Keith Leslie's International Report

Socialist Resurgence (SR) held a convention meeting on March 13th, and issued the usual, Trotskyist-style reports: a Political Report by Erwin Freed, and an International Report by Keith Leslie. The topic for this post is the latter.

Readers may recall Mr. Leslie from our discussion of the long and excellent monograph he wrote while he was still a member of Socialist Action, entitled China: A New Imperial Power (pdf). In those days he was known as "Comrade Keith," and while I credited him with considerable erudition, I faulted him for putting too much weight on the word imperialism--a mostly meaningless term.

Unfortunately, the same error leads him astray in the International Report. He is so convinced that the US is an "imperialist" power, and that China aspires to be an "imperialist" power that he completely misses the historical dynamic. So let's just ignore the word imperialism and try to make sense of things as they really are.

Here's a key graf:

The election of Joe Biden heralds a new effort by U.S. imperialism to halt or reverse the phenomenon of its declining global power. The Trump administration sought to reinvigorate U.S. standing through brash unilateralism, disruption of existing agreements, and trade wars waged on every front, including against both traditional allies and opponents in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, it suffered a series of embarrassing reversals such as the failure of a U.S.-backed coup effort in Venezuela, a partial withdrawal of military forces from Syria, which provoked wide backlash in bourgeois circles, and a negotiated truce in the trade war with China.

The first sentence is partly true. Following WWII the US contributed about 50% of gdp; today the value is a bit over 25%. But this is only relative decline--in absolute terms the US economy has grown like gangbusters. It's just that the global economy has grown faster because it started from a much lower base. In particular, China went from zero to hero once it got over the whole Revolution-Mao-Tse-Tung-mass-murder thing.

The Trump administration, far from trying to "reinvigorate U.S. standing" intended precisely the opposite. His goal was isolationism--and for good reason. To wit:

1. The US depends less on foreign trade than any country on earth (for which data exists) besides Afghanistan and Sudan. Our total trade (imports plus exports) amount to only 26% of gdp. Even Cuba (at 27%) relies more on foreign trade than we do. By comparison, China is at 36%, Canada at 65%, and Germany at 88%. (The leader is Luxembourg at 382%, but for obvious reasons small countries have a greater dependence on foreign trade than big ones.)
2. Yet, despite our relative self-sufficiency, we have been financing global foreign trade through the Eurodollar system. This is known colloquially as "the dollar is the reserve currency." 
3. Owning the reserve currency has some big advantages (we can unilaterally sanction anybody we want), but it comes with a huge disadvantage--we have to run permanent and large trade deficits. That's because everybody else needs dollars in order to finance their trade, and the only way they can get dollars is to sell into the US market. Thus our imports are nearly unlimited, while our exports are capped because our trading partners are hoarding dollars to use as a global currency.

When the US contributed 50% of global gdp, financing the reserve currency was a tolerable expense, and the advantages outweighed the cost. But now the shoe is on the other foot--especially since the US is nearly self-sufficient, and including Canada and Mexico almost entirely self-sufficient. Trump decided (rightly in my opinion) to stop financing global trade, and as a corollary to repatriate manufacturing back to the United States (so we don't have to import the products). Hence all the tariffs on everybody.

If we're gonna withdraw from foreign trade, then there's no reason for us to be the world's policeman. Thanks to fracking, we no longer have much interest in the Persian Gulf--the US Navy has largely withdrawn from that venue. Likewise neither the Indian Ocean nor the Mediterranean are of much concern for us. There's no reason for us to have troops in either Afghanistan or Syria--or for that matter in Germany or the Korean peninsula. Trump--left to his own devices--would have withdrawn US troops from all those locales. Beyond North America and the Caribbean, only the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and the South China Sea remain important trading routes for us.

Put bluntly, the United States has not been acting like an "imperialist" nation. Quite the opposite. Mr. Leslie is pounding square pegs into round holes.

Now let's look at it from China's perspective. (My view is heavily influenced by Peter Zeihan, whose books I reviewed here, here, and here.)

This is what Mr. Leslie has to say:

For its part, China is facing a new series of obstacles to its investments abroad. A number of stops along the Belt and Road Initiative have run into serious issues, with infrastructure falling behind schedule, large debt loads piling up, economic returns underachieving expectations, and a few messy defaults in progress. These experiences reflect the relatively poor investment locations that China has had access to as a newly emerging power. As Chinese capital licks its wounds from this first round of setbacks, it seems likely that the BRI will not succeed, at least in the immediate future, at shaping global economic and trade flows as hoped. China will be forced to increasingly compete with other powers to access more stable investment locations, or intensify its international political and military presence to better secure its existing ones.

Everything he says is very true--I don't disagree with a word of it. But he misses the elephant in the room, and that is--unlike the USA--China is NOT self-sufficient.

• China can't feed itself. According to Mr. Zeihan, their productivity per acre is declining because of a move toward mechanized farming. Recently they've had some bad luck--a major swine flu epidemic, and serious flooding in the Yangtze river basin. China has to buy food on the open market--and for this they need dollars. Mr. Zeihan suggests they're on the verge of famine. China has begun an anti food-waste campaign.
• China depends on foreign energy--especially from the Persian Gulf. While China possesses huge reserves of shale gas, the American fracking method won't work in their geology. So for the moment they have to import most of their energy--and for that they need dollars.

The bottom line is that China urgently needs dollars--and just at a time when the US is no longer providing them. They're trying to turn the RMB into a reserve currency, but this has failed--less than 2% of global trade is settled in RMB. More--China does not run huge trade deficits and has no intention of doing so--so there aren't enough RMB in global circulation to work as a reserve. No major food exporter--the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Europe--is willing to accept RMB as payment.

So Mr. Leslie completely misreads the situation. Far from seeking to be an "imperialist" power (whatever that means), the country is desperately trying to keep the wolf from the door. Mr. Zeihan thinks they won't succeed--and I'm increasingly inclined to agree with him.

Conventional Wisdom has it that tariffs are a tax on consumers--prices will go up to reflect the cost of the tariff. But in the case of China this has proven false. They are so desperate for dollars that they're not willing to raise prices and so lose market share. They're simply eating the losses so that they can procure enough dollars to feed themselves.

The situation is that serious.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• China and the United States
• What Marxists Don't Understand About Economics

Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death

James Fortin, a journalist for Socialist Action (SA), pens an article entitled The Capitalist Criminality of (Un)Natural Fracked Gas. It is complete nonsense, buttressing SA's reputation as a pro-poverty grouplet. Indeed, the logical conclusion is that American houses should not be heated, and children should be allowed to freeze to death. It's the socialist way.

The rot starts at the top:

Exxon Mobil, fifty years ago, was the first to obscure and lie about the dangers that fossil fuels pose to the climate. But such criminal “traditions” carries on to this day. Pittsburgh EQT, the largest supplier of U.S. gas, pumping about 4 billion cubic feet a day, says on its website as of this writing: “Clean burning natural gas is an important part of our country’s energy mix, and we are proud to be a major producer of natural gas and even prouder to produce it in an environmentally responsible manner.”  Whatever the claim, the record on natural gas says otherwise, overwhelmingly.

If anybody is lying about fossil fuels, it's SA. Solar and wind (S&W) combined produce less than 4% of America's energy, while fossil fuels are responsible for 80% (nuclear, biofuels and hydroelectric make up most of the difference). It is literally impossible for S&W contribute much more than 10% of total electricity production. Germany has gone the farthest with this, with S&W comprising 11.9% of total electric power, but they have the costliest electricity in the world, at 38.1 cents/kwh. Compare that with Oklahoma's 8.8 cents/kwh.

Unlike what Mr. Fortin claims, cheap electricity does not just benefit Exxon Mobil. How many children would freeze to death if Mr. Fortin turned off gas supply? How many people would lose their jobs if factories had to pay double or triple their current electric bill?

Mr. Fortin admits that gas has ended most coal consumption in the US, and also that it is a much cleaner fuel. As a result, US CO2 emissions have declined steadily since 2005.

(Source)

He also points out that cheap gas made investment in S&W uneconomic. Of course--why invest in something that's more expensive, and therefore wastes more resources and is likely worse for the environment? Raw materials needed for S&W manufacture include silicon, copper, aluminum, cadmium, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc, along with rare earth metals. These are expensive to mine and leave a lot of heavy metal waste in their wake. It is not clear that S&W is a green technology.

While understating the potential costs of S&W, Mr. Fortin hugely exaggerates the dangers of fracking. He writes,

Fracking operators have avoided disclosure of the chemicals used in their extraction process. Numerous studies though have confirmed evidence of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene contaminating groundwater in the area of the wells, and populations in the vicinity of wells experiencing disproportionate occurrences of respiratory, nervous, and immune system problems. A wide assortment of lesser impacts such as headaches, eye irritation, and dizziness have been found as well.

Mr. Fortin provides no source for this data. While the precise components of fracking fluid are kept as trade secrets, the major components are well-known: sand and soap. There is this:

Fracking fluids fall within such cryptic catagories as carrier/basefluid, biocides, scale inhibitors, solvents, friction reducers, additives, corrosion inhibitors, and non-ionic surfactants – which is a catch-all category for dozens of fluids like Naphthenic Acidethoxylate or Poly (Oxy-1,2-Ethanediyl), Alpha-(4-Nonylphenyl)- Omega-Hydroxy-, Branched.

While it sounds scary, most of these are just "soap." Indeed, the term surfactant is a generalization on the "soap" idea. "Solvents" is likely just a synonym for water. According to The Frackers (my review here), the industry has become very sensitive about being green, and tries to source all fracking fluid ingredients from consumer products. It is highly unlikely that anything very toxic is found in fracking fluid--certainly not as hazardous as the waste from S&W manufacturing.

The chemicals that Mr. Fortin lists are very unlikely fracking ingredients and are almost certainly not used. Benzene is a strong carcinogen and is banned from most industrial processes (and from undergraduate chemistry laboratories). Mr. Fortin, as usual, provides no reference nor context for his data. Similarly, his list of ailments is so vague and so common that it is unlikely that they're caused by fracking.

He also writes,

In one Texas location a study performed between 2012 and 2015 demonstrated that babies born to mothers who lived within 5 miles of natural gas flaring during that time frame were 50 percent more likely to be premature. In other areas excessive nausea, fatigue and cancer have been attributed to exposure to radioactive materials extracted from the fracked bedrock together with the natural gas.

Natural gas flaring comes from oil wells, not gas wells. The purpose of a gas well is to capture the gas, not to burn it off. So this is a silly charge. He may be correct that gas wells bring radioactive substances to the surface, but this has to be a minor effect. Is there any evidence of higher radioactivity around gas wells? I doubt it, and again, Mr. Fortin cites no reference. Here as well, the list of ailments is too vague and other possible causes too widespread for anything to be attributed to gas wells.

I'll cite just one more paragraph, full of hyperbolic claims. My responses are in red.

The attack on public health is part and parcel of the assault on the environment. With the development of fracking technology came the exploitation of shale geological formations where 75 percent of U.S. gas now originates, now found throughout the continental U.S. Obviously any resource extraction has some environmental impact. But fracking is less dangerous than coal mining, than the traditional way of procuring gas, and likely less destructive than the manufacture of S&W technology. A poisonous mix of patently secret  chemicals and massive amounts of water, under enormous pressure, are blasted into the fissures created thousands of feet below the surface. The list of chemicals is not secret, and they're not especially poisonous. The deadly concoction – presently with each well consuming over 14.3 million gallons of water on average – is pumped out and stored for treatment and further use. Fracking in total uses about as much water as American golf courses. Much of the water comes from deep underground, way below well-water aquifers, and is too saline for human/agricultural consumption. That the water is reused is a benefit. The fracked gas now being produced releases into the atmosphere carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, alone. Methane is natural gas, and is the product the frackers wish to sell. They obviously try to prevent its escape into the atmosphere. Unlike CO2, methane decomposes quickly in air. Side effects (have that read “cost of doing business”) include earthquakes, billions of gallons of water poisoned beyond repair, and despoilment of grasslands and forest. The earthquakes are a problem, but increasingly understood and perhaps avoidable. As said, the water is already saline before the frackers use it, and "despoilment" is a lot less than open-pit mining, as is done to obtain copper and other metals for solar panels and electric cars.

Not only is Mr. Fortin against fracking, he's also against pipelines. Indeed, he's against any kind of industrial infrastructure at all. He apparently believes that electric power and home heating will appear miraculously from the tooth fairy and free unicorns.

The man literally believes that letting children freeze to death is a price worth paying in order to prevent "climate change." Mr. Fortin and SA have their priorities all mixed up. They're subscribe to pro-poverty politics.

Unlike Mr. Fortin, I'm against poverty, and I hope it can be eliminated.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade and China
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?

For those of you who don't follow the ins and outs of Trotskyist grouplets, Socialist Resurgence (SR) arose from a split in Socialist Action (SA), as I described here. Nominally, the split was over some abstruse (and irrelevant) issue concerning Syria. In reality, I think the break-up was over leadership. Specifically, SA's chief honcho (and failed presidential candidate) is the incompetent, 80 year old Jeff Mackler. He has been national secretary since SA was founded in 1983.

The problem extends way beyond SA. Gus Hall was national secretary of the CPUSA from 1959 until just before his death in 2000. James P. Cannon, founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led the organization from 1938 to 1953--though he retired long before he died in 1974. The SWP is now helmed by 81 year old Jack Barnes, who has served since 1972.

So Trotskyism has a problem--their leaders seem to think they own a birthright. There is no bench, no term limits, no succession planning. It's a conceptual flaw in the democratic centralism framework, and it's why the organizations always split after they grow beyond a certain size. I see no indication that SR has addressed--much less solved--this issue.

In commemoration of James Cannon's birthday, SR comrades Ernie Gotta and Erwin Freed pen companion articles about the relevance of his legacy for today. Mr. Gotta writes,

Cannon would likely conclude (I think this is obvious) that the revolutionary leadership of the working class in our present moment is in poor condition. He might suggest that our historic role in 2021 must be in reforging a revolutionary leadership in the U.S. with a deeply internationalist perspective. As we begin resolving the problems of revolutionary socialist leadership in the U.S. through fusions and regroupments, we’ll have to do the same internationally as well.

This is mostly Trotskyist gobbledygook, but a little meaning can be extracted. By "revolutionary leadership," he means the existence of a vanguard party. This is a disciplined organization that is possessed with the precisely correct political line so that it can steer the benighted working class around the dangerous shoals of reformism and ultraleftism until a workers' state beachhead can be established on the other side.

SR possesses at least a tinge of self-awareness in the realization that their organization--perhaps 50 comrades--is too small to qualify as a vanguard that's gonna overthrow the capitalist system. So they have connected with an umbrella group--the Revolutionary Socialist Network--consisting of leftover grouplets from the now defunct International Socialists (along with something derived from the Workers' League). It's a hodge-podge of sectarian grouplets that all believe in almost the same thing but for theological differences. And they can't agree on who their leaders should be--so I think unity is likely a lost cause.

Mr. Freed opines on the importance of the "revolutionary press."

The press is a central component of all Bolshevik organizations. As Cannon said, the purpose of the vanguard party “is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.” Cannon took seriously the paper’s role in realizing these actualities, which Lenin defined as “not merely a collective propagandist and collective agitator, [but also] collective organizer.”

The concept was likely unworkable even in Mr. Cannon's day, but today it is completely ridiculous. The idea is that a single publication (edited by Socialist Resurgence) will have so much credibility among the working class that they won't bother to read anything else. Perhaps that was vaguely realistic dream when each city had only one daily paper and two TV stations--a Revolutionary Press could conceivably gain status in that environment. But today--with 500 channels on TV, millions of channels on YouTube, along with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., etc.--the notion that the publication of some tiny grouplet like SR is gonna get heard above the noise is utterly absurd. Not gonna happen. Even the New York Times struggles in this environment, and nobody else has a chance.

Still, they're trying, and unlike their former comrades in SA, they're competent. Their webpage is as good as any of the grouplets--but you can see by the number comments (mostly zero) that their reach is not very far. SR consists predominately (as best I can tell) of graduate students--people whom Lenin would've called the intelligentsia, but whom I refer to as the lumpen proletariat. But they're educated, they write well, and they can organize things like a podcast.

I just listened to a podcast on Socialist Resurgence Radio, an interview between host Alex Coy and SR's resident economist, Osman Keshawarz (a grad student at UMass). I do not have a transcript, so apologies if I misremember something.

1. It's professionally done. The sound quality is excellent, the host is fluent and entertaining, and the guest is smart and well-informed. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. How very unlike the endlessly boring podcasts by Jeff Mackler, hacking his way through a monotone exposition of whatever (I never managed to sit through an entire episode).
2. Mr. Keshawarz, while competent, is still wrong. He thinks wealth accrues in a zero-sum competition between capitalists and workers, where the system is rigged so that workers inevitably lose. In truth, it's not zero-sum--the standard of living of everybody in capitalist societies has steadily increased since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This is because entrepreneurs, via a process of trial and error, try to find the most efficient uses possible for resources (labor, capital, raw materials). Accordingly, there is a continuous ratcheting up of productivity, leading to more wealth across the entire society.
3. Mr. Keshawarz is narrowly correct about the division of the producer surplus. That is, at any given time the producers (workers and capitalists) have to figure out how to divvy up the proceeds between them. But he completely ignores the consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to consumers by reducing the costs of production as much as possible. It is the growth in the consumer surplus that drives the persistent increase in our standard of living across the centuries.
   

   

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4. As mentioned, entrepreneurs seek to maximize social utility by a process of trial and error. The purpose of financial markets--in all their complexity--is to reallocate capital from inefficient enterprises to efficient, highly productive enterprises. Of course there is a lot more error than there are successes--most new ventures either fail, or end up as small businesses. Mr. Keshawarz apparently wants the 14,000 people employed by GameStop to keep their jobs forever, despite the fact that the company no longer makes any sense--the world has changed. Even he admits that those employees are today "ripping off their customers." It will be much better if that labor force is reemployed doing something else that is of greater value to consumers.

Anyway, SR is interesting. They write well. They know how to host a podcast. Whether or not they have the precisely correct revolutionary program is above my paygrade. But I am certain that their larger influence on American society and history will be zero.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on the Pandemic
• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Health Care Workers
• New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend

Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

This is the book that Jack Barnes wishes he'd written. Mr. Barnes is the long-time leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who penned a tome entitled Are They Rich Because They're Smart? .

In today's book, The Cult of the Smart, author Frederik deBoer declares

This book is my prayer for the untalented, an attempt to show how badly our society and its people are hurt by the obsessive focus on schooling and smarts.

He does answer Mr. Barnes' question: they are rich because they're smart! This is unjust in two ways:

1. The emphasis on smart results in a meritocracy, namely a class of people that claim for themselves all the best jobs, and because they've done so well at school, they hold themselves morally superior to folks with low IQ scores. Mr. deBoer claims that most jobs don't require a high IQ, and sorting people by education is largely unjust.
2. "Smarts," aka intelligence (measured as IQ), is substantially genetically inherited--that is at least 50% of a person's IQ score can be attributed to genes. In this it is very much like musical talent, aptitude for basketball, or good vision, among many other traits. And while those attributes can contribute to a better life, smarts looms vastly larger in future outcomes. Intelligent people earn substantially more than the less intelligent. In Mr. deBoer's world, this is grossly unfair.

Mr. deBoer imagines himself a Marxist, and accordingly the real villains are the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the top 1%. But there not very many of them--only 1%--so while their economic importance is indisputable, their cultural influence is much weaker. For this they rely on the upper middle class--the top 20% of the population, and the best-educated people in the country. These are the folks who dominate academia, the media, politics, and the prestigious professions. They are, in a word, the meritocracy. This is also Mr. Barnes' point of view. 

The claim of the education establishment is that school is the great leveler--it gets everybody up to speed so they can compete in the modern economy. Mr. deBoer disagrees.

Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

He describes college as the "instrument of inequality." Students are tracked according to their IQ scores--those who are smart get ahead and eventually enroll at Harvard. The less gifted wind up at the local beauty school. It's deeply unfair.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do students perform badly because they attend bad schools? Or are the schools bad because they enroll poorly performing students? The received wisdom on the Left is the former answer--if we just equalized the schools, or the curriculum, or the funding, then all students would excel equally and educational inequality would disappear. This is termed the blank slate hypothesis--the contention that all children are equally endowed with intelligence, and all can learn calculus if they just try hard enough.

Mr. deBoer rejects the blank slate hypothesis. Summarizing current literature, he writes,

The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes. The degree to which genes assert themselves varies over the course of life. Profoundly unequal environments for children can drown out genetic effects. There is also what behavioral geneticists call the "unshared environment," ...--the influence of unpredictable events, random chance, the flux of life. But none of that changes the fact that our genetic heritage deeply influences our behavioral selves, including our academic selves and that we should recognize that individual exceptions are less important than larger trends when we are dealing with broad populations. Like, say, when we're considering educational policy.

What Mr. deBoer writes about genes and behavioral traits corroborates the book Human Diversity, written by Charles Murray and which I regard as the leading textbook of the discipline. That Mr. deBoer and Mr. Murray mostly agree is something I find very reassuring.

Mr. deBoer urges his fellow Leftists to reject the Blank Slate dogma--the evidence for genetic influence on personality is too strong. By insisting on a manifestly false principle, the Left discredits itself.

In one important respect he disagrees with Mr. Murray--Mr. deBoer insists there are no racial or ethnic differences in IQ or other personality traits. He concedes that much is inherited--children tend to be as smart as their parents, who in turn take after their grandparents, and similarly are related to their cousins, nieces and nephews, and the whole clan. But to then claim that an ethnic group that practices endogamous marriage does not share on average a suite of personality traits is unreasonable. Of course they do--and in fact they must, as is amply and overwhelmingly demonstrated in Human Diversity.

Scott Alexander, in his lengthy review of The Cult of the Smart, argues that this opinion is not just a concession to political correctness, but rather a deeply held belief by Mr. deBoer--which Scott describes as vaguely irrational. But I think I have some insight here, because like Mr. deBoer, I have spent my career as a college professor. And I can tell you that thinking about IQ in racial categories is deeply, deeply destructive.

I used to teach general chemistry to a class of about 100 students--including a handful of Black students. It is horribly unfair to those students to walk into a classroom with the prejudice that Blacks aren't as smart as whites. For even if that is true on average, the students in my room are not average--they're not even close to average. For that matter, the white students aren't average, either--because anybody who enrolls in a general chemistry class is both smarter and more motivated than anything average. Conflating a half dozen individuals with an average over a large, and in this context irrelevant population is a huge category error. So big, in fact, that it's immoral. Anybody smart enough to read Charles Murray or Frederik deBoer should know better.

I think Mr. deBoer, with his otherwise irrational rejection of racial similarities, is responding to that immorality--and for that I give him props. But he's still wrong.

Mr. deBoer offers two lists of reforms--a list to be accomplished in the short-term, like under the Biden administration. And a more utopian list that might have to wait till after the revolution. Surprisingly, I agree with many items. I'll summarize in bullet points:

• "Provide Universal Childcare and Afterschool Care"-- He rejects the argument that either of these improve educational outcomes, but he supports it...

As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility for each of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.

Needless to say, I don't support this objective.

• "Lowering the Legal Dropout Age to 12"-- If the less-intelligent are forced to stay in school, then the obligation to graduate them requires the school to dramatically lower standards. Mr. deBoer documents this phenomenon at length. Among other things, it renders the high school diploma meaningless.
  
  I support this--our children spend waaaay too much time in school. An unmentioned corollary is that we need to let teenagers participate in the paid labor force--otherwise you have unsupervised kids out looking for trouble.
  
  
• "Eliminating Charter Schools"-- Why? I mostly accept Mr. deBoer's argument that charter schools yield no net positive educational benefit, but that misses the point for two reasons. First, while not changing the statistical average, charter schools may be of significant benefit to individuals. It's very much like the Black students in my gen-chem class--the average is irrelevant. All that matters are the individuals. Why not let students choose the school where they will be most successful?
  
  The second reason--even if there is no educational benefit--there are surely other benefits. There are, for example, advantages to children wearing uniforms--it likely saves the parents money. Scott mentions that kids can escape bullies by moving to a charter school. For many kids and parents, they're just more fun. Besides, they're cheaper than the public schools. I see no benefit in banning them.
  
  
• "Loosening Standards"-- I strongly agree with this one. We should abolish the absurd standards left over from the early 20th Century. My pet peeve--which Mr. deBoer also addresses--is the high school algebra requirement. Many kids will never pass it. Many more will pass it, but only at great cost in terms of time and misery. And to what end? If anything is less useful than high school algebra, I can't imagine what it is. Probably fewer than 1% of jobs in this country will require any facility in algebra, and computers can do it better than you can. The only people who should take algebra are people who are interested in mathematics for its own sake, or people who know they're headed for certain STEM careers.
  
  I feel the same way about long division. When was the last time any reader of this blog used long division? Likely not since the fourth grade. Waste of time.
  
  
• "College is Unnecessary for Living a Satisfying Life"-- Amen, brother! In college we have something called a general education program that's designed to turn you into an educated man or woman. In this day of unlimited bandwidth and instant access to any information you want, it's completely unnecessary. Anybody can go on YouTube and learn about anything from introductory electrical engineering to the Bible as literature, and everything else in between. The notion that you have to study all that at age 18 (when, frankly, most people are not interested) is almost as silly as learning algebra.
  
  If we canned the gen-ed programs, college could be shortened by a whole year, saving everybody a lot of time and money.
  
  I disagree with Mr. deBoer's claim that general education is mostly about racial bigotry.
  
  He spends most of the chapter discussing the salary benefits that accrue to college graduates. He rightly points out that it's mostly about native aptitude, not anything learned in school.
  
  My view is that college is useful for those people who enjoy school and are good at it. Everybody else should stay away. The worst thing you can do for your career is to go to college and then not graduate. That's a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your life. Better not to go to college at all.

The final chapter of the book lays out his idealistic perspective. It's complicated and I won't cover it here. Let me just pick out a snippet. 

The modern meritocracy doesn't judge itself by its material well-being, but instead ranks itself by status symbols: where you went to school, where and how intensively you've traveled, how Woke you are, how much you feign concern for the environment, etc. Mr. Barnes cites a similar list.

Mr. deBoer writes,

The old version of middle-class success--a two-car garage, a well-mowed lawn, and a big-ass television--seems simpler and more accessible, as it placed far less emphasis on success in a scarce number of fields ... But of course the heyday of this type of success was riven by racial and gender exclusion...

Like too many Leftists, Mr. deBoer grossly exaggerates the effects of racism. The problem was never racism as much as poverty--solve the poverty problem (which we've substantially done), and the "racism" mostly goes away.

And so those old middle-class ambitions have made a comeback--now expressed as Make America Great Again. The Left, of course, interprets it as "racism", but then they interpret everything that way. It's not racism. It is instead a plea to return to middle-class, bourgeois values that are much more democratic than those of our current meritocracy.

Mr. deBoer has written an excellent, very worthwhile book. Jack Barnes really needs to read it. 

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Are They Rich Because They're Smart?
• Book Review: Human Diversity
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education