If I understand correctly, DeSantis seems to have been mostly working the referee by threatening to reevaluate whether Florida should look for an alternative to AP classes sponsored by College Board. (DeSantis thinks the College Board curriculum on some classes is not balanced and/or indoctrination.)
It looks like College Board has added some additional nuance into its planned Black Studies AP class, but it's not clear if that will be enough to get the class into Florida schools.
As an outsider the American "AP class" system doesn't make sense to me. Surely if a university-level class can routinely be (a) passed by high schoolers and (b) taught by high-school teachers, it means that this class is far too easy to be a university-level class?
Over a 1/3 of the population gets an undergraduate degree. And getting a degree is an imperfect measure of intellegence, so some undergraduate-degree holders are average in intelligence.
As a result, even among college graduates, there are large, qualitative differences in the ability to handle high-level cognitive work. AP classes are mainly targeted at not just future college graduates, but those who will likely excel in college.
I'm a professor at an unselective state university in the US and agree 100% with you: the way we do things doesn't make sense at all, especially to someone with an outside perspective. Undergraduate education in the US is dramatically different from the way it works in Europe, Canada or the UK. (I know very little about Australia, so can't compare.) A strength and weakness of the American system is that it is full of choices for the student.
As I understand it, in most states at least, students get a huge amount of choice over the classes they take in high school (This is not true at all in France, and is only somewhat true in Canada). Then, any university program is supposed to be accessible to any high school graduate, no matter how crappy the high school, and no matter how bizarre the student's course selection was. In practice, this means we need to offer high school level classes in every subject so that students who spent all of high school doing irrelevant things can learn e.g. algebra, trigonometry and then calculus and still graduate as a math major. A quarter century ago at least, you already narrowed down your choice of majors both in Canada and in France by the (far fewer) choices you had to make in high school. From talking with colleagues, I'm under the impression that most European high schools worked along lines similar to the French model, and Canada seems to be about halfway between Europe and the US. (Admittedly all of this might be slightly out of date. Many places are emulating the American model for whatever reason.)
Australian university education in general is much more specialized than the US, with very little choice in courses within a program. Liberal arts and business degrees probably offer more flexibility, but most degrees are either professional/vocational in nature (engineering, medical professions, nursing, teaching, accounting etc.) or they're technical with a very clear structure for a chosen major.
University programs very commonly have high school subject prerequisites, usually the intermediate and advanced math subjects and chemistry and/or physics.
Most universities offer undergraduate professional degrees in e.g. engineering, allowing you to practise as a engineer with a 4-year undergraduate degree, or medicine in a single 5-6 year undergraduate degree.
Australia's top ranked university, the University of Melbourne, has unfortunately moved towards a much more american model, with nearly all undergraduate degrees being 3-year, more generic courses with specialized graduate programs for e.g. engineering or medicine.
Source: Bachelor/Masters in the US, Masters degree and industry consultant for undergraduate Engineering curricula in Australia
This is vastly less important than the fact that so many people get undergraduate degrees in the US these days. Some high schoolers being smart enough to get through AP calculus is completely unsurprising. It's to be expected.
OTOH, in 2019, over 32% of people aged 25 and older in the US had a college degree. If around a third of the population can get through college, way too many people are going to college and college is way too easy. Why would it be remotely surprising the the top X% of high school kids can pass courses that almost a third of adults can?
The number of AP courses has proliferated a lot since their inception, even since I took them. There is probably some kind of dilution in some of them. However, the quantity of information I needed to retain for the AP history courses was much more considerable, frankly, than the introductory college "history" courses required of non-majors.
Going by the URL, I suspect that what DeSantis was trying to do was replace AP exams with International Baccalaureate exams, which are more rigorous and less subject to influence from the Current Thing.
Conservatives often argue that the loss of traditional values, like faith, family and patriotism, deprives people's lives of meaning. They're half right. Those things can provide meaning, but living life, surviving and learning to thrive in the world can provide just as much meaning. The problem with our contemporary society is that we've removed a good deal of those pressures and replaced them with a bunch of mostly stupid, zero sum status games that are increasingly bereft of any meaning other than the preservation of power for the bureaucratic class.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the construction of modern childhood. Kids were once an integral part of household production; they worked on the farm, helped out in the store, or got outside jobs and brought their wages home. Eliminating the need for that sort of child labor is a net positive, but in some ways what we've replaced it with is worse. We've removed kids from real life, because real life is too risky, and tried to replicate real world learning and development through some bizarro facsimile of the real world. We've turned childhood into a two decade experience of unreality. Why would we expect them to come out of that mentally healthy?
The other ironic thing is that parents often go to great lengths to give their kids advantages in these stupid games, making themselves miserable in the process. But they also go to great lengths to try to hide this from their out of of some perverted notion of selflessness. Of course, kids pick up on their parents disposition, and while they don't exactly know what's wrong, they know enough to understand that their parents being miserable is in some way related to them.
Weird you start off with conservatives being wrong about something, when all of what you described has coincided with America/the west becoming vastly less culturally conservative.
I started off with saying that conservatives are half right. Where they're wrong is on obsessively focusing on the symptoms instead of the underlying conditions.
Taxes strengthen your childcare arguments considerably, with parents spending after-tax wage income on mostly nondeductible (beyond a small amount) childcare expenses.
It's even more challenging for people employing nannies and babysitters because the cost of properly reporting and paying employer-side taxes is immense (we comply with the rules, yes it's expensive, and I acknowledge it's a privilege to be able to do so and to have a great/honest nanny).
And >75% of paid caregivers are used to being paid under the table so the incidence of the employee-side taxes often ends up on the employer anyway, because most household employees view their options, fairly, in after-tax terms. Without the implicit subsidy of the government currently condoning massive noncompliance by employers and employees alike in childcare, the entire market would grind to a halt.
The timeline of the decline* doesn't match up with the depression/unhappiness rates exploding in 2011-12, but intuitively it seems that teenage jobs offer a combination of structure -- be here at 5, leave at 9 -- and freedom -- we're trusting you to run the register with only marginal supervision -- that is a major positive in the long run. Not to mention the classic "learning the value of a dollar, instilling a good work ethic" refrain that is also almost certainly true.
Working in grocery, we hire a fair number of minors...what's remarkable is how some of these "kids" go through the process you mentioned, not merely surviving first contact with Real Life but thriving because of it. Sometimes they're better workers than the Actual Adults! It's very cool to watch people grow up in real time, and hopefully play some small part in that. I suspect a large part of the effect is just being exposed to lots of different kids of people - diversity not just along racial lines, but SES, age, politics, religion, and so on. The ones who do well learn to interact with People Very Different From Them, instead of surrounding themselves in a bubble of similar familiar peers.
Others though...they treat actual jobs like school, as if the game is Guess the Teacher's Password and the goal is status signalling games. These are the ones I worry about, who seem too far gone up the Simulacra Levels. How to wake them up that there's an underlying reality full of work that must be done, that there are consequences for abusing freedoms and rebelling against all structure? I think bad management is a lot like bad parenting, in this regard...many of the same incentive structures apply. If every boss wants to be your buddy, rather than enforcing discipline, then of course there'll be a subset of little shits who take that free pass to walk all over the system. It's almost rational to never grow up, if collectively worse for everyone.
a large number of people in the US cannot imagine the idea of a job, or traditional "employment", as an economic arrangement that benefits both parties. Any transaction is coerced, anyone working for wages (or The Man) is being exploited.
I base this on a year in a Halfway House and time in jail where I got to know "the underclass". "I DON'T WORK FOR NOBODY! I WORK FOR ME!!!" Was the very heated reply of my (black) roommate when I talked about jobs.
Black culture is joined by Marxist leftists in thinking all workers are always exploited. The only economic models are master/slave (ok, I see where this comes from, but still...), pimp/ho, hustler/mark, capitalist/proletariat, thief/victim.
So either workers need political intervention to prevent misery.... or you decide that YOU will be the thief/pimp/hustler/master, at whatever level you can achieve.
Note the ratio of rap songs that celebrate being a criminal young genius superstar, versus those about working a job and saving money and enjoying civic life. Note the rhetoric of Calif. AB5, about "exploited" Uber drivers (who are now exempt from AB5, along with every other corporation and profession with the money to lobby for a loophole.)
Ah, but it's totally copacetic if one works for the government, or its related permutation, the Non-Profit(tm). Good to see the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive in other socioeconomic bands though. Start-ups and small businesses are valuable.
The whole "wage slavery" dunk seems to me disrespectful to the lived experience of actual slaves...part of a general trend of hyperbolizing things one doesn't like. Yes, the audacity of asking people to pitch in towards the cost of resources they extract from society, what a terrible idea. Should the ratios between capital and labour be tweaked? Probably! Could the jobs be better? Of course. And in some cases like Uber where the company itself is an illegitimate rentier leech of the commons, I have no problem appropriating more of the dumpster fire for the poorly-compensated workers. But, yes, keeping the Social Contract going is super important...and jobs are one of the few remaining avenues we're allowed to forge such links. As Zvi says, fear the world model of someone who overgeneralizes from specific systems. A man who plays Defect once will do so again and again...
(I dunno, I always liked "Take This Job And Shove It" from Office Space.)
"Take This Job And Shove It" was a huge country hit for Johnny Paycheck back in the Smokey & the Bandit era '70's. It is a f*** the establishment song similar in spirit to "Convoy" from 1975.
Office Space used the song in the soundtrack, but it was well known.
I kinda feel like the the time I overheard some kids at a mall food court who thought Queen had ripped off Vanilla Ice.
Did not, sorry. 90s child, deeply unfamiliar with most music from earlier eras.
More embarrassing is when I'll put on classical music and kids are like "oh it's a Disney OST!" I am glad the OGs live on in remixes and inspirational riffs, but do wish people could learn a bit more appreciation of origins. Deep history beneath the modern corporatized derivatives. (Which is something that keeps feeling "off" about AI art...there's more to aesthetics than simply pruning a permutations tree until something sticks.)
In the same vein but reversed, I was blown away when over at a friend's place, they have young children, so he put on a Pixar movie ... "WALL-E". I wasn't paying attention (busy vauuming and clearing construction debris ahead of his mother-in-law's visit) until I heard something familiar and I copped a major rush of remember-whenning...,
"Holy crap! This is from ",Hello, Dolly!" What the hell is going on here?!"
Turns out the whole Pixar universe is full of these two and three level in-jokes that connect with kids and parents differently.
Brains finish developing around age 25. Spending 18-22 goofing around and doing more learning isn't the worst thing, leading into spending 23-25 as an "entry level position" somewhere.
IIRC the meme about brains not being developed until age 25 is complete nonsense, with a citation trail that terminates in a single study that contains no real evidence for the claim.
But also, the claim has no policy implications unless you decide that "undeveloped" brains (by any given measure) are fair game as a basis for discrimination, which leads to all the usual moral hazards. You need some kind of limiting principle to address that problem, which in practice means a package of rights and responsibilities granted to all legal adults at some arbitrary age.
There is significant anecdotal evidence of 30 year olds being different than 20 year olds in significant maturity/stability ways, so saying "on average 25" makes sense even if the one study is confounded. Obviously there isn't a magic switch that flips on your birthday, so saying "25" always means "somewhere around 25, with incremental developments through the whole time period. But not 15, and not "continuous improvement from 15 to 50" either."
My instinct is to illustrate the danger of rationalizing negative externalities by arguing for zero-sum policies that hurt everyone except my own age group. That's quite easy to do, just by cherry-picking facts that are obviously true. I finished writing that comment, then deleted it.
Probably you understand that danger, but you don't think it's the relevant factor here. I don't know how to argue that point beyond gesturing vaguely at my priors. You clearly don't share my priors, so there's nothing I can say.
Secondly, there are a whole host of reasons 30 year olds are different to 20 year olds. If 20 year olds spend their time "goofing around" in college and 30 year olds are working real jobs, then you obviously don't need brain differences to explain personality/behavioral differences!
How does "not finished developing" imply "shouldn't do anything real"?
I could easily spin out an argument that, if we prohibit young humans from doing anything real until their brains are fully congealed, that they will never truly learn to do anything real, and we're condemning them to a shadow life in which they will never even know who they are.
Can you please provide solid, scientific evidence for your claim that brains finish developing around 25?
And this "goofing off" costs tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the US providing loans for much of this, forgiving much of this debt (i.e. just flat out paying for this "goofing around") and there are continuing calls for all this debt to be forgiven and for the government to pay for everyone to go to college. This would end up costing taxpayers trillions of dollars. And this doesn't even account for the lost productivity of millions of people working less, and the delay in learning skills that actually matter through working.
America cannot afford this "goofing off", and there's absolutely no evidence (besides your recitation of the 'brains not developed' meme) that this is optimal for anyone involved (except for university administrators, obviously).
What worries me even more than kids who default to resolving problems through physical violence...is kids who don't know how to resolve problems at all. Even "victim culture" complain-to-the-manager behaviour shows some spark of creativity, a working model of the (dysfunctional) world. Kids who lapse into learned helplessness and passivity, I almost wish they *would* lash out and punch someone. Better to vent frustration in such relatively-harmless ways than let it fester internally. Easier to control aggression with low-stakes practice. The same logic that makes martial arts valuable also applies to sports and genuine childhood play...giving people a sense of agency, of being embodied and Doing Things with one's own hands. Getting out of that headspace of permanent symbol manipulation.
Unfortunate that raising kids in the US has become such a mess. Not that it was ever easy, ask my parents, heh heh. I opted out mostly for income reasons but also I felt like I wasn't into the modern 110% parenting style (even if parents don't want that, it seems like it is forced on them).
My impression is that the "parents calling cops on other parents letting kids do normal stuff" issue is mostly a suburban thing. I would think parents in cities need lower levels of baseline anxiety just to live there, and thus are not likely to do that.
Germany's " increase in instruction hours" was due to a genius plan to stabilise our pension-system by more work-years: do away with last year, class 13, and instead study ALL the material of classes 11+12+13 now in just two years ("Abitur", your ticket for university).
That turned out fricking hard; students, parents and teachers hated it. In most "Länder"(states) it has by now been turned back. In my town only one (of 14 or so) senior high-schools still does the two-year-track. As much as I hated our K13, I had wished they had done away with the rubbish during class 7-10 to get it down to K12. - Agree with all takes, never seen kids this century without a parent at the playground. Visiting friends of my 8 year old son are often expected to call home after their 200 yard walk to our place (suburbia). My daughter (soon 6) hardly ever has friends visiting. I guess their parents would feel the need to be present all time then. My childhood was same place but very different.
I think "fighting at school" and the draconion penalties for physical violence now, are a bigger issue than almost anybody thinks.
I commented about this at ACX, a few months ago, in a nutshell:
- boys, esp 11-15, are going to fight
- My childhood experience was that those fights lasted about 30 seconds
- after a scuffle you were friends again. (Sitting in the hall outside the principal's office for an hr becomes a bonding experience, good school principals knew this....)
-- !!!! you learn that fighting is EXPENSIVE, punching somebody also hurts *your* hand, you take some damage no matter what. !!!!
- you also learn that if you insult or provoke people all the time, you will likely get punched in the mouth.
- boys learn this before they become men physically able to kill people.
I think these are all valuable lessons. The reaction from some at ACX surprised me. One commenter replied that I seem to have had a "violent and traumatic childhood" ? A few 45-second scuffles in 7th-9th grade is "violent and traumatic"? I would say, "completely normal, and healthy." The fact that very rational people now consider any physical violence to be anathema explains a lot. Never having been in a fight produces adults who don't understand violence at all, who think words or silence are violence, and who are helpless in the face of actual violence, criminal or political.
There is an analogy to the fact that children who grow up with guns, who learn how to shoot and handle firearms with responsible adults, are the least likely to go for "mass casualty" attacks. I would also opine that one reason military veterans are so conservative is because they have seen how effed-up the govt is, and also govt's incredible power to destroy things, and know govt action is a terrible answer to most things.
BR
Also, w/r/t a fight clearing the air and being friends again, the modern alternative, call it "girl rules", is holding anger and grudges and crying and gossip and slander and insults and cliques and social exclusion and status and it never ends and just gets worse and look I am now describing the current political and cultural landscape.
There is also an issue where a perpetrator can provoke or bully with subtly non-physical tactics (social, verbal) and plausible deniability, because they know that physical retaliation on the part of the target would get the target in trouble and not them.
Your comment regarding DeSantis potentially eliminating AP courses was misleading and lacked context. He is considering replacing College Board/AP with other providers of college level classroom material (and the possibility of receiving college credit after passing an exam) such as International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment.
Jonathan Haidt's https://letgrow.org is worth sharing and boosting. It's here that I found out that my state, Texas, *does* now have a law protecting me from Child Services visit for letting my daughter out of my sight to play in the neighborhood.
This is excellent news and deserves celebration, and we would all do well to put energy into passing such laws across the remaining 46 or so states that need them.
Thanks for the summary, lots of interesting things in here. The Alpha School seems like a great idea to me, I'd like to see that model spread quickly.
Broadly, do you think the problems you've highlighted here are the consequences of society adapting to a reduced birth rate? When our reproductive success depends on 1 or 2 children, it seems logical that this would lead to a reduced appetite for risk among parents, and for the kids to feel a greater sense of pressure to succeed. If you agree with this, do you see any obvious long-hanging fruit we change as a society to increase the perception of safety for parents?
On a related point, do you think most people who don't have kids because of the sacrifices required make the decision because the amount they're willing to sacrifice is lower than average, or because their expectations about how much they're required to sacrifice is higher than average? It seems from your post that you think it's the latter, but the former group could help shift norms here if they were convinced to just have kids.
On education, I've noticed before that my experience was very different from yours, but it always shocks me how little I recognise in your model. I'm from rural Scotland, and left school 10 years ago, but my memory is that primary school was almost entirely about genuine learning and that most kids seemed to enjoy it. In secondary school, things like relationships and avoiding being beaten up became more important, but learning definitely still happened. While I'll concede I was as square as a school pupil could be, I never got the sense that the school itself was cruel or particularly capricious. The senior teachers were too concerned with superficial things like school uniform, but broadly the classroom teachers were pretty reasonable. As long as you didn't throw stuff across the room or put other people's stuff in the Bunsen burner, they seemed fairly willing to give a bit of leeway. By the time I was 16 they treated us like human beings a lot of the time, especially if we showed the slightest interest in their subject. I think my school was fairly normal (probably top 25% in the country academically) so I'm curious whether you (and any readers) think my experience would be unusual in the US. Also providing a datapoint in favour of not burning the whole thing down.
Likewise on university, while I agree with your assessment of Michael Story's argument as a whole, I would like to protest slightly against the pure signalling model. While my family was privileged, and did instil in me many of the classically upper middle class behaviours associated with a university education, it was not until going there that I was able to find a community in which these traits could be expressed and developed fully. University was incredibly fulfilling for me socially, as I was surrounded by people with a range of backgrounds, beliefs and interests I couldn't possibly have encountered had I stayed at home. For students from elite circles or expensive fee-paying schools, university may have been a disappointment, but I found the chance to interact with such a variety of intelligent, interesting people massively stimulating. From a school where I could discuss ideas with at most 10 people, I was introduced to an entirely new social world. Tuition was free, so I would find it very difficult to assign a monetary value to the experience, but I can certainly say that I found undergrad a lot more valuable than the skills acquired in my subsequent, more focussed, graduate level studies. However, I do broadly agree with you about the value of just getting a job instead.
I think fewer children per family is a contributing factor but not the main thing going on, is my guess? And I think both the no-kids group wants to make fewer sacrifices than the kids-group, and also their estimate of sacrifice needed is higher, and also actual sacrifice needed is effectively higher, and all three are doing heavy work.
As for school? Well, yeah, different experiences for sure.
The Alpha School advertises $40k/year tuition. I would be curious to see a graph of how many pay actually what amount (the classic college problem of the people who want to be there subsidizing the people the school wants to be there and the list price being a poor representation of true cost).
Because otherwise $40k/year/pupil and just letting apps do the lecturing/testing sounds like a pretty good ROI and something that they should be scaling quickly.
I wonder how they compare to public school achievement when weighting by their family income demographics.
(I say this as a homeschooling parent who also leverages a lot of apps.)
If I understand correctly, DeSantis seems to have been mostly working the referee by threatening to reevaluate whether Florida should look for an alternative to AP classes sponsored by College Board. (DeSantis thinks the College Board curriculum on some classes is not balanced and/or indoctrination.)
It looks like College Board has added some additional nuance into its planned Black Studies AP class, but it's not clear if that will be enough to get the class into Florida schools.
https://highschool.latimes.com/hs-insider/ap-african-american-studies-receives-harsh-backlash-despite-current-success/
As an outsider the American "AP class" system doesn't make sense to me. Surely if a university-level class can routinely be (a) passed by high schoolers and (b) taught by high-school teachers, it means that this class is far too easy to be a university-level class?
Over a 1/3 of the population gets an undergraduate degree. And getting a degree is an imperfect measure of intellegence, so some undergraduate-degree holders are average in intelligence.
As a result, even among college graduates, there are large, qualitative differences in the ability to handle high-level cognitive work. AP classes are mainly targeted at not just future college graduates, but those who will likely excel in college.
I'm a professor at an unselective state university in the US and agree 100% with you: the way we do things doesn't make sense at all, especially to someone with an outside perspective. Undergraduate education in the US is dramatically different from the way it works in Europe, Canada or the UK. (I know very little about Australia, so can't compare.) A strength and weakness of the American system is that it is full of choices for the student.
As I understand it, in most states at least, students get a huge amount of choice over the classes they take in high school (This is not true at all in France, and is only somewhat true in Canada). Then, any university program is supposed to be accessible to any high school graduate, no matter how crappy the high school, and no matter how bizarre the student's course selection was. In practice, this means we need to offer high school level classes in every subject so that students who spent all of high school doing irrelevant things can learn e.g. algebra, trigonometry and then calculus and still graduate as a math major. A quarter century ago at least, you already narrowed down your choice of majors both in Canada and in France by the (far fewer) choices you had to make in high school. From talking with colleagues, I'm under the impression that most European high schools worked along lines similar to the French model, and Canada seems to be about halfway between Europe and the US. (Admittedly all of this might be slightly out of date. Many places are emulating the American model for whatever reason.)
Australian university education in general is much more specialized than the US, with very little choice in courses within a program. Liberal arts and business degrees probably offer more flexibility, but most degrees are either professional/vocational in nature (engineering, medical professions, nursing, teaching, accounting etc.) or they're technical with a very clear structure for a chosen major.
University programs very commonly have high school subject prerequisites, usually the intermediate and advanced math subjects and chemistry and/or physics.
Most universities offer undergraduate professional degrees in e.g. engineering, allowing you to practise as a engineer with a 4-year undergraduate degree, or medicine in a single 5-6 year undergraduate degree.
Australia's top ranked university, the University of Melbourne, has unfortunately moved towards a much more american model, with nearly all undergraduate degrees being 3-year, more generic courses with specialized graduate programs for e.g. engineering or medicine.
Source: Bachelor/Masters in the US, Masters degree and industry consultant for undergraduate Engineering curricula in Australia
This is vastly less important than the fact that so many people get undergraduate degrees in the US these days. Some high schoolers being smart enough to get through AP calculus is completely unsurprising. It's to be expected.
OTOH, in 2019, over 32% of people aged 25 and older in the US had a college degree. If around a third of the population can get through college, way too many people are going to college and college is way too easy. Why would it be remotely surprising the the top X% of high school kids can pass courses that almost a third of adults can?
The number of AP courses has proliferated a lot since their inception, even since I took them. There is probably some kind of dilution in some of them. However, the quantity of information I needed to retain for the AP history courses was much more considerable, frankly, than the introductory college "history" courses required of non-majors.
Going by the URL, I suspect that what DeSantis was trying to do was replace AP exams with International Baccalaureate exams, which are more rigorous and less subject to influence from the Current Thing.
Conservatives often argue that the loss of traditional values, like faith, family and patriotism, deprives people's lives of meaning. They're half right. Those things can provide meaning, but living life, surviving and learning to thrive in the world can provide just as much meaning. The problem with our contemporary society is that we've removed a good deal of those pressures and replaced them with a bunch of mostly stupid, zero sum status games that are increasingly bereft of any meaning other than the preservation of power for the bureaucratic class.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the construction of modern childhood. Kids were once an integral part of household production; they worked on the farm, helped out in the store, or got outside jobs and brought their wages home. Eliminating the need for that sort of child labor is a net positive, but in some ways what we've replaced it with is worse. We've removed kids from real life, because real life is too risky, and tried to replicate real world learning and development through some bizarro facsimile of the real world. We've turned childhood into a two decade experience of unreality. Why would we expect them to come out of that mentally healthy?
The other ironic thing is that parents often go to great lengths to give their kids advantages in these stupid games, making themselves miserable in the process. But they also go to great lengths to try to hide this from their out of of some perverted notion of selflessness. Of course, kids pick up on their parents disposition, and while they don't exactly know what's wrong, they know enough to understand that their parents being miserable is in some way related to them.
Weird you start off with conservatives being wrong about something, when all of what you described has coincided with America/the west becoming vastly less culturally conservative.
I started off with saying that conservatives are half right. Where they're wrong is on obsessively focusing on the symptoms instead of the underlying conditions.
Taxes strengthen your childcare arguments considerably, with parents spending after-tax wage income on mostly nondeductible (beyond a small amount) childcare expenses.
It's even more challenging for people employing nannies and babysitters because the cost of properly reporting and paying employer-side taxes is immense (we comply with the rules, yes it's expensive, and I acknowledge it's a privilege to be able to do so and to have a great/honest nanny).
And >75% of paid caregivers are used to being paid under the table so the incidence of the employee-side taxes often ends up on the employer anyway, because most household employees view their options, fairly, in after-tax terms. Without the implicit subsidy of the government currently condoning massive noncompliance by employers and employees alike in childcare, the entire market would grind to a halt.
Curious if you'll one day examine the (leftist, from what I have seen) backlash to hiring teenagers to work jobs. Example here: https://twitter.com/bern_identity/status/1645493732240949248
The timeline of the decline* doesn't match up with the depression/unhappiness rates exploding in 2011-12, but intuitively it seems that teenage jobs offer a combination of structure -- be here at 5, leave at 9 -- and freedom -- we're trusting you to run the register with only marginal supervision -- that is a major positive in the long run. Not to mention the classic "learning the value of a dollar, instilling a good work ethic" refrain that is also almost certainly true.
*https://www.statista.com/statistics/477668/percentage-of-youth-who-are-enrolled-in-school-and-working-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20around%2019.4%20percent,school%20in%20the%20United%20States.
That's truly bizarre. Some of the best memories of my teenage years came from the various part time jobs I held.
Working in grocery, we hire a fair number of minors...what's remarkable is how some of these "kids" go through the process you mentioned, not merely surviving first contact with Real Life but thriving because of it. Sometimes they're better workers than the Actual Adults! It's very cool to watch people grow up in real time, and hopefully play some small part in that. I suspect a large part of the effect is just being exposed to lots of different kids of people - diversity not just along racial lines, but SES, age, politics, religion, and so on. The ones who do well learn to interact with People Very Different From Them, instead of surrounding themselves in a bubble of similar familiar peers.
Others though...they treat actual jobs like school, as if the game is Guess the Teacher's Password and the goal is status signalling games. These are the ones I worry about, who seem too far gone up the Simulacra Levels. How to wake them up that there's an underlying reality full of work that must be done, that there are consequences for abusing freedoms and rebelling against all structure? I think bad management is a lot like bad parenting, in this regard...many of the same incentive structures apply. If every boss wants to be your buddy, rather than enforcing discipline, then of course there'll be a subset of little shits who take that free pass to walk all over the system. It's almost rational to never grow up, if collectively worse for everyone.
A very important personal observation:
a large number of people in the US cannot imagine the idea of a job, or traditional "employment", as an economic arrangement that benefits both parties. Any transaction is coerced, anyone working for wages (or The Man) is being exploited.
I base this on a year in a Halfway House and time in jail where I got to know "the underclass". "I DON'T WORK FOR NOBODY! I WORK FOR ME!!!" Was the very heated reply of my (black) roommate when I talked about jobs.
Black culture is joined by Marxist leftists in thinking all workers are always exploited. The only economic models are master/slave (ok, I see where this comes from, but still...), pimp/ho, hustler/mark, capitalist/proletariat, thief/victim.
So either workers need political intervention to prevent misery.... or you decide that YOU will be the thief/pimp/hustler/master, at whatever level you can achieve.
Note the ratio of rap songs that celebrate being a criminal young genius superstar, versus those about working a job and saving money and enjoying civic life. Note the rhetoric of Calif. AB5, about "exploited" Uber drivers (who are now exempt from AB5, along with every other corporation and profession with the money to lobby for a loophole.)
BRetty
Ah, but it's totally copacetic if one works for the government, or its related permutation, the Non-Profit(tm). Good to see the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive in other socioeconomic bands though. Start-ups and small businesses are valuable.
The whole "wage slavery" dunk seems to me disrespectful to the lived experience of actual slaves...part of a general trend of hyperbolizing things one doesn't like. Yes, the audacity of asking people to pitch in towards the cost of resources they extract from society, what a terrible idea. Should the ratios between capital and labour be tweaked? Probably! Could the jobs be better? Of course. And in some cases like Uber where the company itself is an illegitimate rentier leech of the commons, I have no problem appropriating more of the dumpster fire for the poorly-compensated workers. But, yes, keeping the Social Contract going is super important...and jobs are one of the few remaining avenues we're allowed to forge such links. As Zvi says, fear the world model of someone who overgeneralizes from specific systems. A man who plays Defect once will do so again and again...
(I dunno, I always liked "Take This Job And Shove It" from Office Space.)
Ummm...
Did you not know that ....
"Take This Job And Shove It" was a huge country hit for Johnny Paycheck back in the Smokey & the Bandit era '70's. It is a f*** the establishment song similar in spirit to "Convoy" from 1975.
Office Space used the song in the soundtrack, but it was well known.
I kinda feel like the the time I overheard some kids at a mall food court who thought Queen had ripped off Vanilla Ice.
BR
Did not, sorry. 90s child, deeply unfamiliar with most music from earlier eras.
More embarrassing is when I'll put on classical music and kids are like "oh it's a Disney OST!" I am glad the OGs live on in remixes and inspirational riffs, but do wish people could learn a bit more appreciation of origins. Deep history beneath the modern corporatized derivatives. (Which is something that keeps feeling "off" about AI art...there's more to aesthetics than simply pruning a permutations tree until something sticks.)
In the same vein but reversed, I was blown away when over at a friend's place, they have young children, so he put on a Pixar movie ... "WALL-E". I wasn't paying attention (busy vauuming and clearing construction debris ahead of his mother-in-law's visit) until I heard something familiar and I copped a major rush of remember-whenning...,
"Holy crap! This is from ",Hello, Dolly!" What the hell is going on here?!"
Turns out the whole Pixar universe is full of these two and three level in-jokes that connect with kids and parents differently.
Brains finish developing around age 25. Spending 18-22 goofing around and doing more learning isn't the worst thing, leading into spending 23-25 as an "entry level position" somewhere.
IIRC the meme about brains not being developed until age 25 is complete nonsense, with a citation trail that terminates in a single study that contains no real evidence for the claim.
But also, the claim has no policy implications unless you decide that "undeveloped" brains (by any given measure) are fair game as a basis for discrimination, which leads to all the usual moral hazards. You need some kind of limiting principle to address that problem, which in practice means a package of rights and responsibilities granted to all legal adults at some arbitrary age.
There is significant anecdotal evidence of 30 year olds being different than 20 year olds in significant maturity/stability ways, so saying "on average 25" makes sense even if the one study is confounded. Obviously there isn't a magic switch that flips on your birthday, so saying "25" always means "somewhere around 25, with incremental developments through the whole time period. But not 15, and not "continuous improvement from 15 to 50" either."
My instinct is to illustrate the danger of rationalizing negative externalities by arguing for zero-sum policies that hurt everyone except my own age group. That's quite easy to do, just by cherry-picking facts that are obviously true. I finished writing that comment, then deleted it.
Probably you understand that danger, but you don't think it's the relevant factor here. I don't know how to argue that point beyond gesturing vaguely at my priors. You clearly don't share my priors, so there's nothing I can say.
First, anecdotes aren't data.
Secondly, there are a whole host of reasons 30 year olds are different to 20 year olds. If 20 year olds spend their time "goofing around" in college and 30 year olds are working real jobs, then you obviously don't need brain differences to explain personality/behavioral differences!
To put it more pithily, most people who say the brain isn't developed until 25 are implying you shouldn't truly live until after you've peaked.
How does "not finished developing" imply "shouldn't do anything real"?
I could easily spin out an argument that, if we prohibit young humans from doing anything real until their brains are fully congealed, that they will never truly learn to do anything real, and we're condemning them to a shadow life in which they will never even know who they are.
Can you please provide solid, scientific evidence for your claim that brains finish developing around 25?
And this "goofing off" costs tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the US providing loans for much of this, forgiving much of this debt (i.e. just flat out paying for this "goofing around") and there are continuing calls for all this debt to be forgiven and for the government to pay for everyone to go to college. This would end up costing taxpayers trillions of dollars. And this doesn't even account for the lost productivity of millions of people working less, and the delay in learning skills that actually matter through working.
America cannot afford this "goofing off", and there's absolutely no evidence (besides your recitation of the 'brains not developed' meme) that this is optimal for anyone involved (except for university administrators, obviously).
What worries me even more than kids who default to resolving problems through physical violence...is kids who don't know how to resolve problems at all. Even "victim culture" complain-to-the-manager behaviour shows some spark of creativity, a working model of the (dysfunctional) world. Kids who lapse into learned helplessness and passivity, I almost wish they *would* lash out and punch someone. Better to vent frustration in such relatively-harmless ways than let it fester internally. Easier to control aggression with low-stakes practice. The same logic that makes martial arts valuable also applies to sports and genuine childhood play...giving people a sense of agency, of being embodied and Doing Things with one's own hands. Getting out of that headspace of permanent symbol manipulation.
Unfortunate that raising kids in the US has become such a mess. Not that it was ever easy, ask my parents, heh heh. I opted out mostly for income reasons but also I felt like I wasn't into the modern 110% parenting style (even if parents don't want that, it seems like it is forced on them).
My impression is that the "parents calling cops on other parents letting kids do normal stuff" issue is mostly a suburban thing. I would think parents in cities need lower levels of baseline anxiety just to live there, and thus are not likely to do that.
East Asia/Singapore seems a considerably worse place to raise kids, at least.
Germany's " increase in instruction hours" was due to a genius plan to stabilise our pension-system by more work-years: do away with last year, class 13, and instead study ALL the material of classes 11+12+13 now in just two years ("Abitur", your ticket for university).
That turned out fricking hard; students, parents and teachers hated it. In most "Länder"(states) it has by now been turned back. In my town only one (of 14 or so) senior high-schools still does the two-year-track. As much as I hated our K13, I had wished they had done away with the rubbish during class 7-10 to get it down to K12. - Agree with all takes, never seen kids this century without a parent at the playground. Visiting friends of my 8 year old son are often expected to call home after their 200 yard walk to our place (suburbia). My daughter (soon 6) hardly ever has friends visiting. I guess their parents would feel the need to be present all time then. My childhood was same place but very different.
Zvi,
I think "fighting at school" and the draconion penalties for physical violence now, are a bigger issue than almost anybody thinks.
I commented about this at ACX, a few months ago, in a nutshell:
- boys, esp 11-15, are going to fight
- My childhood experience was that those fights lasted about 30 seconds
- after a scuffle you were friends again. (Sitting in the hall outside the principal's office for an hr becomes a bonding experience, good school principals knew this....)
-- !!!! you learn that fighting is EXPENSIVE, punching somebody also hurts *your* hand, you take some damage no matter what. !!!!
- you also learn that if you insult or provoke people all the time, you will likely get punched in the mouth.
- boys learn this before they become men physically able to kill people.
I think these are all valuable lessons. The reaction from some at ACX surprised me. One commenter replied that I seem to have had a "violent and traumatic childhood" ? A few 45-second scuffles in 7th-9th grade is "violent and traumatic"? I would say, "completely normal, and healthy." The fact that very rational people now consider any physical violence to be anathema explains a lot. Never having been in a fight produces adults who don't understand violence at all, who think words or silence are violence, and who are helpless in the face of actual violence, criminal or political.
There is an analogy to the fact that children who grow up with guns, who learn how to shoot and handle firearms with responsible adults, are the least likely to go for "mass casualty" attacks. I would also opine that one reason military veterans are so conservative is because they have seen how effed-up the govt is, and also govt's incredible power to destroy things, and know govt action is a terrible answer to most things.
BR
Also, w/r/t a fight clearing the air and being friends again, the modern alternative, call it "girl rules", is holding anger and grudges and crying and gossip and slander and insults and cliques and social exclusion and status and it never ends and just gets worse and look I am now describing the current political and cultural landscape.
There is also an issue where a perpetrator can provoke or bully with subtly non-physical tactics (social, verbal) and plausible deniability, because they know that physical retaliation on the part of the target would get the target in trouble and not them.
Your comment regarding DeSantis potentially eliminating AP courses was misleading and lacked context. He is considering replacing College Board/AP with other providers of college level classroom material (and the possibility of receiving college credit after passing an exam) such as International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment.
Jonathan Haidt's https://letgrow.org is worth sharing and boosting. It's here that I found out that my state, Texas, *does* now have a law protecting me from Child Services visit for letting my daughter out of my sight to play in the neighborhood.
This is excellent news and deserves celebration, and we would all do well to put energy into passing such laws across the remaining 46 or so states that need them.
"Freddie deBoar" -> "Freddie deBoer" :)
Thanks for the summary, lots of interesting things in here. The Alpha School seems like a great idea to me, I'd like to see that model spread quickly.
Broadly, do you think the problems you've highlighted here are the consequences of society adapting to a reduced birth rate? When our reproductive success depends on 1 or 2 children, it seems logical that this would lead to a reduced appetite for risk among parents, and for the kids to feel a greater sense of pressure to succeed. If you agree with this, do you see any obvious long-hanging fruit we change as a society to increase the perception of safety for parents?
On a related point, do you think most people who don't have kids because of the sacrifices required make the decision because the amount they're willing to sacrifice is lower than average, or because their expectations about how much they're required to sacrifice is higher than average? It seems from your post that you think it's the latter, but the former group could help shift norms here if they were convinced to just have kids.
On education, I've noticed before that my experience was very different from yours, but it always shocks me how little I recognise in your model. I'm from rural Scotland, and left school 10 years ago, but my memory is that primary school was almost entirely about genuine learning and that most kids seemed to enjoy it. In secondary school, things like relationships and avoiding being beaten up became more important, but learning definitely still happened. While I'll concede I was as square as a school pupil could be, I never got the sense that the school itself was cruel or particularly capricious. The senior teachers were too concerned with superficial things like school uniform, but broadly the classroom teachers were pretty reasonable. As long as you didn't throw stuff across the room or put other people's stuff in the Bunsen burner, they seemed fairly willing to give a bit of leeway. By the time I was 16 they treated us like human beings a lot of the time, especially if we showed the slightest interest in their subject. I think my school was fairly normal (probably top 25% in the country academically) so I'm curious whether you (and any readers) think my experience would be unusual in the US. Also providing a datapoint in favour of not burning the whole thing down.
Likewise on university, while I agree with your assessment of Michael Story's argument as a whole, I would like to protest slightly against the pure signalling model. While my family was privileged, and did instil in me many of the classically upper middle class behaviours associated with a university education, it was not until going there that I was able to find a community in which these traits could be expressed and developed fully. University was incredibly fulfilling for me socially, as I was surrounded by people with a range of backgrounds, beliefs and interests I couldn't possibly have encountered had I stayed at home. For students from elite circles or expensive fee-paying schools, university may have been a disappointment, but I found the chance to interact with such a variety of intelligent, interesting people massively stimulating. From a school where I could discuss ideas with at most 10 people, I was introduced to an entirely new social world. Tuition was free, so I would find it very difficult to assign a monetary value to the experience, but I can certainly say that I found undergrad a lot more valuable than the skills acquired in my subsequent, more focussed, graduate level studies. However, I do broadly agree with you about the value of just getting a job instead.
I think fewer children per family is a contributing factor but not the main thing going on, is my guess? And I think both the no-kids group wants to make fewer sacrifices than the kids-group, and also their estimate of sacrifice needed is higher, and also actual sacrifice needed is effectively higher, and all three are doing heavy work.
As for school? Well, yeah, different experiences for sure.
The Alpha School advertises $40k/year tuition. I would be curious to see a graph of how many pay actually what amount (the classic college problem of the people who want to be there subsidizing the people the school wants to be there and the list price being a poor representation of true cost).
Because otherwise $40k/year/pupil and just letting apps do the lecturing/testing sounds like a pretty good ROI and something that they should be scaling quickly.
I wonder how they compare to public school achievement when weighting by their family income demographics.
(I say this as a homeschooling parent who also leverages a lot of apps.)