OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
CAPITALS
ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
|
US SOCIETY
POLITICALLY CORRECT NYT Opinion by John McWhorter ... Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions 
Credit...Delcan and Co. Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/opinion/heres-a-fact-were-routinely-asked-to-use-leftist-fictions.html Burgess COMMENTARY I don't have much of a takeaway from the NYT opinion piece by John McWorter except to opine that the piece is essentially fashionable content without much substance. My priority is to try to figure out what it is that can be done to help make the world a better place, and for this there has to be action ... and the right sort of action. Nearly every sector in our modern complex socio-enviro-economic system has been optimized over time to get to its present structure and performance. In most cases the goal of the optimization has been to generate the most profit for the owners that are engaged in the sector. Most of the conversation around the various sectors is related to issues that are very interesting, but actually skirt round the issues that are constraining the aspects of performance that are beneficial for society, the environment and indeed those with economic interest. In the health sector in the United States it is mainly medical professionals that own the organizations that operate in the sector and design and enforce the professional rules. There are also organizations that own activities within the health sector that have been organized to generate impressive profits at the expense of society ... I am of course thinking in terms of the Sackler involvement with opiods. The fact that the US health sector is very expensive for people with healthcare needs and delivers generally poor results shows how the US health industry structure has become very dysfunctional. In the field of education, the United States is also a low performer. US education is expensive by world standards and the results are less good than most other high income countries on almost every count. It is interesting to observe how many of the most successful business executives in the USA are foreign born with primary and secondary education done overseas. A small number of American tertiary education institutions are world class, and in fact the best in the world, but this is a tiny piece of the total education sector. While for most people the price of education has gone up very rapidly, the value of education has gone up along a very different trajectory. The US education system has delivered new recruits to the labor force that are a considerable mismatch with the needs of the national workplace. There was a time when working people in the United States were very well paid compared to every other country in the world. In my case I came to the United States early in my career in 1966 and was able to earn more in one month than I had been able to earn in the UK in a year. This is an indicator of how wealthy ordinary people were in the USA compared to the rest of the world. Fast forward to the present time, and it is increasingly clear that other high income countries are now enabling a better quality of life for their people than is available for most people in the USA. Many economists have been pointing this out for a long time, but there has been little or no meaningful action to address this issue. There has been some talk in Washington about increasing the Federal minimum wage to $15 an hour ... but that is an incredibly clumsy, simplistic and inadequate way of addressing the problem of low wage income levels and the related issue of quality of life. My work suggests that there are many places where wages can and should be higher but there are also places where mandating higher wages will result in small business failure and a general decline on the social situation and economy of a community. Wage policy ... and indeed every policy ... should take into account the differences that exist from one place to another. Peter Burgess | ||
|
Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions
By John McWhorter ... NYT Opinion Writer Nov. 19, 2021 Our times often put me in mind of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” when Big Daddy says: “What is the smell in this room? Don’t you notice it, Brick? Don’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?” These days, an aroma of delusion lingers, with ideas presented to us from a supposedly brave new world that is, in reality, patently nonsensical. Yet we are expected to pretend otherwise. To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it’s mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as “vulnerable (or disadvantaged)” but as “oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)”? Do you believe that being “diverse” does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted? In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do. The San Diego State University physics department is seeking a physicist. The job description asks candidates to show how they “satisfy” at least three of the following criteria:
The notion seems to be that practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, must devote a considerable part of their time to putatively antiracist initiatives. It’s a bold proposition, but given how shaky its actual justification is, it is reasonable to think that lately this devotion is being imposed by fiat, as opposed to being an organic outpouring. And if the price for questioning that notion is to be seen as sitting somewhere on a spectrum ranging from retrogressive to racist, it’s a price few are willing to pay. One is, rather, to pretend. The American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges have released a “guide” that urges practitioners to employ a left-leaning glossary in pursuit of “health equity.” The problem is that what they recommend would be all but inapplicable in the real world. While caring for their patients, doctors are encouraged to mold their statements to reflect that vulnerability isn’t merely extant, but something imposed upon some patients. That is true in a technical sense, but how realistic — or useful relative to the care itself — is it to propose that physicians should say “oppressed” rather than “vulnerable”? Or, based on the same sociopolitical perspective, what is the utility of replacing the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States” with “equity-focused language that acknowledges root causes” like “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States”? Surely, even in our age, clinicians should focus on treatment, not medical newspeak. The chances that real doctors will ever use language like this are minuscule. Commitment to healing the sick makes it plain that energy should be focused on ways of attending to the unhealthy, rather than to studiously ideological ways of talking about and to them. This means that all polite engagement with documents like this, from the very production of them to any forums in which their propositions are engaged politely, amounts to an act. The jukebox musical based on Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” includes a character who’s a white mother of a Black daughter. In one scene, friends mention that the daughter will be more likely to get into a top-level university because she’s Black. The mother takes this as a slam and gives a sharp retort implying that the very assumption is racist, with the additional assumption that the audience will agree (which it vocally did the night I attended a performance). This, though, is fake. That selective schools regularly admit Black students with adjusted standards is undeniable. Examples include “Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program” — as U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch described it last year — and the circumstances of the well-known Gratz v. Bollinger Supreme Court decision, where this aspect of the admissions process was widely aired, as among a number of other cases over the past few decades. My point here isn’t to debate the pros and cons of affirmative action. There are legitimate arguments on both sides of that debate. My point is that the existence of various forms of affirmative action in admissions is a fact, and saying otherwise is fiction. Beyond this musical, it is often suggested that it is disingenuous, if not racist, to surmise that a Black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences. But this leaves the question as to just what we are to assume the aim of these policies has been, when the educational establishment so vociferously defends them. That athletes and legacy students are also admitted via preference does not belie the fact that there are also, at many schools, admissions preferences based on race. That this is not to be mentioned is a kind of politesse requiring that we prevaricate about a subject already difficult enough to discuss and adjudicate. All of this typifies a strand running through our times, a thicker one than always, where we think of it as ordinary to not give voice to our questions about things that clearly merit them, terrified by the response that objectors often receive. History teaches us that this is never a good thing. Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com. John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” ------------------------------------------- Editors’ Picks
| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/opinion/heres-a-fact-were-routinely-asked-to-use-leftist-fictions.html and |