David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

michael strong

If you want to win a chess match, you have to play chess, not lecture the other players

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If changing the world were about winning debates, libertarians would have brought freedom to the masses long ago. The vast majority of libertarians I know are scary smart and can make convincing and rational arguments for their positions. The only problem is that changing the world has little to do with winning debates.

I have to confess that it’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut when someone makes what seems like a ridiculous argument. My natural instinct is to point out the flaws in an argument and to lay out the facts and logic from my point of view. I have to confess that this approach has never changed the mind of a single person I know. What’s worse, reacting in my natural way has made me look like a jerk a time or two. Or three. Well, OK. Way more than that.

Dale Carnegie famously said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” In other words, even if you’re able to logically prove a point — and get someone else to admit that your logic is correct along the way — the typical person isn’t going to change what he believes in his heart. That’s a lesson that’s hard for hard-headed libertarians to learn.

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The free market: It’s not just for greedy, rich white capitalists

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Some well-meaning people on the political left listen to arguments for the free market and respond by saying something such as, “Well, that’s fine if you’re one of the privileged middle class or higher. But for those in poverty, they’re never going to have anything unless the state helps them. Your free market is only good for the rich.”

This just isn’t so. The free market is the best known vehicle for raising the living standards of the poor. People today look at the lifestyles of poor people in the 19th century (and even 20th century) and believe those lives indict the free market. Reality is just the opposite.

Life has always been difficult. Thomas Hobbes famously referred to the natural state of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The relative wealth that came to the poor in the 19th century — because of industrialization — was a tremendous improvement over what they had experienced before. It’s a testament to just how far we’ve come since then that their lives seem so bad to us today. The fact that the “working poor” weren’t as well off as the capitalists doesn’t change the fact that the market helped the poor immensely.

Michael Strong makes a powerful case for the market when he talks about the experience of the poor in India:

“At the average rate of economic growth under socialism, India would have reached a U.S. standard of living in 2300. At the average rate of economic growth achieved since economic liberalization, India will reach a U.S. standard of living in the mid-21st century. By what standard of morality can one condemn a billion people to 250 years of unnecessary poverty?”

That’s a powerful argument. If you’re a socialist or egalitarian, you might not like it that some people are going to do better than others in a market. But condemning people to the “equality” of a non-market system ensures that the living conditions of the poor will be far worse. Is your egalitarianism worth condemning billions of people to lives of poverty for? If so, please don’t pretend that you really care about the poor.

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If you care about education — not just schooling — please read this paper right now

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For years now, I’ve struggled with finding a way to adequately explain all the things that I see wrong with how we handle education and what steps we could take to fix them. I don’t have to try anymore, because anyone who’s willing to read this paper by Michael Strong will pretty much know what I would have said if I were actually qualified to talk about it — and it’s clear that Strong is both qualified and passionate to talk about it.

This paper was published almost four years ago, but I never knew about it until the author gave me the link Monday. After suffering through dozens of mediocre articles and podcasts about education over the past decade or so, I have to say that this one is going to be my new starting point to recommend to people who are willing to read 23 pages of well-written and gripping prose. And — let’s be honest — if you don’t care enough to read just 23 pages, you don’t really care that much about education.

The thing that makes this paper so worthy of your time is that it’s not just about achieving better test scores, as many modern conservatives want. It’s not just about helping students develop as human beings, as many modern liberals want. It’s about integrating information, critical thinking skills, culture and more into something that can create better lives in the real world. And it’s this sort of properly integrated person who will take the lead in building the post-statist world I’ve been talking about. So I’ll shut up — if you’ll just go read this PDF now. It’s worth it.

Change This – The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation.

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