Spurious Merit

Imagine we had multitudes of pipe wrecking, publicly funded plumbers claiming: "How dare you oppose our employment. Plumbing saved millions, if not billions of lives, from cholera and other dreaded pathogens, saving more lives than most doctors throughout history, while causing fewer harms. Our critics are guilty of insidious anti-plumberism." We'd probably mock and defund the harm causing plumbers while employing other (mostly) beneficial plumbers. Similar assertions could be made by other harm causing blue collar workers, and we'd defund them as well.

Yet we publicly fund multitudes of academics, spouting poorly reasoned ethical arguments, partly because a minority of academics provide large benefits by opposing tyranny, inventing vaccines, and other beneficial activities. We're supposed to fund the fanaticism and other wrongs of most academics because some minority of academics are beneficial, even when they ruin lives, leaving some students in debt peonage. At least in the latter days of the Soviet Union, millions of individuals didn't go into debt to be easily indoctrinated. And not merely in the humanities and social sciences. Many natural scientists demand we spend billions on trivial scientific advances having few benefits. Thousands of scientific journals publish newly discovered picayune facts, but we can't find enough money for killer asteroid hunting. Business schools crank out students devoted to extracting wealth by harmful means. Not surprisingly, billionaires made super wealthy by parasitic activities donate to their favorite business schools to create more such individuals. The proliferation of academic administrators is worse.

Academics resort to the false dichotomy bumper sticker, "If you think [formal] education is expensive, try ignorance." Never mind that contemporary formal education is an expensive way to end up wrong on the most important ethical issues.

Academics claim we need academic freedom with tenure to protect ideas. But academic freedom isn't the same as the legal and ethical rights to freedom of speech. Academic freedom with tenure is the privilege to be paid wealthy and upper middle class incomes by students and taxpayers for harmful opinions. It also includes the privilege of stocking colleges with politically like minded individuals, not philosophical diversity. Despite having more presumed supporters of equality than most other institutions, college campuses rank among the most unequal institutions, with students and grad assistants being exploited, with a parallel justice system where students can be expelled for thought crimes or unsupported accusations.

The overwhelming majority of academics born in the Twentieth Century support or supported one or more forms of totalitarianism--Sharia, Randism, fascism, globalism, neoconservatism, cultural Marxism, economic Marxism, new Democratism or similar ideologies. Worse, the more the evidence contradicts these belief systems, the more fanaticism increases. The greater the contradictions, the more they ignore the contradictions, walling themselves off from decent counterarguments. demonizing those providing good evidence.

While a few academics claim they want to add more ideological diversity, what they mean by ideological diversity is more libertarianism and neoconservativism, which is no improvement. They sure as heck won't knowingly hire me or some other nonmulticulturalist.

Imitation meritarianism by irrelevant association applies many other white collar professions as well, often worse than secondary and post secondary education:

1. We need a small financial industry, but then the industry gains more power to bribe, leading to specious justifications for "masters of the universe," "too big to fail," and thousands of other rent seeking activities. The financial crises alone cost at least $20 trillion.
2. We benefit from health care, but now free riding dominates the industry, especially by insurers and various medical monopolies and oligopolies. Our medical system costs 750 billion more dollars per year than it should.
3. We benefited from some military officials, but others devoted to militarism and war profiteering took over and assert they "fight for our freedom" when, if fact, they mostly act to destroy our freedoms. The more ruling groups uses fallacies and totalitarian force to create ethnoracial diversity, the more force is needed to keep a little peace and the more freedom disappears. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone cost $2.4 trillion and counting.
4. We benefit from a small legal profession, but now unelected and unaccountable judges imagine they have a right to decide laws in utter violation of ethical governance. The fallacious appeal to tradition known as precedent gets treated as sacred, depending on whether the precedent agrees or disagrees with judges own whims. Legislators seem proud of the fact they know little about public policies.
5. We benefited from the printing press and the invention of paper, but now we have mass media pursuing profits, ratings, and indoctrination while ignoring the public interest.

The above numbers do not include most opportunity costs and non-monetary costs, which are even greater than the monetary costs.

Steve Sailer criticized a recent article by David Brooks promoting the rise of today's alleged meritarian class but for the wrong reasons. Sailer regards Brooks' take as "pretty reasonable," asserting that Brooks uses meritocratic "as a euphemism, basically, for 'Jewish'." Sailer downplays the fact that the new establishments are extremely anti-meritarian, worse than the old "Protestant establishment," Neoconservatism is far worse than Vietnam era counterinsurgency failures. Heck, neoconservatives seem hellbent on starting World War III. Technology advanced and wives now work outside the home, yet nonwealthy incomes declined, if you replace one sided hedonic pricing and other misadjustments to the Consumer Price Index with more accurate measures. More important, cultural Marxism will exterminate the West and white individuals if permitted to do so, making it much worse than the old establishments racial flaws.

How meritarian can today's establishments be when they will expel or otherwise punish individuals for telling unwanted ethical truths?

Come on, man.

David Brooks isn't merely cheerleading for his teams. Brooks likely believes that his own mixture of Randism, neoconservatism, and cultural Marxism is the greatest ideology ever created, the ultimate in merit, the evidence be damned.

Establishments pretend they create great value.

We know better.