Today we graduated another Senior class, and now my final task is to write end of term comments on my underclassmen. I teach at a very good school and have very good students, but the difference between very good and excellent is usually how well a student can grapple with and convey nuance in their writing. Not a reflexive bothsides, but real nuance and qualification in their arguments.
On a side note, that's why I hate Debate Club type of academics. They seek not to understand complexity but to "win" their maximalist position. There are important skills involved in debate, but the idea of winning warps an appreciation of how few issues really are black and white.
I was thinking of that, also, while reading Paul Krugman talk about how deindustrialization is not simply a product of globalization and outsourcing. America is the second largest manufacturing country in the world, even if our total number of workers in manufacturing is smaller than it used to be and much smaller as a percentage of the work force. The biggest culprit is automation.
If you understand deindustrialization as a process whereby many jobs are made much more efficient because of machines and robots, you see a process whereby America does still make things, we just don't employ as many people to do it.
His argument is actually about AI and what that will do to service and skilled workers. Basic economics says that if AI makes a bunch of jobs obsolete, then we will just create new jobs. I worry more about AI making us even stupider than we already are, but if I'm worried that "this time will be different" I need to remember that rarely is that actually true.
All of which is to say, navigating the modern world successfully requires people who can understand and grapple with those subtleties. Trump and MAGA deal only in certainties.
Yesterday, Trump "delivered" a rambling incoherent speech at West Point that would have had the press calling for Joe Biden - if he had delivered it - to resign by Monday. At the same time, we have the MAGA war on Harvard, a war designed to impoverish the country of the sort of critical thinkers that the modern world requires.
I'm old enough to remember when Japan was going to eclipse us. It didn't happen, because Japan has too few children and refuses to let immigrants come into their country. Recently, it has been China that was going to eat our lunch, but I felt that they insular, corrupt government and business environment of China would eventually fail.
What I did not expect was for the US to shut itself off from immigrants and embrace clannish, corrupt politics - importing the worst aspects of Japanese and Chinese weaknesses.
As others have noted: If Donald Trump was a foreign agent intent on destroying America's place in the world, what would he be doing differently?
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