Rebecca Sugar decries modern “education’s” failure to educate as it intoxicates young people with the hubris to mistake their poorly educated selves as being fit to “change the world.” (HT George Leef) A slice:
I was speaking to a young woman the other day who told me she was a member of a citywide youth commission on “equity” and “solidarity.” When I asked her what that meant, she seemed startled. Some words are designed to be conversation stoppers. If someone is an “activist,” or fighting for “human rights” or “inclusion,” if she believes in “diversity” or wants to “change the world,” we are all supposed to understand the meaning and the mission.
The follow-up question doesn’t often follow. I asked one. Predictably, this young woman stumbled.
She tried to work out her understanding of “solidarity” in real time, seemingly for the first time. Then, she wrongly defined equity as equality. She clearly hadn’t spent much time thinking about the principles around which her committee had organized itself. She hadn’t gotten past the buzzwords, and no one, it appeared, had ever asked her to.
Teenagers aren’t expected to engage big issues at impressive depth, and I don’t blame the 18-year-old I was speaking with for her dilettantish efforts to “make the world a better place.” After all, signing up for social action projects, however manufactured, is the path to social acceptability and, of course, college admissions. I blame the adults who run programs like these, and who encourage young people to take serious matters so unseriously.
Our brains evolved to develop skills involved in collaboration. One skill is the use of language. Another skill is the ability to handle situations that social scientists call games involving the choice between cooperation and defection. This includes skills related to cheating and detection of cheating, and skills related to deception and discovery.
Peter Earle defends so-called “junk fees.”
“Deregulation Remains Our Best Hope to Combat Alzheimer’s Disease.”
Mr. Malpass was under particular pressure to turn the bank into another slush fund for financing green-energy boondoggles. Some in the media are crowing, without evidence, that he’s been pushed out after Al Gore and the media climate conformity caucus raked him for comments last year they misconstrued as climate “denialism.”
The critics prefer to ignore the evidence that developing countries have figured out that Western-imposed carbon policies will trap their people in poverty. The danger is that the global climate clique will take the opportunity of Mr. Malpass’s retirement to remake the bank in their image.
The World Bank’s leader historically is nominated by the U.S., and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is pointing to “expanding our capacity to combat climate change” as a crucial goal for the bank’s next president as “we are undertaking to evolve” the bank and the IMF.
Mr. Malpass was right to focus the bank on helping countries cope with the economic damage from Covid and the Ukraine war. He’ll remain a strong voice for keeping developing economies and the institutions purporting to help them on the road to prosperity. As for the bank, let’s hope it doesn’t become an engine forcing costly renewables on countries that desperately need cheaper, more reliable electricity to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Anthony LaMesa tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
In Europe, Sweden’s education minister said she was right to keep schools open; Norway’s pandemic-era health minister suggested Sweden was correct; Liz Truss said closures were wrong; and Germany’s health minister said they were a mistake. How about here? Anyone besides DeSantis?
