Arnold Kling

That the South Korean school system would do this is discouraging, no question. But I am also discouraged by how, when reading academic scientists and academic journals (_Nature_ in this case), it seems considerably easier to find concern about unscientific nonsense beloved of the right than about unscientific nonsense beloved of the left.

E.g., individual genetic heritability is even more fundamental and even more loudly supported by obvious evidence than evolution by natural selection. Yet not only is this sometimes slighted in the high school curriculum, one can find academic work from prestigious institutions that pretends heritability does not exist (or is at least, for some unexplained reason, absolutely negligible). See, e.g., Chan and Boliver "The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility", http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/papers/asronline.pdf (HT http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/a-grandparent-effect/). It is not easy (for this reader with a BS in Biology) to see why it's scientifically OK to assume that heritability is negligible at the level of detail considered by Chan and Boliver ("if mobility follows a first-order Markovian process"; "well-connected grandparents could also use their social contacts to help grandchildren with job searches"; citations into a more than a decade of research on multigenerational issues, e.g. the cite to Bengtson). It's easy to see how this taboo can help produce useful political soundbites, and why the BBC would take it and run with it…

I think you're putting too much weight into Picketty's fairly contentious conclusions.

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/how_different_studies_measure_income_inequality.pdf

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/unpersuaded.html

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/capital-punishment

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/krugman-reviews-picketty/

(for some starters, if you somehow have not seen how it is not the Bible that some people want it to be?).

Also it is hard to compare Europe's norms which country-by-country are generally featuring a lot more ethnic-cohesion and have social spending heavily subsidized by America's military (not to mention much more density for things like trains)

I say this as someone who wishes there were more dense, EU-style cities in America.

Mobility is certainly not dead in America, and the middle class is shrinking because more people are moving up and making more money overall: http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-shrinking-but-its-because-americans-are-moving-up-and-no-americans-are-not-struggling-to-afford-a-home/

I think anyone trying to say "you don't know how shitty you have it!" is akin to saying "you vote against your own interests" which is really saying "I think I know better than you" -- which is trash.

The fact of the matter is a lot of people prefer US-style suburban living.

America certainly has its share or problems, reliable/trustable Governance being a big…

Preschool appears to have little if any benefit as measured by school achievement or teacher assessments of school readiness by first grade teacher

http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/research/pri/VPKthrough3rd_final_withcover.pdf

A Randomized Control Trial of a Statewide Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Skills and Behaviors through Third Grade

>The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures.
In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.

>First grade teachers rated the TN‐VPK children as less well prepared for school, having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school. It is notable that these ratings preceded the downward achievement trend we found for VPK children in second and third grade.

Further commentary and…

While there was some pre-production, I disagree that vaccine supply is the only binding constraint we have going on. And the lack of sane regulatory approvals and sane distribution setups has been heartrending.

If you look at https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/ and scroll down to "U.S. Vaccination Campaign" you will see that in the US 74.5% of the vaccine doses that have been delivered have actually been used.

This could happen for a combination of two reasons, as far as I can see: either delivery is ramping up so fast that most of the delivered doses were delivered very recently, or because people are doing a terrible job of using doses that get delivered.

My impression is that the latter is a larger factor than the former, so far, based on the wide variation by state in the "Supply used" column. West Virginia has used ~96% of their supply. D.C. and Rhode Island have used only 60% (and it's not like their populations are larger or more spread out than West Virginia's!). And I should note that I can imagine various poverty-and-social-whatever issues D.C. might be facing, but they don't obviously apply to Rhode Island in the same way.

Things like http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/virus-update-3/ item 3 are pretty common: crazy vaccine-distribution setups meaning people who want vaccines can't get signed up to get them, while vaccines are getting thrown out due to spoilage.

Things like…

Power hungry certainly, but if they were really greedy they could satisfy that far more easily in private industry for the same amount of talent and work.

As for morality, well, I think there are two factors at play there. Powerful people tend to become less moral in their treatment of people below them, but that isn't the same as being willing to compromise their ideals. Also, people seem to have a finite desire to be moral, and you can find studies about people being less likely to hold doors for others if they've recently donated to charity, for instance.[1] So if this hypothetical Republican leader feels that his political work is Defending Civilization from Barbarity[2] I imagine that they'd feel more free to be amoral in other aspects of their life. But that doesn't mean they'd be willing to sell out their cause itself!

[1] Different people can have very different base desires here, and habit is also a force to consider.
[2] See second to last paragraph in this very good post:
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/being-uncharitable-to-those-who-disagree/

When I cite such things, it's because "all models are wrong, but mine are useful" :)

And yeah I think big five is useful in the above context, and also for things like this:
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/keeping-up-with-the-fits-114

"Empirically, men and women to tend to differ on the trait that personality psychology calls agreeableness. More women show up as high in agreeableness than men.

[As an aside, I once wrote Nassim Taleb and the Disagreeables.

Nassim Taleb’s latest book heaps praise on the trait that personality psychologists call low agreeableness. . . I am pretty far out on the disagreeable end of the spectrum myself, but Taleb makes me look like a goody two-shoes.

Taleb came across the essay and tweeted this response:

There is this BS in this "disagreebleness" scale used by psychologists, unconditional of domain. Like most psych categorizations, BS. Many are socially gentle but intellectually rigorous & no-nonsense: others nasty in person but appear gentle in public . BS!

I rest my case.]"