Something I think people forget re: Afghanistan is that in 2001 the Taliban did not rule all of the country:

They were engaged in a ~5 year civil war that, while they were winning, was far from over. I don't think its unreasonable to say that uniting the country was beyond them in the short term.

And then after 20 years of US occupation of the country, they achieved that goal in fucking weeks. Without US boots on the ground the US's Afghan government hit the ground belly up despite every material advantage where previous opponents of the Taliban held on for years. The Taliban are stronger in 2024 then they ever were in 2001. That is how badly US strategy played out.

Do you think we'll ever get a Nabokov-style 'Lectures on Anime' where you write pithy summary essays about your favorite series while throwing shade at those you dislike?

Haha honestly I don't have the talent to pull this off? Like brevity is not my strong suit, I very much struggle with it. And you need his eye for "impact" that he, as a great artist himself, can uniquely see.

But its a great idea, and there is glory in failure. I will jot this down and see if I can workshop it

Hard to say, but its absolutely the case that from 2003 to 2009 (the first Obama surge) the US heavily underinvested in Afghanistan, took the pedal off the gas on pacifying the non-urban centers, and allowed the Taliban to regroup and grow. The US had very limited responses to the growing pace of attacks in that timeframe, only increasing troop deployments from like 20k to 30k, before harshly escalating to 100k in in the surge. And meanwhile Iraq was eating up over 150k US troops during that time. Everyone knows that US force totals were stretched, calling up reserve units and extending deployments was a big political battle at the time, so we were very much "at our limit". A world with no Iraq war permits far more intense and less delayed responses to the deteriorating security situation.

Probably even more important was the level of focus by leadership Iraq consumed - Afghanistan was deliberately downplayed as a "solved problem" as the Iraq War heated up, and so imo a lot of warning signs were missed.

However, I don't want to take all this too far? Iraq's geography, culture, and political history was far more amendable to the kind of "solution" the US wanted to implement, while the Kurds were/are a thorny problem most other factions wanted a stable country and Sadaam's party was a shallow system that vanished as a force quite quickly. Meanwhile the government of Afghanistan the US set up was just fundamentally at odds with the reality of the country it was trying to rule and the war it was trying to wage. I believe that was a problem the US was constitutionally incapable of recognizing, and no level of troops the US was realistically willing to commit was gonna change that.

I am not a full determinist or anything, if enough power was brought to bear quickly enough to bring peace, give the government times of stability and economic plenty to get mass buy-in & shift culture, sure its possible. But if I give it some simple numbers, if there is no War in Iraq I think the odds of the US losing in Afghanistan are still >50%.

Oh lets drag up some more 2000's politics debates - Noah Smith had this take today:

So bait is bait, but I think this fun bait, I'll take this. Its a definition game (what does "win" mean) but that can still be elucidating.

There is obviously a sense in which the US won the War in Iraq - which is extremely easy to reveal by looking at Afghanistan! Unlike there, where the explicit, named enemy of the US outlasted us, overthrew our imposed regime, and took power, in Iraq it is true that the country is currently governed by the system the US built, and it rules with relative stability. Not ideal, but hey its not Syria or anything. This would in fact be *shocking* to people in the 2000's - back then the general vibe was that Iraq would descend into full-on civil war. People openly discussed throwing in the towel and just letting the country split in three. And then all of that just fizzled out over time, and people started buying into the system. Its not glorious "nation building" but it looks like it stuck. It is fair to say that Iraq is not in fact a disaster case study in the nation building timeline (from an outcomes standpoint, from other lens like humanitarian its different), and its often unfairly seen that way.

But there is just no coherent definition of "win" divorced from strategy, divorced from goals. Imagine if the US today jointly invaded Israel & Gaza both, and hey throw in Hezbollah too, what the fuck ever (Pro tip: don't do this) with the goal of setting up governments that did whatever the fuck they wanted, don't care, as long as they don't attack each other anymore. And we got Iraq today as a result? Eh, I won't fight you too hard if you call that a win. This magical funland scenario hit the target, right? The US wanted to de-escalate regional conflicts in the region, it did that. How nice a place those are to live or w/e wasn't the point.

In Iraq, "not falling apart" was not the goal. The goal was end Sadaam's WMD program, which well raincheck on that, but moving on was also to End Terrorism by Sending a Message to other enemy countries like Iran and also building a beacon of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East to show the people that there was a better path to Islamic Fundamentalism, thus reducing its strength in the region.

It Did Not Do That.

Man, can I not emphasize enough how much it did not do that, how much the War in Iraq did not reduce the strength of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East. It is literally, not figuratively-literally but actually-literally, one of the greatest own goals in the history of strategy since war has existed. I have explained that part in more detail too often in the past to repeat, but do I even need to? Say the sentence "The War in Iraq reduced Islamic extremism as a political movement" out loud and try not to laugh. You can't, its too absurd to get past your lips.

From that lens, the proper lens, I do not think you can call the War in Iraq a win. How stable Iraq is, while a dodged bullet for its people, barely scratches the surface of what would need to be shown to call it a win; and I see precious few nails that can join it.

If you asked an oncologist to treat high blood pressure, they would most likely have enough general knowledge to make a sensible decision.

Sure and if you asked any economists "hey welfare cliff good or bad idea" they would nigh universally pass that test. This is an "undergraduate textbook" level question.

If you asked a marine engineer to design a road tunnel, they would say they weren’t qualified to do so. 

And if you asked a development economists to design an online auction price system, they would tell you the same.

But in economics, you all too often come across people who don’t have a sufficient baseline of knowledge outside their specialty, but who either aren’t aware of this or don’t see it as a reason not to give advice. 

He notes the lawyer example about how they do this too - I am not going to exclude doctors from this category, I won't be as charitable as him. And hey, can some of us maybe think of idk programmers or businessmen who maybe opine on politics outside their station? Is that a thing maybe?? But the difference here is not "economics" imo, its social sciences & politics. These topics are A: inherently more subjective as proof is hard to come by, and B: just catnip for absolutely everyone to have an opinion on them. CEOs do, doctors do, writers do, musicians do, and when Green Day does a performance of American Idiot idk man they seem pretty confident in their conclusions to me. It just isn't the case that you run into economists being outlier-levels of confident in their conclusions outside their field all the time. They aren't even in the top most stereotypically arrogant disciplines imo! Though sure, I agree they are in the top 50%.

Note that they are often asked by society to be the expert on these things; and that does cycle back on how the community sees itself. But lets not overstretch things - they are asked by governments for their opinion very often, way more than say political scientists. But they are actually listened to about as often. We just don't live in a world being run by economists where their overconfidence is the source of our woes.

Matt Darling showcasing some blast-from-the-past "what is wrong with economics" takes that are apparently preserved in amber from 2008 being retold in 2024:

"Don't economists know that scalar models aren't everything" wow. amazing.

"hAvE yOu tRiEd SyStEm DyNaMiCs" fucking lmao

Anyway our boy Michael Saylor continues by asking "hasn't anyone tried tracking price changes for specific goods?" - inquiring minds at the BLS want to hear more. Will you be shocked to learn this guy is an ex-tech CEO who is now really into Bitcoin??

Back in 2008, the financial crisis hit the world, and while the idea that it was "economist's fault" like they were running things somehow was very silly, its fair to say it was a black mark on a lot of mainstream macro people - it did cause some solid revisions & debates. And in the dissident econ era of that time, it became a "thing" to talk about economics as this sort of backward institution, obsessed with models disconnected from reality and privileging math over data, since if macro was vulnerable the whole field was.

This critique was fully outdated at the time, but I will least credit that it takes time for people to catch up to the frontier, and the critiques were like a bit valid about say 1980's economics - with the extremely obvious caveat that they lacked affordable computers then and so couldn't do shit like system dynamics, but w/e. Still, if it was outdated in 2008, its laughably off the mark in 2024, discussing an econ field flush with econometrics, measurement & big data, and diverse mathematical and computational methods. But since the ideas of 2008 were foundational to so many dissident movements - like crypto for example - they continue to march on, divorced from their place and time.

Fun to see an old friend I guess; how ya been since Occupy Wall St eh?

So I didn't want to get into it because I would be heavily repeating myself, but I think the "default" stance should be "ISIS existed as a force capable of doing that because of the Iraq War". Sadaam would never have let Mosul fall, Syria itself quite possibly wouldn't have even had a civil war, and ISIS, and organization built root-and-stem from insurgents in Iraq and their successors, would almost certainly never have existed. I don't think the US should get much credit for "almost bringing the exact state it feared most into existence before slamming it back down to a still-worse-than-previous status quo".

If one wants to disagree go for it, fine to hear it. But I think that is the current consensus stance of most observers.

(As for the general decline of Islamic Fundamentalism more generally, that is ofc far less obvious a thing so I don't apply the laugh test rhetoric so strongly to that - but I think its hard to escape the default stance of "time" and wider social forces being the cause. Extremist movements flair out if they don't win, that is the general rule. It was the biggest mistake of the US to not realize that this was a passing threat not worthy of trillions spent and hundreds of thousands dead)

Oh lets drag up some more 2000's politics debates - Noah Smith had this take today:

So bait is bait, but I think this fun bait, I'll take this. Its a definition game (what does "win" mean) but that can still be elucidating.

There is obviously a sense in which the US won the War in Iraq - which is extremely easy to reveal by looking at Afghanistan! Unlike there, where the explicit, named enemy of the US outlasted us, overthrew our imposed regime, and took power, in Iraq it is true that the country is currently governed by the system the US built, and it rules with relative stability. Not ideal, but hey its not Syria or anything. This would in fact be *shocking* to people in the 2000's - back then the general vibe was that Iraq would descend into full-on civil war. People openly discussed throwing in the towel and just letting the country split in three. And then all of that just fizzled out over time, and people started buying into the system. Its not glorious "nation building" but it looks like it stuck. It is fair to say that Iraq is not in fact a disaster case study in the nation building timeline (from an outcomes standpoint, from other lens like humanitarian its different), and its often unfairly seen that way.

But there is just no coherent definition of "win" divorced from strategy, divorced from goals. Imagine if the US today jointly invaded Israel & Gaza both, and hey throw in Hezbollah too, what the fuck ever (Pro tip: don't do this) with the goal of setting up governments that did whatever the fuck they wanted, don't care, as long as they don't attack each other anymore. And we got Iraq today as a result? Eh, I won't fight you too hard if you call that a win. This magical funland scenario hit the target, right? The US wanted to de-escalate regional conflicts in the region, it did that. How nice a place those are to live or w/e wasn't the point.

In Iraq, "not falling apart" was not the goal. The goal was end Sadaam's WMD program, which well raincheck on that, but moving on was also to End Terrorism by Sending a Message to other enemy countries like Iran and also building a beacon of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East to show the people that there was a better path to Islamic Fundamentalism, thus reducing its strength in the region.

It Did Not Do That.

Man, can I not emphasize enough how much it did not do that, how much the War in Iraq did not reduce the strength of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East. It is literally, not figuratively-literally but actually-literally, one of the greatest own goals in the history of strategy since war has existed. I have explained that part in more detail too often in the past to repeat, but do I even need to? Say the sentence "The War in Iraq reduced Islamic extremism as a political movement" out loud and try not to laugh. You can't, its too absurd to get past your lips.

From that lens, the proper lens, I do not think you can call the War in Iraq a win. How stable Iraq is, while a dodged bullet for its people, barely scratches the surface of what would need to be shown to call it a win; and I see precious few nails that can join it.

This seems true enough but, in fact, is not at all unique to economics. This is just as true for political scientists, for doctors, for programmers, for just all of them really. For some disciplines its less, sure, but not in a way that is super elucidating of anything substantial.

I'm not sure where it gets you as a critique - unless what you are critiquing is the Cult of Economics as the true discipline of technocratic expertise, where like if you just elect economists instead of lawyers to congress all your problems would be fixed. Which is fair enough (though tbh I think we should take a turn at it, since we always elect lawyers and never economists I think we would find low hanging fruit aplenty), but that critique is far too centrist for these dissident movements to settle for it. If the critique is "individual economists are human beings", well, so is everyone, that isn't a problem a manifesto can solve. But if economics as a discipline is corrupt, rotten to its core, then its far more amendable to being purged of its sickness and replaced with the shiny new & true Real Economics you outlined in your Wordpress blog. Which is why they have to say things like "why doesn't *any* economist do X", as opposed to "more should do X".

Matt Darling showcasing some blast-from-the-past "what is wrong with economics" takes that are apparently preserved in amber from 2008 being retold in 2024:

"Don't economists know that scalar models aren't everything" wow. amazing.

"hAvE yOu tRiEd SyStEm DyNaMiCs" fucking lmao

Anyway our boy Michael Saylor continues by asking "hasn't anyone tried tracking price changes for specific goods?" - inquiring minds at the BLS want to hear more. Will you be shocked to learn this guy is an ex-tech CEO who is now really into Bitcoin??

Back in 2008, the financial crisis hit the world, and while the idea that it was "economist's fault" like they were running things somehow was very silly, its fair to say it was a black mark on a lot of mainstream macro people - it did cause some solid revisions & debates. And in the dissident econ era of that time, it became a "thing" to talk about economics as this sort of backward institution, obsessed with models disconnected from reality and privileging math over data, since if macro was vulnerable the whole field was.

This critique was fully outdated at the time, but I will least credit that it takes time for people to catch up to the frontier, and the critiques were like a bit valid about say 1980's economics - with the extremely obvious caveat that they lacked affordable computers then and so couldn't do shit like system dynamics, but w/e. Still, if it was outdated in 2008, its laughably off the mark in 2024, discussing an econ field flush with econometrics, measurement & big data, and diverse mathematical and computational methods. But since the ideas of 2008 were foundational to so many dissident movements - like crypto for example - they continue to march on, divorced from their place and time.

Fun to see an old friend I guess; how ya been since Occupy Wall St eh?

Oh lets drag up some more 2000's politics debates - Noah Smith had this take today:

So bait is bait, but I think this fun bait, I'll take this. Its a definition game (what does "win" mean) but that can still be elucidating.

There is obviously a sense in which the US won the War in Iraq - which is extremely easy to reveal by looking at Afghanistan! Unlike there, where the explicit, named enemy of the US outlasted us, overthrew our imposed regime, and took power, in Iraq it is true that the country is currently governed by the system the US built, and it rules with relative stability. Not ideal, but hey its not Syria or anything. This would in fact be *shocking* to people in the 2000's - back then the general vibe was that Iraq would descend into full-on civil war. People openly discussed throwing in the towel and just letting the country split in three. And then all of that just fizzled out over time, and people started buying into the system. Its not glorious "nation building" but it looks like it stuck. It is fair to say that Iraq is not in fact a disaster case study in the nation building timeline (from an outcomes standpoint, from other lens like humanitarian its different), and its often unfairly seen that way.

But there is just no coherent definition of "win" divorced from strategy, divorced from goals. Imagine if the US today jointly invaded Israel & Gaza both, and hey throw in Hezbollah too, what the fuck ever (Pro tip: don't do this) with the goal of setting up governments that did whatever the fuck they wanted, don't care, as long as they don't attack each other anymore. And we got Iraq today as a result? Eh, I won't fight you too hard if you call that a win. This magical funland scenario hit the target, right? The US wanted to de-escalate regional conflicts in the region, it did that. How nice a place those are to live or w/e wasn't the point.

In Iraq, "not falling apart" was not the goal. The goal was end Sadaam's WMD program, which well raincheck on that, but moving on was also to End Terrorism by Sending a Message to other enemy countries like Iran and also building a beacon of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East to show the people that there was a better path to Islamic Fundamentalism, thus reducing its strength in the region.

It Did Not Do That.

Man, can I not emphasize enough how much it did not do that, how much the War in Iraq did not reduce the strength of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East. It is literally, not figuratively-literally but actually-literally, one of the greatest own goals in the history of strategy since war has existed. I have explained that part in more detail too often in the past to repeat, but do I even need to? Say the sentence "The War in Iraq reduced Islamic extremism as a political movement" out loud and try not to laugh. You can't, its too absurd to get past your lips.

From that lens, the proper lens, I do not think you can call the War in Iraq a win. How stable Iraq is, while a dodged bullet for its people, barely scratches the surface of what would need to be shown to call it a win; and I see precious few nails that can join it.

Matt Darling showcasing some blast-from-the-past "what is wrong with economics" takes that are apparently preserved in amber from 2008 being retold in 2024:

"Don't economists know that scalar models aren't everything" wow. amazing.

"hAvE yOu tRiEd SyStEm DyNaMiCs" fucking lmao

Anyway our boy Michael Saylor continues by asking "hasn't anyone tried tracking price changes for specific goods?" - inquiring minds at the BLS want to hear more. Will you be shocked to learn this guy is an ex-tech CEO who is now really into Bitcoin??

Back in 2008, the financial crisis hit the world, and while the idea that it was "economist's fault" like they were running things somehow was very silly, its fair to say it was a black mark on a lot of mainstream macro people - it did cause some solid revisions & debates. And in the dissident econ era of that time, it became a "thing" to talk about economics as this sort of backward institution, obsessed with models disconnected from reality and privileging math over data, since if macro was vulnerable the whole field was.

This critique was fully outdated at the time, but I will least credit that it takes time for people to catch up to the frontier, and the critiques were like a bit valid about say 1980's economics - with the extremely obvious caveat that they lacked affordable computers then and so couldn't do shit like system dynamics, but w/e. Still, if it was outdated in 2008, its laughably off the mark in 2024, discussing an econ field flush with econometrics, measurement & big data, and diverse mathematical and computational methods. But since the ideas of 2008 were foundational to so many dissident movements - like crypto for example - they continue to march on, divorced from their place and time.

Fun to see an old friend I guess; how ya been since Occupy Wall St eh?

Eh, I think that is very reductive? Like that was just one "front" and also one "avenue of action", but not close to all of it. I don't think its accurate to boil down "the battle over how universities & the Department of Education will handle accusations of sexual assault on campus" into corporate comms. That involved a ton of real rape cases, a ton of accusations of rape, institutional policies around evidence & guilt standards, etc.

I don't think its accurate to boil down "newspapers should dispense with middle-ground coverage and pursue truth through activism" to corporate comms. In a certain sense all news is comms, but that is the product, people were fighting over the core mission of the New York Times and all that.

I don't think its accurate to boil down "we should abolish the police" to corporate comms - in 2020 it very much was not PR! Lots of people really, authentically tried to pass laws to radically dismantle police departments. They failed, obviously, but we do ourselves little credit by pretending all they ever cared about was PR stuff.

I get the "in practice all they did was X" argument, I do - though I would say that part was just as much about internal staffing, about firing opponents & changing workplace norms, as it was about 'outsider-insider' accountability dynamics. But it was not all it was by any means, changing books published and university curriculums and news coverage and political campaigns by presidential candidates can't all be lumped into that bucket.

When would you say we hit peak woke?

I think 2020, which I will admit I think very strongly. The woke revolution to tease, or the social justice movement to be academic, was probably the most "online" movement in American history. Which I do not mean pejoratively, simply descriptive here, the history of the 2010's is very much the history of the ascendant internet. And 2020 was the year we just forced all of humanity to be online 24/7 with no recourse; we threw Americans to the fucking lions man. All these little gazelle up against seasoned internet warriors with a decade+ of practice honing their craft. And of course in a time that objectively felt apocalyptic to so many people. I think the George Floyd protests are absolutely the peak for the movement, the energy it brought in was unreal.

It, of course, as these things go, was also the end for it. All that energy was applied with all the undisciplined ferocity that its most extreme adherents were able to command, towards obviously unachievable goals - something they could not see being high on their own supply. They tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. And once the quarantine ended everyone (well, everyone liberal) was ready to move on. The Return to Normalcy was a go.

Which Imo does mask the actual achievements of the movement? I do personally think it was on net a misguided use of energy focused on symbolic targets, but it did hit some of those targets (when is the last time you even questioned a mainstream Hollywood movie or TV show having a diverse cast, for example?). But its big achievements it had locked in earlier in its run. Its a classic tale, you set out to achieve something, you pretty much achieve it actually, the only way you were ever going to at least, but what - are you going to disband? No, of course not, you double down, you go harder. So went the First Republic, so went the Woke Revolution.

The alt-right of course had its own similar journey at pretty much the same time, which culminated in 1/6. For, hm, reasons, it does not have the same ending.

I dont disagree with that thrust; I think that phenomenon is in part a universal aspect of all modern societies, so to describe the social justice revolution you do need to include the specific ways and causes that force pushed with/for.

I fully expect in the next ~decade a gekokujō movement will occur in some form; but I am betting it will be different enough from the 2010's that it should be called its own thing.

When would you say we hit peak woke?

I think 2020, which I will admit I think very strongly. The woke revolution to tease, or the social justice movement to be academic, was probably the most "online" movement in American history. Which I do not mean pejoratively, simply descriptive here, the history of the 2010's is very much the history of the ascendant internet. And 2020 was the year we just forced all of humanity to be online 24/7 with no recourse; we threw Americans to the fucking lions man. All these little gazelle up against seasoned internet warriors with a decade+ of practice honing their craft. And of course in a time that objectively felt apocalyptic to so many people. I think the George Floyd protests are absolutely the peak for the movement, the energy it brought in was unreal.

It, of course, as these things go, was also the end for it. All that energy was applied with all the undisciplined ferocity that its most extreme adherents were able to command, towards obviously unachievable goals - something they could not see being high on their own supply. They tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. And once the quarantine ended everyone (well, everyone liberal) was ready to move on. The Return to Normalcy was a go.

Which Imo does mask the actual achievements of the movement? I do personally think it was on net a misguided use of energy focused on symbolic targets, but it did hit some of those targets (when is the last time you even questioned a mainstream Hollywood movie or TV show having a diverse cast, for example?). But its big achievements it had locked in earlier in its run. Its a classic tale, you set out to achieve something, you pretty much achieve it actually, the only way you were ever going to at least, but what - are you going to disband? No, of course not, you double down, you go harder. So went the First Republic, so went the Woke Revolution.

The alt-right of course had its own similar journey at pretty much the same time, which culminated in 1/6. For, hm, reasons, it does not have the same ending.

Hah lol I think that is eight levels of discourse too high - Andy & Leyley is intensely self-indulgent, none of it is done as an attack on any outside faction and I can't imagine what scenes one would think could even qualify for the attempt. It was made as an edgy comedic psych horror fetish game, and any politics like that is entirely from discourse around it, not the text.

(Wouldn't be completely shocked if Nemlei, bitter from having fled the internet due to anti's harassment, adds in a bit of that to future installments, but that hasn't happened yet and I have faith in their purity of vision)

I played a few more of Nemlei's (Developer of The Coffin of Andy & Leyley) games to sort of get a feel for their design philosophy a bit (typical Ash behavior, everything's a production history). I played No-Good Noelle & Candy Scabs, and poked around Better Half.

Andy & Leyley is their most ambitious project by a country mile, and a good deal more advanced conceptually. It is also their first RPG Maker game, the rest being pure Ren'py VN projects. This was a very smart choice on their part - they love gore & horror style elements, but in a simple VN those elements are going to be carried, in the main, by dialogue, with the occasional splash art. Its hard for that not to overstay its welcome, or come off as a bit too edgy? You can make it work with real design flexes (Doki Doki Literature Club being a classic example) but that is very high skill (DDLC is famously impressive on the coding side). Meanwhile Andy & Leyley gets miles out of the fact that you-as-player physically do all of the actions, and engage with 'bonus' dialogue from the environment as much as you want. You are extending that welcome via choices you make.

Andy & Leyley also seems like their first project to take place in "our world", even if it's a crapsack alt skin version of it. It is another smart choice, as - typical to the relationship-focused VN genre - Nemlei cares about characters first, and that is where all the time goes in these games. Which means the fantasy settings of say No-Good Noelle are inherently shallow; they don't want to spend time developing it all that much. In A&L all that is presumed *except* the relevant differences, which are way easier to drip-feed. The longer length & RPG elements help with that too ofc. And I think it works a little bit better with the toxic dynamics they are so enamored with; a toxic snow fairy/imp dynamic is like, yeah, they are magic creatures, guess they can do that. Fun, but that isn't going to hit the way a Covid-Quarantine metaphor driving you over the edge is going to.

Of course the art has also evolved and all that too; they started making full games in 2019 it seems, had choppy "generic western cute-horror-anime" aesthetics for a few there, couldn't get "adult" character designs to work for Better Hal & Divelethion, but finally broke the barrier on Andy & Leyley, and committed to a more cohesive style with its own identity to boot.

Btw they have very impressive output for a solo artist who is virtually never charging for these products and doing like no social media promotion. They love the grind for stories, I see who they are in every work and respect them immensely for that.

I have been seeing a bunch of buzz recently online about a possible "decline in value" of the ivy league+ degree - Nate Silver didn't start it but he certainly accelerated it. And while there is nothing robust you do see things like surveys of hiring manager opinions out there to suggest its possible, its not a crazy idea even if its far from proven. So assuming its real, why would it be happening?

1: This discourse is obviously happening because of the recent protests at top US schools - essentially its the idea that elite students are hyperpolitical, coddled, and out of touch with reality. This causal path should be very, very silly. The vast, vast majority of students at Columbia are not protesting. They don't really care about this topic! Sure, if asked, they agree Israel Bad Right Now, but otherwise they are busy with finals and job apps. This is of course equally true at most other schools, its just not a mass movement in that way (protesting to be clear rarely is). This is a specific instance of the general trap of selection bias - the visible students aren't the median ones.

Stacked on top of that is the second level of selection bias - the median protestor is not a business major or engineer! They are exactly the kind of students for whom being a politically engaged activist is *good* for their career, not bad, or at least neutral. Schools produce a large diversity of career outcomes, and those students self-select on how they spend their time, there is no "median" student to observe really.

And ofc all of this has to rest on the foundational reality that people are products of their context - jobless 20 year old's surrounded by young peers protest a bunch, that is what that context produces. The large majority of them will become mortgage-paying white collar workers by the time they are 30, this identity will not stick with them. If they become political activists it will, sure! But if you are the hiring manager for Palantir this isn't going to be the trend for your hires. There are "politically liable" hires out there but you aren't going to predict them via the sorting algorithm of "was at Columbia in 2024", that is for sure.

Now, as much as this is a silly idea, humanity are zeitgeist creatures - I can't actually reject the idea that, despite it being silly, hiring managers might use this moment to feel like they are "over" the Ivy League and start dismantling the privileged place their applications currently get. Cultural tipping points are vibes-based, and amoung elites (unlike the masses, who don't care much) Israel/Palestine has an awful lot of tense vibes.

2: Still, I don't think this is explaining those survey results people are throwing around, and I don't think its explained (very much at least) by the general "woke uni" trends of the past half decade. It is instead downstream of wider trends.

There was a time where companies really did want "the smart guy". You could major in English at Harvard, write a good thesis on Yeats, and be off to the trading desk in Chambers St two weeks after graduation. Those days are over - for complex reasons we won't get into - and nowadays people expect their new hires to be as close to experts in the field as they can manage. Students have internships, consulting clubs, capstone projects with real clients, specialized sub majors, the works. These are all ways of saying "signaling quality" has gotten more legible and more specific over time. Why would I choose a Harvard English major over a University of Illinois finance major who did a research internship with our specific Chicago firm on midwest agricultural derivates markets? Students like that exist by the bucketful now, and the Ivys cannot monopolize them. Partially because they choose not to; Columbia could actually say fuck it and make its school 90% finance majors, but they don't want that, they specifically recruit intellectually diverse students. Which means State School finance types will fill the remaining slots slots.

The other reason they can't monopolize is much simpler - numbers. The US has way more "elite" jobs today than it did in the past. Programmers and their adjacencies are the biggest growth sector, but everything from doctors to analysts to lawyers is all up up up. And do you know what isn't up? Undergraduate enrollment at elite schools! Columbia's has grown by like 10% over the past 20 years; Harvard's is essentially unchanged. For, again, reasons, these schools have found the idea of doubling or tripling their undergraduate enrollment, despite ballooning applications, impossible. Which means of course Microsoft can't hire from Stanford alone. So they don't, and they have learned what other schools deliver talent, and no longer need Stanford alone. The decline of Ivy Power is in this sense mathematical - if a signal of quality refuses to grow to meet demand, of course other signals will emerge.

I therefore personally think, while minor, the Ivy+ schools are experiencing declining status, have been for a while, and will continue to do so (though there are offsetting trends not mentioned here btw). But its structural way more than cultural.

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rough day for marcille

Yeah pretty much - not like that specific article or anything, which ofc you aren't saying either, but the entire ethos of the article is a pretty good example as the large majority of its 'mission' failed to materialize despite actually having buy-in from a lot of powerful stakeholders for it. People will of course continue to write things like that, but you arent going to have that level of elite buy-in and milquetoast opposition for some time - and its been 4 years, the track record is clear.

When would you say we hit peak woke?

I think 2020, which I will admit I think very strongly. The woke revolution to tease, or the social justice movement to be academic, was probably the most "online" movement in American history. Which I do not mean pejoratively, simply descriptive here, the history of the 2010's is very much the history of the ascendant internet. And 2020 was the year we just forced all of humanity to be online 24/7 with no recourse; we threw Americans to the fucking lions man. All these little gazelle up against seasoned internet warriors with a decade+ of practice honing their craft. And of course in a time that objectively felt apocalyptic to so many people. I think the George Floyd protests are absolutely the peak for the movement, the energy it brought in was unreal.

It, of course, as these things go, was also the end for it. All that energy was applied with all the undisciplined ferocity that its most extreme adherents were able to command, towards obviously unachievable goals - something they could not see being high on their own supply. They tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. And once the quarantine ended everyone (well, everyone liberal) was ready to move on. The Return to Normalcy was a go.

Which Imo does mask the actual achievements of the movement? I do personally think it was on net a misguided use of energy focused on symbolic targets, but it did hit some of those targets (when is the last time you even questioned a mainstream Hollywood movie or TV show having a diverse cast, for example?). But its big achievements it had locked in earlier in its run. Its a classic tale, you set out to achieve something, you pretty much achieve it actually, the only way you were ever going to at least, but what - are you going to disband? No, of course not, you double down, you go harder. So went the First Republic, so went the Woke Revolution.

The alt-right of course had its own similar journey at pretty much the same time, which culminated in 1/6. For, hm, reasons, it does not have the same ending.

Having a normal morning convo with partner M today