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Meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly flattin
is wave big down in a force.
Speaker 8: Man, it will cause a tree fold letting five thousand
miles away.
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Speaker 3: All right, Steven Pimantel, Welcome to the Jay Burton Show.
How are you doing that?
Speaker 8: Thank you? I'm doing great, glad to be here.
Speaker 3: So yeah, you and I I've introduced to your work
by a mutual admirer. I guess I'll put it that way.
And so if you could for my audience, could you
describe who you are and what you do.
Speaker 8: I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I work
in tech, but I am pretty active in social media.
On Twitter, and I write quite a bit. I've always
been very interested in a number of topics around, like philosophy, classics, politics, governance,
all kinds of things, pretty pretty wide ranging interest, and
I've written for a bunch of places, like Palladium. I
am seventeen seventy six, everything from like book reviews of
books that have come out from like Passage Press, to
my own articles on various topics, sometimes historical, sometimes more
forward looking. Yeah, all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm interested. And this is a very broad question
in your sort of broad opinions on the field of
the classics. Like most people who embark on getting a
classics degree, it ended up finishing it right, ended up
deciding I needed to do something slightly practical, and then
never actually got a job in that allegedly practical field.
But the classicists I met had sort of an odd
relationship with Western civilization or on one hand, it was
their field, We're very well read in it, but they
also sort of seemed to hate it and present the classics.
And so I'm curious, what is your general feeling on
the field of classics, like as an area of study.
Speaker 8: So what you're referring to is almost a meme. I mean,
it's like this very commonly noted thing where you know
classicists who hate the classics, and it's part and parcel
of the larger corruption of the humanities, And I would
go so far as to say the larger corruption of
academic culture in the universities, where there's just been this
intense turning against the West, against any sort of Western
heritage culture. And you see that very intensely in English departments,
in classics departments. So part of it is this ideological
thing where there's just this very anti Western and it
goes under a number of aims, you know, postcolonialism, you'll
hear you know, deconstruction, et cetera, et cetera. I mean,
there's this whole stew of theory and whatnot that has
a very tendentious kind of ideological bias, and it just
sort of swept over academia. I mean it's actually the
problems are a very long standing and go back a
very far away, but they've just gotten worse and worse
in recent years. So yeah, I mean, I know, I
know class classicists who got their PhDs on who later
left or either did not go into academia or who
later left. Alice Petkiss Alex Pettkiss, for example, who does
the Cost of Glory podcast as a friend of mine.
He was got his PhD from Princeton in the classics,
later had a tenure track position, very good career, and
he left because of a lot of these issues. He
wanted to do something that was much more substantive, much
more actually contributing to you know, to the culture in general,
but young men in particular, and he knew he couldn't
do that in academia, so he left and did something different,
and it's now doing excellent work with his podcast and
with writing. But he's just one of many, many such examples.
And none of this means that there aren't still good
people in universities. You can find them, but it's hard
and it's getting harder, and they are like under siege.
Many of them are unhappy. Some of them are older
and are like moving on. So yeah, it's kind of
a mess. And you know, I believe that it has
been true for a long time now that if you
really want to pursue this kind of stuff seriously, it
is actually better to do it outside the university than inside.
That's very unfortunate that that should not be the case.
It's kind of screwed up that it is the case,
but it is the case. And it's just that so
many departments, even formerly very good departments that had great
reputations at elite universities, are like just shitholes now. And
that's just the way it is.
Speaker 3: I think, like many people, they're sort of these kind
of moments of conflict that sort of stick in your brain.
And I was in I believe it was a Latin
class on the day that Notre Dame Cathedral partially burnt down,
and my professor was, I mean, I don't want to
hazard guess, but very old and seemingly the sort of
person that in you where I could get along with, Right,
kind of seemed to be a sort of kind of stereotypical,
genuinely liberal aging professor Right kind of winding out his
career teaching one or two classes, and when I just,
you know, before class, you know, brought up the fact
that I was very affected by the fact that Notre
Dame was burning. It was very upsetting to me. He
was genuinely baffled by that fact. He's like, well, what
do you what do you mean do you not like
what he could not comprehend why I not only thought
this was relevant to a discussion about the classics, but
also that it was something that I felt some sort
of emotional attachment to. And you know, once I sort
of saw that dissonance, sort of started to pick up
on other attitudes towards you know, the Western canon more broadly.
But it was a very it's a moment that is
stuck in my mind ever since. That, Right, someone who's
devoted his life to the study of Western civilization ultimately,
and someone you can't even blame on the kind of
great awokening you know of the Obama years, someone who's
been around for a long time none less has that
same sort of attitude towards our cultural heritage. And to
your point about the sort of where the actual conversation
is being held. Obviously, education has any number of major
issues with it, but I think that, you know, on
a very basic level, if you were interested in actually learning,
you can still do that in academia. But it's almost
in spite of the system, not because of it. And look,
I graduated in twenty two. I should be able to
I should remember that more. But I left feeling completely
and totally disgusted. And you know, anyone who's made the
mistake of giving their cell phone number to you know,
where they got their degree from, will, like me, get
texts and messages constantly, but one asking for money, which
is you know, just shameless, but also saying like, oh,
do you want to come back for a graduate degree?
Do we think you'd be a good fit for this program? Again,
let's be honest, fishing for money. But my reaction, and
many other people I went to school with who were scholarly,
who were interested in ideas, who you know, at a
previous generation would make a great fit, their conclusion has
largely been the same. It is not only no, but
know and I hate you. You know, I have seen
what you have brought. And it's interesting even talking to
people in my parents' generation, right Gen xers, who have
a very very different relationship to education and even just
from a social level, many of them view those as
their kind of best in most positive years. And not
to say that I didn't enjoy my time in college,
but the relationship between I guess sort of the you know,
the consumer right of education and those providing it has
changed dramatically, and I think that's an interesting kind of
sea change.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's so much there. I mean, you're absolutely right
about the relationship of older generations. I mean, my dad,
who's now in his nineties, you know, had a deep,
deep sort of respect for education in general and higher
education in particular, and always encouraged me and all his
kids to like seriously engage in that. And I think
that was actually common of his generation that regardless of
your political orientation, they viewed this as an important and
very beneficial institution. And they were right. I mean, that
is what it was supposed to be, and at one
time that is what it was. And people would form
these very intense bonds of loyalty with their alma mater.
They would go back to their schools, whether it be
in regard to sports or even more like directly academic things,
they would donate and they there's always this lagging effect
where people maintain these cultural attachments and attitudes long after
the reality that that motivated them has gone away. And
you know, you see on Twitter, you know, jokes about
you know, that's not the thing you think it is,
that's you know, something killed that thing and is wearing
it as a skin suit. Well, you know if you
have a kind of romantic, more classical idea of what
the university is and what it should be doing. All
I can say to you is, when you look at
current universities, that's not what that is. That's something wearing.
It is a skin suit. And and you know, you'll
you'll even see like wealthy people, millionaires even billionaires, giving
these and some of them think that they're right leaning
or just dribe themselves as right leaning, and yet they
will give huge sums of money to these institutions that
are like pushing exactly the opposite of what they think
should be going on in the world. And there's a
kind of blindness there that's just inertial, like they're so
attached to these loyalties that you know, it's like it's
their parents or something. And I don't think you should
really give any institution, especially these large, very rich institutions.
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Speaker 8: That kind of loyalty. I mean, it's like they are
what they do, and if what they do is persistently bad,
then they're bad. And that's kind of how I think
of that. And again I don't say this with any glee.
I think it's very unfortunate that this is the case,
and we would all be much better off if it weren't,
but it is.
Speaker 3: I think additionally, there's a level to which education has
been commodified, and there's a cheap version of that argument
that I'm not trying to go into it all. But
when I speak to older people, predominantly of you know,
the silent generation, what few were still around the relatively
small minority which went to college. In many cases, these
were you know, regional colleges like I think of you know,
one of my friends grandfathers who's now in his you know,
mid eighties, and the fact that he went to college
was not only a big deal, but he went to
that college which was located, you know, within a relatively
short radius of where he lived, met people from the
surrounding community who would then form a sort of local
elite if you were so you know, you had you know,
prosperous farmers, the you know, the owners of you know,
the funeral home, the bank president would all be from
that same university together. It was a sorting mechanism, but
it was a local sorting mechanism. And obviously, you know,
this applied less but still to a large degree to
you know, internationally known institutions like the Ivy's. But still
there was very much a idea that a school produced
a culture, in many cases locally derived culture. But as
college became a sort of rite of passage for the
professional class, where you have at this point almost a
majority of seniors graduating high school going to college, and
also it became a sort of bootleg IQ test right
where you could sort of sort in the hiring market.
You know, we need someone with one hundred and thirty IQ,
so let's just find a college that only accepts people
with that. Well, it became a marketplace, and if you
were upwardly mobile or in our current times not downwardly mobile, right,
needed to strive. You needed to market yourself. And so
instead the game no longer became one will I go
to college? Yes or no? It became how will I
market myself to an entire nation's worth of colleges, And
so you have one if they kind of derogatorily refer
to them as the snowbirds in the southeast, where you're
kind of the second sons of you know, places like
northern Virginia, New Jersey who can't get into you know,
the ivy's, the preciege institutions moving down the coast. So
for instance, you know, Duke is very very hard to
get into. UNC is extremely hard to get into because
you have this massive influx of students from both around
the country and also relatively recently around the world, and
so that process has become commodified. You are effectively competing
against the entire nation, in the entire world. And you
could say, well, does not that allow those institutions to
select the best of the best. Maybe it does. I
would argue that results have not borne that out. But
you see there a destruction of an organic culture. Whereas,
for instance, I went to a a you know, a
state school, and at that state school, not only was
a large proportion of that graduating class foreign, actually such
a high percentage that they ended up being sued by
the state for violating the requirements of their you know, grants,
But even then, almost all of them were from I'm
from Virginia, the DC suburbs, where, let's be honest, they
aren't really from anywhere, but it's a population center with
a lot of wealth, and they can divert that endo education.
And so what used to be a regional institution is
now being dispersed over the entire nation. And again, if
we were in an era of unparalleled prosperity, where we
have more and more capable people, you know, every every
school and every block is turning out in Einstein every year,
then okay, fair enough, I'm just an old stick in
the mud. But we have lost both. We seem to
have lost the you know, the productive power of those
institutions and also the sort of beneficial social structures that
they gave to sort of small town America. But i'll
kick it back to you, Steven. Yeah, No, I think
you're absolutely right. You're right on target there.
Speaker 8: Quite Apart from the ideological corruption that I was talking about,
there's this issue of form. When you say that almost
everyone or a majority is trying to go to college.
I mean this is really a post World War two
phenomenon where there was actually policy set at the federal
level that college attendance was this great good thing and
we should encourage everyone to do it. And this was
done through things like the GI Bill, It was done
through various federal granting and loan mechanisms, but it was
actually sort of an official policy. And it leads to
all kinds of distortions because there's really not clear thinking
there about what higher education.
Speaker 11: Is really for.
Speaker 8: And I think part of it is a kind of
homogenization where you imagine there's just this thing called college
or university and it's a good thing, and therefore everyone
should go to it and then they'll be smarter and
better educated and more able to contribute to the workforce
and in society, et cetera. And I think that's that's
actually a very wrong way to think about higher education.
That there's actually a kind of heterogeneity in terms of goals,
in terms of appropriate goals, and in terms of what
would actually be functional and helpful. So there's a kind
of vocational training that's oriented towards career, that's oriented towards
workforce preparation, and it's entirely appropriate. It's a good thing.
I have nothing bad to say about that. I think that,
you know, people need to make a living. People should
be able to work and help contribute to our economy,
not only support themselves and their families, but the broader economy.
All of that is good and great, and there should
be places that are oriented just mostly toward that and
very practical majors. Yeah, But I think there's also something
else that you can call liberal education and or liberal arts,
and it's actually a quite different thing. It's not oriented vocationally.
It's not primarily about what job you get or how
much you're going to be able to earn, and it's
not for everybody. Probably most people should not be steered
toward a kind of liberal arts or liberal education. I mean,
I think it's just fine if only a very small
minority of people do that, people who have some like
who feel called to it in terms of their own
interests and background and what they're trying to seek. What
I'm saying is there can be more than one thing,
and there should be more than one thing. And I
think our educational system would have been much stronger if
in that immediate post World War two period that distinction
had been clearly made, and if people had said, Okay,
the real reason we want more people to pursue higher
education is for our economy, for its economic effects, both
for themselves and for the country at large. And we're
going to tailor policies to that. And maybe you'll also
have liberal arts schools that are doing something different and
that's great too, and maybe we'll support them in some
other way. I think you could have had a much
more functional system. But when you try to funnel everyone
through the same institutions, what we've seen happen from that
is a lot of things like great inflation, decrease of standards,
and here it begins to intersect with some of the
more ideological stuff, because there's also like reasons around disparate
impact why people want to lower standards. So there's a
lot of things that kind of interact in a negative
way and lead to where we are now.
Speaker 3: Several things there to sort of paraphrase what you said,
you know, if we assume that the purpose of a
system is what it does, you could make the argument
that the purpose of education is actually not to educate people.
And when I say education, I mean, you know, big
e it is. It is in fact to provide sinecure jobs, right,
to provide these sort of cushy positions where and you
see this in the growth of administrators dramatically since the
two thousands, both on you know, the sort of K
through twelve level and also you know in higher education,
where there's been this massive growth of people who do
certain things that are not related to the direct each end, right,
gramming knowledge into people's brains, and it's sort of become
this massive patronage network where you can just shovel money
into you know, this this system sort of socialize the
effects of that wealth transfer, and then now you've created
someone who, incidentally, and maybe this is too conspiratorial, does
promulgate your ideology, does you know, reproduce that sort of
system of thought. But also they are paid workers, right,
And you could almost imagine education the sort of an
extension of generic government bureaucracy.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 3: They're technically not state workers in all cases, but functionally
might as well be. And again, maybe this is my
inner kind of boss Tweed coming out, but it does
seem like a very politically useful thing to have a
lot of people who have a decent standard of living
because they get money from you. And I'm look, I
haven't done the political questionnaires of you know, uh, department
administrators at you know, Harvard or Nebraska or any given school,
but I'm pretty sure I could guess generally, you know
how they align.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 8: Yeah, No, I think that's exactly what's going on going on,
And and you know, this doesn't have to be consciously
conspiratorial in order from that dynamic to be very real.
I think you see it in multiple areas. You see
it in government bureaucracy, you see it in healthcare frankly,
this growth of bureaucracy and administration, but you see it
big time and education when when you have I think
a lot of this is a function of the amount
of federal dollars, you know, ultimately taxpayer dollars that are
funneled into that system. A lot of it just goes
into this sort of metastatic growth of administration. You see
this at many of the top schools, and you're absolutely
right about the political orientation of the people who hold
those jobs. Very similar in government bureaucracy as well. It
is a kind of patronage network, and.
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Speaker 8: I think what would in fact improve education a great
deal would be to shut off a great deal of
that money. And people will scream. Of course, they will
say your anti education, why are you attacking education? And
of course that's nonsense. I mean a lot of the
actual teaching of students can be done very inexpensively. I
mean there are some areas, like support for research in
the sciences, where you could like maybe make an argument
that some sort of research funding is actually playing a
more functional role. But there's just a huge amount of
money that isn't anything like that. And you're right on
target about the growth of administration as a percentage of
university budgets, which themselves have ballooned. It's just very clear
that a huge amount of that has nothing to do
with what we would sort of think of as functional
load bearing education.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that you may an apt point. I
want to turn to something you said earlier about the
distinction between vocational and a liberal education. Obviously, very great
number of people throughout time, I mean, look at American
history who had a liberal education and proved to be
quite useful. So they're not completely separate circles under then diagram.
But when we look at a liberal education, like what
does that mean? You go back to Aristotle and his
idea was that education was effectively a leisure activity, right,
you needed to have time to educate yourself, and transforming
an education into something that is that has gotten you
get an education. It's sort of the same sort of
thinking you see often parodied as magic dirt, where these
people live in a nice neighborhood. These people live in
a bad neighborhood. The bad neighborhood is full of crime.
If we pick the people up and move them into
the nice neighborhood, it will transform them into nice, productive
people with a white picket fence. Similarly, the idea is, well,
the products of this, you know, liberal education are very impressive.
You know, they're they're discovering new animals, you know, inventing
all of these sort of processes that benefit the human
species for at large, and they passed through this door
literally in the case of some institut And if we
could simply funnel through an additional ten twenty thousand people
a year, we would create ten or twenty thousand of
those impressive men. I think a lot about one of
my friends who is multi generationally. I said that very badly.
Many generations of his family have been to Harvard, I'll
say it like that, And he went to a prestige
prep school in New England. His family has for generations.
And one of the things that he talks about is
that it was sort of up for debate how much
the education per se made those men great, because he
said they were impressive people before, and obviously they learned
from the best, they were able to fraternize one to another,
build the sort of connections that prepared them for life.
But also they were drawing from an existing ruling class, right,
and many of them went through that prep school system.
And the same urge to universalize or democratize that we've
seen in education more broadly hit that system as well. So,
for instance, Harvard instituted a program that said, and I
might be off on these numbers. This is me remembering
a conversation I had several months ago, so don't crucify me.
But he said they instituted a cap on how many
students could come from any one school, so they could
accept no more than I believe it's three students from
any given school. So whereas before you have a graduating
class of one hundred very impressive students, and the top
seventy would all end up at Harvard and the stupidest
thirty would end up at Yale. That's what he said.
I assume that's what joke. That's funny to people who
went there. I was never smart enough to go to
an IVY in any time, so I don't have a
dog in this fight. But point is, when that system
goes away, you're only taking the top three, so competition
becomes very cutthroat for that top three. Sure, but where
did those people go? Will they go elsewhere? And all
of a sudden, right that Harvard graduating class is being
made up of a different sort of person drawn from
you know, in many cases still brilliant kids from different
schools who no doubt do well. But let's be honest,
that's not what's happening. They're not selecting an even meritocracy
from everywhere, and so the products of that university have declined.
They've gone through the same magic door, they stand on
the same magic dirt, and well, the magic hasn't worked.
We have not produced, you know, more of these kind
of capable people needed to sort of lead to society.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, I think your analogy with the magic
dirt is very good. And just as the magic dirt
turns out not to be magic and not work, likewise
the magic door turns out to not be magic and
not work. It was always the case that Harvard and
other similar universities were selecting from uparticular elite and propagating
the next generation of that elite. It used to be
that for Harvard, for example, that this was very New
England focused, and there was a kind of hereditary, de
facto aristocracy that Harvard served and propagated. And you know,
many people would would say, very frankly during that period,
you know, the people going to Harvard aren't necessarily all
that right. They simply came from the right families, the
right prep schools, and they will go on to work
at the right law firms or what have you. And
that was right, That was a correct description of what
was going on after World War Two, there was this
very conscious sort of decision, and it didn't happen at
one time. It kind of went throughses, but a very
conscious set of decisions to change that Harvard became was
very was always very conscious of what it was doing
in terms of elite selection and formation, but it just
made a decision to broaden that well beyond its former
WASP kind of base into other parts of the population,
and it did that progressively more and more. There was
a period of, you know, a couple decades in the
middle of the century when they leaned very hard into
the SATs, which are really in the This is less
true now, but what the SATs looked like like in
the nineteen sixties, they were sort of a proxy IQ test.
They always denied that, but it really sort of was
not that different from an IQ.
Speaker 3: I think the correlation and it depends because they've they've
messed with the test to such a degree that is
completely used, but I believe it's peak. The correlation is
zero point seven point eight something, so not perfect, but
pretty damn close.
Speaker 6: That's right.
Speaker 8: So they made a decision, well, we're going to be
more a meritocratic We're not going to cater to the
not so bright suns of wealthy wasps who are you know, alumni. Necessarily,
we'll still let a few of those into but you know,
we're going to try to deliberately have a more a
meritocratic focus. And that was you know, nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties.
But then what happens is various, you know, the civil
rights movement comes along, various you know, ethnic considerations come
into play, and they say, well, the way we're selecting
is still very non representative of the population. We want
to make a conscious effort to make it much more representative.
So then you see this strong trend away from the SAT,
away from a kind of strictly meritocratic kind of emphasis,
towards other criteria, and this just gets pushed further and further.
It's still deliberate elite formation. They still know very well
what we're handing out are these sort of you know, parchments,
you know, declarations of minor nobility, as if you know
that the queen had like made you a knight or something.
We understand that this is the function of the diploma,
and that we're giving people this ticket to elite jobs
and whatnot. But we're gonna We're going to hand that
ticket out very differently than we were doing before. And
the problem is that the more that diverges from any
common sense notion of merit or academic achievement, the more
the credibility of the institution weakens, the more the brand
ultimately becomes questionable. Until I think we're at a point
now where you know, I hate to say this, but
I almost view a Harvard diploma as an anti signal,
as a kind of a reason for me to look
more skeptically or more to provide additional scrutiny on a
resume or something like that. Then then as some unquestioned
stamp of credibility.
Speaker 3: Several things there, well, one, and this is something that uh,
Johann Kurz wrote about in his recent book Leaving a Legacy.
He's not paying me to say that, it's just beat
you should read it, uh, But he talks about that
term meritocracy, and he says there's there's sort of a
Mott and Bailey being argument there where, you know, so
of course the idea that systems should be just that
deserving people should you know, receive accolades, you know, the
right man for the right job is almost autological, like,
very few people disagree with that if you formulate it
like that. But meritocracy often means is this sort of
like like Manchurian obsession with exams, right, the idea that
you need to sort of craft yourself specifically to meet
certain entrance requirements. I remember this very distinctly when I
was applying to schools where there was this sort of
you know, complicated calculus of you know, you need to
you know, have your SATs, your gap, your gap geez,
your GPA, and then also you know, the requisite number
of you know, extracurriculars you know, spread out in the
optimal way so you can optimize yourself to pass through
this gate. And you know, I think it created this
very unhealthy culture where everything was being done entirely for
mercenary reasons, right, Everything was being pursued so that you
could fit through the filter. And again I think about
my friend who was just mentioning Harvard as the system
where they will pull in alumni to interview prospective students,
and I think this was the moment that he completely
cut all ties with his alma mater. But he describes,
you know, going up, you know, going there, sitting down
for this meeting with this girl, and apparently she she
nailed the interview, right, she had. She explained that she is,
you know, a deeply you know, involved tribal artist, right
reconstructing uh you know, the culture from which she was,
you know where she came, and you know, really nailed
the interview until you know, after it was done, you know,
they'd shaken hands and all that. Well, he asked her, well,
you know, how long have you been doing this, and she,
perhaps unwisely answered honestly, she said, oh, well I started
last month. You know that that relatively like just just
flay write something I could just start doing. Train formed
into you know, this lifelong passion for you know, the
sort of your ethnic heritage, you know, the passion for
the arts. And no doubt she was coached through that, right,
and someone told her to do that, right. But there's
sort of this over reliance on metrics that I think
is not healthy either.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: The idea that you can create, that you can craft
a sort of I guess you could say a craft
is sort of like you know, genius algorithm to sort through.
And again I think that that is a consequence.
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Speaker 3: You're turning every one of these institutions into first and
national and then international contest, basically where you were no
longer competing against you know that sort of you know,
local elite, you were competing against the world. And obviously,
as you've said, it sort of becomes a writ of trade.
You know, the Emperor has given you you know, passage
into the you know, the the aristocratic class. So it's
you know, it's it's human nature, and it's rational for
those people to act like that, even if it's not moral,
and even if it doesn't necessarily produce you know, the
best product. But do you see what I'm getting at
their kind of distinguishing between meritocracy and meritocracy as it were.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, just because there is a hoop to jump through,
a gate to pass through, doesn't mean that that hoop
or that gait, that filter genuinely represents what we would
intuitively think of as merit It could simply represent the
filter that some institution has created to shape the student
body that they have determined, perhaps for political reasons, ideological reasons,
financial reasons, that they want. And you know, on the
one hand, you could say, well, it's a private institution.
It can do whatever it pleases. You know, why should
I complain? But on the other hand, that doesn't that
shouldn't elicit our respect, That that doesn't mean, you know,
we should think well of them just because they have this.
Speaker 3: And to that point, they take a lot of my money. Yeah,
you know, if they're committed to being a private institution. Well,
then I guess you've committed to being a private institution then.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean so much of this is just, uh,
you know, I think a lot there's been a lot
of articles about the extremely unhealthy culture in some circles
of trying to gain this system and get into the
best elite university you can, you know you can. There's
some people who start like literally with preschools. You got
to get into the right private preschool, so you can
get into the right elementary school, so you can get
into the right high school. And it's like there's whole
chain more than K through twelve determining what you're going
to do with your life so that you can have
this outcome, and people can become obsessed with that. And
I think a lot of this has to do with
excessive credentialism. Why is there even the demand for this,
like on the job side, on the hiring side, I mean,
I think it's sort of inevitable that you're always going
to have a kind of stratification of different kinds of
careers where you know, some people graduating from some universities
can get into some career tracks that aren't really practically
open to others. I think that's somewhat inevitable and is
not even necessarily a bad thing. Where it becomes a
bad thing is when employers at large widely adopt some
standard that you must have a batch lri's degree or
more and more commonly now even a master's degree or
a PhD in order to be eligible that this is
sort of like the bottom floor qualification. And I think
a lot of that is just completely inflated. I think
there's a lot of jobs where that degree is not
necessary and we be much better served by some more
kind of practical assessment, like you know, can you do
can you you know, show me that you can actually
do the job, you know, through some whether it be
some project work you do, or some on hands very
problem solving kind of interviewing or or something like that.
And and it depends on the field obviously, but yeah,
and not simply using the credential as a kind of
shorthand for that, because the credential itself, you know, has
become so watered down. It's very low signal in a
lot of cases, and I think the employers aren't even
doing themselves a favor by relying on it so much.
Speaker 3: This is sort of an interesting thing because to your
point about the low value of a college degree, or
we can extend that, I think perhaps the weakest signal
is an MBA. I've met exactly one impressive MBA in
my life, and the rest of them it is sort
of just a gold star, you know, put on a
you know, otherwise unremarkable resume. But you know, enough of
me trashing MBAs. You actually see an interesting outcome in
family businesses right where it is passed down by a
genetic line instead of you on the open market, they
actually tend to outperform any given business, but not huge amount,
but significantly. And the argument that I've heard to explain
this is effectively, it's on the job training. You have
someone who has been prepped for this job since they
were eleven, and okay, maybe they don't have, you know,
the sort of credentials you know associated with that, but
that sort of thing is invaluable, right. It is something
you can't necessarily measure per se, right, how much your
dad showed you around the family business, but it is
nonetheless something that you can track the result of. I
think that and this is something I oftentimes see from conservatives,
which I think is not particularly positive, which is, they
accurately understand that higher education is as a system opposed
to them, but then they assume that the correct thing
to do is you completely abandoned such a system, because
the problem is you do need a certain amount of
as you've said earlier, a certain amount of credentialism, a
certain amount of like the Old Boys Club, is just
inevitable to human organization. And I worry that the constant
calls to oh, you know, don't go to college, get
a job in a trade. While that might be individually rational,
I believe Bloomberg in the last six weeks, Uh, I
don't have it in front of me basically put out
that for a young white man, the expected value of
a college degree is zero. You're effectively exactly the same
as a high school education. So and while it may
be individually rational to say, you know, well, in that case,
why bother you know, I will simply, you know, support
myself elsewhere. But you were sort of opting out of
the middle and upper class. You're basically saying I will
simply not apply. And maybe this has something to do
within the fact with the fact that in America, money
and class are much more linked than they are in
other countries. But do you think that there is a
danger of fully removing yourself from that system and in
doing so sort of resigning to a relatively lower position
in society.
Speaker 8: Yes, yes, absolutely. Before I address that, let me go
back to the point about family businesses, because I think
there's something important there. If you think of what is
the distinguishing feature of a family business that makes it
able to do what you were describing, I would point
to its continuity. The fact that it has the potential
for continuity not only over years and decades, but perhaps
even intergenerationally, allows for a kind of loyalty and investment
in employees that you might not see in a regular corporation.
I mean, some people who are like very cynical might say, oh, well,
you know, family business, that's great if your dad happens
to have one. But that's just you being privileged. Your
dad happened to give you this job. You know what
does that prove? And I think that's very silly. That's
not seeing the point at all. A lot times when
these businesses are successful, it's because the second generation, third
generation or whatever has worked very hard that on the
job training isn't just like a plum position that was
handed to them. It was that, No, they had to
come up in the business and really learn it and
learn how to run it successfully, and learned a whole
hell of a lot more of nuts and bolts than
they might have in another company. And it's not even
necessarily the members of the family. Even other employees in
a family business who aren't part of the owning family
may have that opportunity for a longer term relationship of
the business investing in them in their training. So it's
I think the key factor there is it's an institution
that tends to think in the long term much more
than other companies might.
Speaker 3: Okay, weirdly enough, this is a point that that Happa makes.
You know, obviously talking about monarchy, but he talks about
exactly that that you were. You were selecting for a
ruler or an executive who has a stake. And obviously
there are bad kings, clearly obviously there are you know,
fail sons who tank the family business. Yep, but you're
avoiding the principal agent problem that we see even in education.
Right as an administrator, what is your incentive is it
to educate the best people or to effectively enrich yourself anyway,
Sorry I interrupt.
Speaker 8: No, that you're exactly right, And I think the point
I was making about continuity on the way I would
say this is it applies not only to businesses but
to institutions in general. That when institutions are incentivized to
pay attention to their own continuity and succession, you know
that who's going to run this after I, the founder
or the current generation is gone, And how can I
structure things so that they can do so successfully or
at least maximize the chance that they can do so successfully.
That's where you see that difference. And I think that's
Happa's point as well. Oh yeah, we were should one
opt out or of the educational system that whole discourse about,
you know, I guess the caricatured version of it is
just become a plumber. Yeah, I'm absolutely not saying that.
I think that the fact that universities are in such
a bad way is very unfortunate, as I was saying,
not something that we can take any glee in or
even just walk away from. You have to look for
pop gifts of functionality, whether that be on the basis
of what school you go to, what department you go to,
or even just individuals searching out individuals who have their
head screwed on straight among professors versus others. I think
for many people, their best shot is going to be
to find the best school they can go into it
with their eyes open, understand the biases, understand the corruption.
Take a very active role in piecing together a curriculum.
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Speaker 8: One of the things that has happened as standards have
fallen is that required courses have been sort of the
course requirements or curricular requirements for different majors have been
relaxed and relaxed until the point where often you're being
given very little guidance about what you should take. It's
just like, you need this many credits and we'll give
you a degree. And that's in general, that's a bad thing.
But if you're sort of proactive and you go into
that with your eyes open, you can take advantage of
it to put together in affect your own major. I mean,
even though you know, within within the shell of whatever
majors they're providing, just by which what electives you choose,
what courses you take, you you may be able to
you know, piecemeal together something that's actually useful and reasonable,
even though they're not making that easy for you. And
I think solutions like that, where you take it upon
yourself to you know, figure out what's up, what will
be helpful and kind of piece stuff together yourself, can
be one way. There are some smaller institutions that are
still very solid. Not a lot of them, but you know,
you may steer that way. So yeah, I don't don't
think opt out or just you know, go be a
plumber or go be a tradesman. Nothing against those trades,
by the way, I think there. I think there are
people who pursue them very fruitfully, who become wealthy doing that,
or you know who you know support themselves and their
families very well. And if that actually is something you
were inclined to anyway, by no means am I disparaging that.
But if what you were aiming for was a more conventional,
you know, quote unquote white collar kind of career in
any field, if you're looking for fields which require college degrees,
whether reasonably or not, but they do, and you need
to accommodate that, Yeah, by all means, still get a
degree and try to navigate your way through the madness
as best you can.
Speaker 3: Well to that point, I think that ultimately what you
have to do is approach higher education with the correct attitude. Yeah,
we spoke disparagingly earlier about getting an education. To your
point about the standards of your course reading, certainly, I
mean geez, I could have had I not been, let's
be honest, a giant nerd, I could have gone through
my entire college career without actually reading anything in its entirety.
I certainly gave it a good run, But like it
was entirely doable. So to that point, if you actually
are interested in learning anything, it will sort of be up.
It will sort of be up to you. I think
that's ultimately a positive thing, right, Not necessarily economically, it
would probably do that without the you know, one hundred
thousand dollars in debt, but certain point, that's the that's
the price you have to pay to enter a white
collar career. But if you you assume that you are
earning an education that it requires deliberate, active work on
your behalf, then ultimately that is where the value is. Additionally, right,
there's the social value, you know, of who you will
be rubbing shoulders with. You know, there is a value
to that, sort of like social I guess you could
say entryism, but uh, I mean, when I look back
at my own college career, I'm gonna be honest, in class,
barely learned a damn thing. If we're gonna be on
hundred percent honest. Partially that was due to COVID, where
nobody learned anything. But also, right, it's funny, you know,
mentioning Kappa or even earlier talking about these kind of
managers and bureaucrats. You know, James Burnham's Managerial Revolution. I
read both of those in college. In fact, I remember
where I was on campus reading them, and that was
what was valuable there. Right, I had the time to
do that, you could develop intellectually. And sure you could say, well,
are you not just taking four years off from your life? Yes,
I didn't really have another option. Right, If there was
a way to both develop, you know, economically, be building
something and also you have that sort of you know,
gold star needed, I would have done it. But ultimately, right,
we live in a world of constraints. You know, sure
it would be great if we could fix the education
system the wave of a hand, But Stephen, unless you're
hiding something from me, I don't believe either of us
have the ability to do that. And so ultimately you
were dealing with the system as it is. Let alone
the fact that for most people, their time in education
is a distinct, truncated part of their life, and relatively
few people go back later in life right to achieve
those sort of educational accolades. So ultimately, it's sort of
similar to a lot of dating discourse right where you know,
I wish, wouldn't it be great if this were different?
It's like, well, it isn't and you can't make it different.
So ultimately, do you want to play the game or not?
You see what I'm getting at.
Speaker 8: Yep, none of us chooses the world into which we're born.
None of us chooses the system that is in front
of us to navigate. What we get to choose is
how to navigate it. So at some level, all education
is self education. All education is the learner's own study
and engagement and sort of you know, thinking through and
reading and practice. That's always true, and it's always been true.
In a more ideal situation, the teachers kind of serve
as guides and can often provide crucial encouragement, direction hints
as to what direction to go in, expose you to
books and material you otherwise wouldn't be exposed to, and
so they play an important role if you can find
good teachers. Now it's probably always been true that good
teachers are the minority. If you can find a truly
great teacher, just one or two in your life, you're
truly fortunate. They can make a huge amount of difference.
But even in the absence of that, you shouldn't despair.
You should simply know that that means there is more
burden on you to lean into this and to you know,
you can. There are there are there are lots of
resources other than the university you may be attending at
the moment. There are book lists, there are you know,
resources on the web. There's lots of things where you
can find books. You mentioned, you know, two good books,
Managerial Revolution and Hoppo's Book on Democracy, and you know,
there's lots of books like that, And there's there's lots
of you know, places on the web where you can
find people listing such books and discussing such books. And
it doesn't mean that you have to like adopt this
entire shadow curriculum in addition to what you're doing with
the university, so that in effect you're doing two university degrees,
although it may turn into that or it may seem
like that, but even just pulling on a few resources
like that that may or may not intersect with your
university studies just can be hugely, hugely valuable just to
know that there are intelligent, knowledgeable people in the world
who have thought about these things, written on these things,
and you can learn from them, and you can find
other people who are interested in them, interested in discussing them,
seriously studying them, and that can be done in conjunction
with the process of getting a degree, and when you
finally do get that degree, you may be in a
much more oriented place than if you had not leaned
into it that way.
Speaker 3: Well, Stephen, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate
your time and also for bearing with me where I
gave you absolutely nothing to prepare that episode. But if
people want to find you, they want to find your work,
what's the best way for them to do so early?
The easiest thing is on Twitter. I'm active on Twitter.
Speaker 8: My handle is at Steven piment That's s T E
P h E n p I M E n T.
That's actually not my last name. My last name is Pimentel,
but I shortened it for the handle, and from there
you can see various stuff I've written. I've you know,
I've written for a bunch of different publications. I usually
post about it and uh yeah, people should be happy,
feel free to reach out to me DM whatever.
Speaker 3: Well, and I should say what actually intended to talk
about completely different? I was you read a really interesting
article about bronze age Global is a and now that
sounds interesting. Check that out. I'll be sure to link
to it and you can read that and wonder why
didn't you talk about this? This is really interesting. Guess
what to quote the great bill? O'Reilly? We'll do it
live anyway. Man, it was a ton of fun to
have you. As far as my stuff, the Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
this is what I do and if you want to
support me, you can throw me a few bucks on Patreon,
Substack or gum Road. Managed to get it out without
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the episodes early in ad free. Check out our sponsor
Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching for something more direct. Again, Steven,
I appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Man, great to be with you.
Speaker 3: Ne everyone in home, keep your head up well, I
can't last forever.
Speaker 6: Good night.
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