‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

> He really was not. He was great at politics.

Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position").

But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for.

Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician.

Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader.

With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics.

> Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously.

The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence.

Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.

I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years.

Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.

It's more correct to think that when 60% of the elites support something change occurs.

My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools are capping the percentage of Asians--you can see this by comparing against schools that don't practice holistic admissions.

Affirmative action and lottery-based admissions in particular is, in at least a narrow and direct sense, contrary to "the interest of Asian-Americans" just as its contrary to the interests of white Americans. Standardized testing offers a direct path to the middle and upper middle class for Asian immigrants (as well as other immigrant groups such as Nigerians who come to the U.S. with lots of education but not necessarily money). Asians have extremely high levels of income mobility in the U.S.--an kid growing up in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20%; double the odds for a white kid born in the bottom 20%. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh. Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc.

In "How to be an Anti-Racist," Ibram X. Kendi defines "equity" as the representation of a group in an organization reflecting the representation of the group in the general population. Any other distribution, he declares, is the product of systemic racism. I don't think Kendi was thinking about the implications of that statement for non-white, non-Black people, but they are alarming for Asians, Jews, Nigerians, etc. Imagine cutting Harvard down from 20% Asian to 5-6% Asian. Or Google or Facebook! What do you think that would do to Asian income mobility?

Now, I happen to support measures to reduce disparities for ADOS people, because all Americans have a common obligation to remediate the nation's history of slavery and segregation. To that end, I support things like traditional affirmative action.

At the same time, Asians are a minority and have to be realistic about the fact that they are not similarly-situated to either white people or Black people and do not have identical interests to either group. Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.