Mike Judge's Idiocracy and American Progress

A student in one of my classes commented recently on Mike Judge's Idiocracy. The student wrote:

If you recall in Idiocracy, there's no great resurgence of intellectual enlightenment at the end... only the exponential success of the few educated time-travelers over the rest of the happily stupid. This success doesn't come from educating people or instigating growth but from keeping to themselves and turning their (historical) knowledge into power. So, is that what we're in for? People that bother to read an uncensored history book or a hard-science technical manual when curious about an idea are becoming more and more rare, and their existence is being actively stigmatized. Is the reality to shut up and keep knowledge to oneself and get rich from it? The bulk of society are getting their degrees and entering the workforce having never had to fix a crisis in their lives, neurologically underdeveloped, missing critical-thinking skills that were absolutely normal even just 10 years ago. This is our workforce of tomorrow?

How do you work in this environment? It's like going to work in construction and finding out that the Dept of Labor suddenly designated that shadow-acting construction work should be treated as equivalent payable labor as actual labor. Now all the construction workers are 100 lbs and don't know how to use their tools, pantomiming construction behaviors and getting full pay for it. If you ask one of them to spot you when lifting something heavy, you're on your own. That's how I've felt at most of my jobs for almost five years now. 

My student indeed.  A century ago Ludwig von Mises wrote about how depressed interest rates stimulate malinvestment.  Malinvestment occurs when projects that are not feasible at market interest rates are funded at below-market rates. The rates will generally have been depressed by stimulative Fed policies.

The Fed has pursued stimulative policies for many decades.  At present, for instance, student-loan debt is about $1.5 trillion. The same period has seen the politicization of higher education. In today's universities, ideology and advocacy in the guise of social justice education substitute for learning about culture and science.  Much of this dumbed-down advocacy lacks any legitimate educational content.  It is funded by paper money, artificially created by the Federal Reserve Bank.  Much of the paper money loans will never be repaid because the dumbed-down social activists will not find jobs, and the unpaid loans will be a deadweight loss to society.  

Students educated in the politicized soft social sciences, the humanities, and the studies fields will not produce value beyond the value that high school graduates are capable of producing. They are not literate or numerate; they lack understanding of basic American institutions; their training teaches them to exclaim their oppressed status, making them difficult to employ in all but menial jobs.  A few months ago Ben Shapiro  noticed, with respect to research that I did earlier this year, that the extent of politicization of academic disciplines is inversely related to the earnings of the graduates. Effete graduates of the studies fields and left-ideological fields like sociology do dismally in the job market. 

There is no doubt of the importance of scientific and mathematical education. When the humanities involved education about the basis for American history and culture, it too was important.  The hard social sciences may at times help business decision making, but it is unclear whether the soft social sciences in their current state contribute to the social good.  However, most college students funded by the paper-money-based education bubble do not take science, math, languages, or the hard social sciences. Dumbed-down studies like gender studies are increasingly influential in fields like history.

Hence, as the number of college students has expanded and as the sciences have been downplayed in favor of politicized fields like gender studies, the value contributed by American universities has declined.  It may now be in negative territory: The net costs of higher education may exceed its social benefits.  

The malinvestment in education is linked to the flexible paper money system.   Inefficiencies are hidden by an artificially depressed cost of capital.  American corporations were already inefficient by the 1970s: Books like Patrick J. Wright's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors

depict an already-inefficient industrial system.  Major firms like GM and GE have been on monetary life support for years.  In turn, the paper-money bubble receives global life support  because the dollar is the international reserve currency.  That double-subsidization of inefficiency  has continued since the end of World War II.

One outcome has been plant relocation to Mexico and China.  With near-zero capital costs, relocation costs were eliminated, and the cost efficiency of relocation to low-wage countries was increased.  Waste is in thousands of fields, including the military,  health care, and finance.  When the waste, especially with respect to federal government debt,  becomes so extreme that inflation is the only way out, the dollar's reserve currency status will end.  There may be a switch to an international basket of currencies such as the IMF's special drawing rights. This may be accompanied by sharp reductions in government spending, public pensions, welfare, and subsidized health care, much as occurred in Greece.  

One of the effects of malinvestment is a workforce increasingly effete and obsessed with supposed injustices.  Such shadow workers, as my student calls them, will be ill equipped to handle an economic depression.  Of course, it is always possible that technology will evolve that will solve these problems, but even during periods of much more rapid technological advance than today's, such as during the laissez-faire period of the late nineteenth century, depressions and wars that posed greater challenges than the recent generations of Americans have experienced required better problem solvers than the current American system of higher education is producing.

Insider Trading at GE

There is increasing talk of the possibility of a GE bankruptcy.  There is always a trade-off between risk and return.  Selling when there is a panic over a small probability of bankruptcy is foolish, even if in the end it turns out to have been a right decision.  The reason is that markets tend to overreact to panic-inducing news. According to NASDAQ's website, three stock analysts give it a buy; nine give it a hold; one gives it a sell, so the bias is somewhat toward buy.  The analysts may be right.

One quick gauge of the probability of a bankruptcy is insider trading activity.  If there is talk of bankruptcy in the executive suite, insiders are likely to be the first to know.  According to The Street, as of October 31, in terms of numbers of shares traded, insiders recently have bought 98,100 shares while they have sold 41,740 shares.  The bias seems to be toward insider buying, although the number of insider sells is greater than the number of insider buys.  There are more sells but larger buys. Perhaps the small trades are by insiders who are less inside.

The chief seller seems to be the HR executive,  Raghu Krishnamoorthy, who has made a series of small sells recently.  CEO Lawrence Culp has been buying.

Buying GE now is a gamble. (Of course, it is less of a gamble than it was last year, when there was no panic, and the stock was selling 2.4 times higher at $17.88--as opposed to $7.44 now.)  On the one hand, there is a chance of bankruptcy and a likelihood of further panic selling; the stock is down better than six percent today.  On the other hand, when there is a turnaround, much as happened with Chrysler in the early 1980s, there will be a nice leverage effect.

Left Wing Hate Speech Against Mitchell Langbert's Blog III: My Courses Fill at a Faster Rate Than in Prior Years

Within the past two months, a small-but-vocal group of radical students have engaged in hate speech.  Supported by a small-but-vocal group of left-wing alumni and the fake-news media, they have called for my sacking from my teaching job at Brooklyn College.  The calls for my sacking received a moral salute from the college president and provost, who sent around emails (carefully omitting mention of my name) condemning my eminently valid claim that the Kavanaugh investigation was baloney.   

A petition to fire me for disagreeing with and offending the Democratic Party bosses--who decide on the college budget--was posted on  the Action Network.  To date, more than a month after the news stories subsided, 447 students and professors have signed the petition.   

The total enrollment at Brooklyn College is 17,803, and the total number of full-time and part-time faculty is 1,480, so about  (447/18,250) or 2.5% of the active Brooklyn College community have signed, a proportion statistically not all that much greater than zero.  If you add the alumni, of whom there are at least 300,000, the proportion is minuscule. If you add the entire population of left-wing extremists in New York (the petition was not limited to those associated with CUNY), the proportion is smaller still. 

Yesterday, a student in one of my classes sent me this email: 

It's [name omitted], hope all is well.

What are my chances of getting into one of your online wait[-]listed classes for Spring 2019? [O]r do they generally stay full?

I would be willing to try online considering I'm familiar with who you are.

Let me know.

Thank you,

Usually, my classes reach wait-list status around Christmas, so the publicity has been of little concern to the majority of students who take my classes. In fact, my classes have filled earlier rather than later than usual.  Perhaps the vast majority of students at Brooklyn College simply do not care about the left-wing president's and provost's emails, the small-but-vocal group of left-wing demonstrators, or the left-wing, fake-news publicity.  Perhaps more students agree with me than disagree with me.

Neither the fringe students and professors who demonstrated against me nor  the media, administrators, and professors who supported them were interested in putting the sacking demands into perspective.  This contrasts with earlier free-speech controversies at Brooklyn College in which left-wing speech was called into question.  Then, the administration and media emphasized freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  These included a controversy about a speaker from BDS and a controversy about students who entered a faculty council meeting and made anti-Semitic remarks.  

The students who wrote pieces about me in the student newspapers likely represent the the more articulate among the demonstrators.   The chief rationale that they present in their opinion pieces calling for my sacking is that they disagree with me and do not believe that people with whom they disagree should be allowed to teach at Brooklyn College. Their logic does not extend much further.

For example, Assibi Ali complains that "Langbert had the outlandish idea to pen a satirical piece that proudly and openly supports Brett Kavanaugh, whose hearing he claimed to be a 'travesty.'" Ali contends, "What students would feel comfortable reaching out to a rape apologist? A man who empathizes with Kavanaugh because of the “defamation that he has suffered at the hands of the media…” 

In other words, according to Ali, the 38% of Americans who supported Kavanaugh's appointment (according to left-biased Time Magazine) should not be permitted to teach at Brooklyn College. As well, Ali didn't bother to check how many students I have taught (likely in the area of 5,000) and how many have complained about not being able to reach out (none).  Perhaps Ali's prejudices have been learned at the college because, according to my own data, conservatives have been consistently excluded from teaching posts by the same left-McCarthyite faculties who have trained Ali.

Another student, Kevin Limiti, claims that my blog is a threat to safety.   In contrast, Limiti is unconcerned by the violent threats I received from his classmates or the five campus police officers whom the administration saw fit to post outside my classroom.  I add that while the administration saw fit to complain that my blog post was outside the supposed "community standards" of Brooklyn College (thus claiming to arbitrate the speech standards of a publicly funded university), the same administration saw no need to complain about left-wing students' threats of violence. 

Like Ali, Limiti is unaware of how university personnel decision making ought to work, how university decision making works in reality, what the First Amendment says, and how the Supreme Court interprets the First Amendment.  At a phone meeting of the National Association of Scholars yesterday, several professors noted that the far left has frequently eliminated or subverted K-12 civics teaching so that students are unaware of how basic American institutions work.   Ali and Limiti are the result.

CUNY's bylaws state the following:

The City University of New York (“CUNY” or “the University”) is committed to academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas and expression of all points of view for members of the University community, including individual students, faculty, and staff and recognized groups of those constituencies. Such exchange is at the core of the mission of higher education. The ideas of different members of the University community will often conflict, but it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even offensive. Although members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however disagreeable or offensive they may be to some members of the University community. The appropriate response to false or offensive speech is not to prohibit it but to respond with more speech.

The bylaws give some caveats, which entirely depend on the speaker's presence at the college, which was not the case with a blog written off campus and with no purpose of addressing campus-linked issues.  Limiti's claim that my blog perpetuates violence is characteristic of the kind of intolerance in which college students are increasingly indoctrinated.   

False Accusations of Sexual Assault Skyrocket

I just received this press release from Margaret Valois of SAVE Services

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Rebecca Stewart

Telephone: 513-479-3335

Email: info@saveservices.org

Surging Public Support for Due Process and the Presumption of Innocence

WASHINGTON / November 13, 2018 – Several non-partisan, national surveys point to widespread public concern about the erosion of the presumption of innocence and due process in our country, the problem of false allegations, and a pressing need to reinvigorate these bedrock principles of fairness in our legal system.

Public concern was first spotlighted in a 2011 SAVE survey that reported 9.7% of persons report they have been falsely accused of sexual assault, domestic violence, or child abuse. One in six of the respondents personally knew someone who said he or she had been falsely accused of domestic violence, child abuse, or sexual assault.¹

A 2013 survey commissioned by the Center for Prosecutor Integrity found that 66.8% of respondents believe the presumption of innocence is becoming lost in our legal system. In addition, 42.8% of persons say prosecutorial misconduct has become widespread.²

A 2017 YouGov poll revealed strong support for the restoration of due process in campus sexual assault cases. The survey queried whether “Students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties from their colleges that they receive in the court system.” Among the 1,200 persons responding, 65% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans, and 67% of Independents expressed agreement with the statement.³

A poll by Ipsos/NPR found 80% of men and 73% of women believe that those who are accused of sexual harassment should be given the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. The survey was conducted October 22-23, 2018 with a sample of 1,003 adults.⁴

Much of the shift in public perceptions can be linked to the controversies associated with the #MeToo movement.

Morning Consult recently found 57% of U.S. adults say they are equally worried about men facing false allegations of sexual assault as they are about women facing sexual assault. Overall support for the #MeToo movement has dropped 2% over the last year, the survey found.⁵

A survey conducted by YouGov and the Economist in October revealed 18% of Americans now think false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished, compared with 13% one year ago. These shifts in public opinion against complainants have been stronger among women than men, the Economist noted.⁶

SAVE has developed a Due Process Statement that urges members of Congress to “speak out in support of Constitutionally rooted due process rights on campus.” Over 285 law professors, scholars, and state lawmakers have signed the Statement. SAVE invites additional state lawmakers to become co-signers. For more information, contact mvalois@saveservices.org .