When many modern graduates receive their certificates of education, there tends to be a sense that they’ve actually learned very little. As people make their way through the ‘real world’ outside academia, it usually also becomes more apparent that what they learned in the classroom has little relation to the real world. Many academic theories, models, and methods are entirely self-referential. Even in the supposedly practical fields of technology and science, many academic disciplines are divorced from their industrial applications, making it so that any training in school will prove to have been useless at achieving its stated ends. Much […]

It’s time to revisit gentrification here at Social Matter. The odd part of this phenomenon is that many of the people who are most aggressive in re-settling old, run-down cities destroyed by misguided policies are also usually some of the most ardent fanatics for Civil Rights. Part of the reason for this is that everyone who goes through any kind of modern schooling in the US learns to venerate Civil Rights activists from the 20th century more fervently than any other figures. American schoolchildren probably need to write more essays about Martin Luther King than they do about people like […]

Most American cities have no real planning behind them. There are urban planners. There are regulations that tell people what they can and can’t build, when they can build, and how high they can build it. There are zoning commissions telling people where they can build what kind of building and run what kind of business in what place. There are laws telling you where you can put windows, how many doors you can have, whether or not you can use stairs, and so on and so forth. There are countless electoral bodies that can say ‘no,’ and consultants need […]

The libertarian movement, as a whole, tends to adopt critical postures with respect to many government policies which are misguided. The proposal to reform the banking system tends to be one of abolition: “End the Fed.” The focus is on removing the institution, rather than on what comes afterward. While there may be some intellectual discussion of how to replace it, as a practical matter, the focus is on the removal. Similarly, when critics of the Drug War want action, they propose to eliminate the policy and replace it with nothing. In the world of ideas, this tends to make […]

Since the popular web emerged and connection speeds became fast enough to share digital photos to millions of people at a time, the virtual pillory has been a reliable source of comedy and moral self-aggrandizement. The way that it works it to take a photo of a degraded person, mock them, and then collect chuckles from anonymous people spread all over the world. This is a little bit similar to internet pornography, enabled by the same technology, but for shaming. Unlike the real pillory, which actually served a purpose to limit bad behavior within a real community composed of people who […]

The simple answer to this is that progressives took over the universities, and gradually made it so that those universities were the only institutions legally empowered to test on merit. This has made it so that parents eager to improve the standing of their children (and by extension, themselves and their families) will send their children to the most prestigious leftist seminary that they can afford. In this way, progressives stack the decks of management at larger corporations and the government, both of which tend to prize credentials far more. It’s hard to be fired for hiring the Harvard MBA, but […]

Emma Watson, a recent Brown University graduate, gave a speech before the United Nations last year about the importance of cultivating male allies for the feminist movement. The campaign, titled HeForShe, made a brief splash in the prestige press before disappearing from public consciousness. Here’s what ‘HeForShe’ looks like on Google Trends: Now, let’s see it side-by-side against global search interest for another celebrity, known as Beyoncé, shown in red: The barely perceptible bump under the letter ‘B’ is the relative search interest for the promoted campaign. This is even coming from two highly recognizable, vocally feminist celebrities. So, with […]

‘Groups which aren’t diverse ought to be made diverse’ — that’s the law of the land, with a few small exceptions, tolerated by the law, but not tolerated by respectable opinion. The appeal to diversity tends to be made without any evidence supporting the notion that diverse organizations are better able to meet the needs of the people who rely upon them than organizations of a more uniform composition in race, religion, gender, and behavior. What distinguishes organizations from ordinary groups of people is in their homogeneity of outlook, behavior, and shared goals. What makes them special is that they’re […]

If we can identify a common impulse shared by technocratic liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike, it’s that they all tend to believe that culture is something that can be ignored, and that it amounts to a sort of waste which, being imperfectly accountable on a balance sheet, ought to be ignored when it isn’t being actively denigrated. Understanding history and culture acts like a tax on time, attention, memory, and behavior. It’s an unseen source of mostly unwritten laws. It makes up physical mannerisms, appearance, verbal tics, senses of humor, taste in food, and artistic styles. It’s the common sensibility […]