Once more, out of the park, by VDH. In this episode, he dissects the failing Technocracy both in America and in Europe. This is the money quote (literally):
But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion.
Isn’t that what it all boils down to? Money borrowed must be repaid. Thus it has ever been, since man first formed societies in the dim recesses of history. The elites have schemed and borrowed, borrowed and schemed, and it will be left to the common man to pay. Not for the first time, I wonder if there doesn’t have to be a better way. Climate change is mentioned:
In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.
This is worth noting because “Climate Change” was the mechanism that the Left was going to use to undo the Industrial Revolution in the name of “Saving the Planet™”. They intended to convince the average American of the necessity to go back to a pre-industrial wasteland in the name of saving us from destruction. Only the facts did not bear out their case, and not even Democrats in the Senate were willing to pass on the Kyoto Accord, a document drawn up to economically destroy America, that was quickly abandoned when America did not deign to be destroyed. Thus it is with America: we will never be destroyed from without. What we may do to ourselves though, may put the Fall of Rome to shame. The Academic engine of the economy is failing us. Consider the following:
A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club.
All of this is manifestly true. How many Americans come out of college not educated, but indebted for the rest of their lives? While a college education once vouchsafed higher wages, that is no longer the case. This is especially true of “diversity” degrees that certify you as “educated” but not learned. Hanson asks the pertinant quesition:
When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?
Why, indeed? And can our academic principalities survive in a market that renders such a judgement? I think not. Tuition has increased at a pace far outstripping inflation for the last 20 years. What does the academy produce to demand such resources? We may not produce the best engineers (and the best engineers that we do produce are often foreign students), but by God we have the best Diversity Engineers on the face of the planet. That is because most of the rest of the planet doesn’t need Diversity Engineers. Remind me again of why we do?
A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.
The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.
This is to be hoped. People who want to be educated as opposed to indoctrinated have resources now that were undreamed of only a generation ago. It is possible to educate oneself about most anything one cares to learn about, with the exception of laboratory sciences. There is still the need to actually perform experiments there, to get the process down.
What will come forth as the Technocracy crumbles? We do not know:
We are living in one of the most unstable — and exciting — periods in recent memory, as much of the received wisdom of the last 30 years is being turned upside down. In large part the present reset age arises because our political and cultural leaders exercised influence that by any rational standard they had never earned.
It is an Ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!” We do and will for the foreseeable future.
Tags: Technocracy, VDH, Victor Davis Hanson
