a hanging offence when they do it. The problem is that Zimmerman, though in fact legally entitled to do this, was not formally qualified. He was acting above his station, in the minds of the professional elite, including “professional” journalists.

One can see how this would ring all kinds of bells, if subconsciously, in the typical newsroom. What professional group is more threatened by citizen volunteerism these days than the media? Zimmerman and those like him are to them an existential threat. It was in their vital interests to take him down by whatever means necessary.

“Racism” is a preferred and time-honoured stratagem in this regard. According to the professional elite, the Pharisiate, the working class is racist by nature. That's why they must be kept in their place. The black mobs now raging through Oakland, et al, and the “low-information voters” generally, are useful idiots for these purposes. “Low-information voters,” pretty much by definition, are people who want to be taken care of, and are happy to have a ruling elite do their politics for them.