In appointing Ms. Gay, the Harvard Corp., the university’s governing board, seems to have shifted the institution’s priorities. It revealed those goals in its Dec. 12 statement, noting that Ms. Gay is the right leader “to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” Harvard’s mission is no longer simply advancing knowledge, but knowledge “that will help address deep societal issues and promote constructive discourse.” From such a perspective, academic honesty seems to matter less than having the right progressive values, and the refusal to disclose underlying data is permissible so long as conclusions support a preferred narrative.
Duke professor James Staddon decries the invasion into science of ‘social-justice’ concerns. (HT George Leef) A slice:
It is hard to overemphasise both the immorality of this largely successful attempt to inject social justice into the scientific bureaucracy and the damage it will do not just to science but to Western civilisation itself. For example, Ute Deichman has described in compelling detail the effects of forcing political doctrine on scientific research in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. What is happening in America and elsewhere is less cruel but in some ways even more effective. Somehow, social pressure pushing identity politics over meritocracy has been building over the years, to the point that an article on the virtues of merit in science, co-authored by many eminent scientists, could only be published in the Journal of Controversial ideas.
“The sputtering EV market shows what happens when companies heed planners instead of consumers.”
Arnold Kling ponders the changing mind.
Who’d a-thunk it?: “California’s new minimum wage is predictably killing food delivery jobs.” A slice from this piece by Eric Boehm:
A new California law will require that most food-service workers get paid at least $20 per hour starting next year.
But hundreds of pizza delivery drivers in the Los Angeles area are about to discover Thomas Sowell’s famous adage that the true minimum wage is zero.
Pizza Hut announced Wednesday that it would lay off about 1,200 delivery drivers in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties, CBS News reported. Pizza Hut franchises are outsourcing delivery to third-party apps like GrubHub and UberEats as a cost-saving measure in advance of the new law taking effect.
The layoffs are likely to take effect in February, The Los Angeles Times reports, just weeks before the new, higher minimum wage hits.
David Beito tells of how “FDR emasculated the Black press in World War II.”
The credit essentially became a de facto hiring subsidy that disproportionately benefited states like California and New York whose excessive lockdowns destroyed businesses. As with enhanced unemployment benefits, Congress rewarded states that stayed locked down longer. Yet even today, their unemployment rates remain significantly higher than the national average.
The ERC didn’t help businesses survive or reduce layoffs. Only after the lockdowns ended did millions of employers line up to exploit the credit. Now the IRS is scrambling to shut down the open bar.
…..
The ERC is a quintessential Washington scam in plain sight. Congress created an open-ended entitlement that costs far more than advertised. Congress even used $8 billion in claimed savings from terminating the program three months early to help pay for the 2021 infrastructure bill. What savings? Behold your Congress at work—or not.
