Here's the column: "What happens if the progressive vanguard talks mostly to itself?" (WaPo, Megan McArdle).
McArdle is reacting to the Ezra Klein piece about the progressive election analyst David Shor that we talked about back here. She writes:
Shor thinks the left has a major problem with its youthful and well-educated activist base, which staffs left-leaning newsrooms and runs campaigns. They focus, naturally, on issues that excite them, and Shor told Klein “the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”...
As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, “A closed circle of young, college educated staffers is likely to end up further off-center the more they talk to themselves.”...
Democrats cannot afford to cater only to that hyper-educated class — not in a country where only a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree.
I don't even know if I'd call people who've gone to college educated. Especially these days. But hyper-educated? What the hell is that? Is it like hyperventilating — it goes to your head, makes you dizzy?
Hey, I looked it up in the OED. Not only is the prefix "hyper-" defined — it means beyond/over — but there's a separate entry for "hypereducated" and the one historical quote is from James Joyce, from "Dubliners" (1914):
Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night. It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his speech. An idea came into his mind and gave him courage. He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack.”
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94 comments:
What happens if the progressive vanguard talks mostly to itself?
When have they ever not...?
I don't even know if I'd call people who've gone to college educated. Especially these days.
Depends on whether they drank the Kool-Aid colleges pour down their throats, or whether they faked swallowing it so they could get back to their classes in STEM subjects.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Will anyone bring back the conventional critiques of the university culture?
"Fragile hot-house flowers who are unable to withstand even mild life challenges."
"Those who can't DO, teach."
One of Henry Kissinger's most famous quotes is:
“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/609695-the-reason-that-university-politics-is-so-vicious-is-because
This sounds more like hyper indoctrinated.
I think in this case, "educated" is obviously used as a pejorative. It's like the way "military intelligence" is used as a punch line.
They need to reach out more to the hyper-uneducated but it's difficult to bridge that gap when you exist mostly in a hyper-brainwashed echo chamber. Maybe they can middle it with an effort toward the hyper-vocational educated. If this succeeds, triangulate from there.
I spend time now and then worrying about the future our grandkids will be inheriting and wonder what we (the boomers) could have done differently. But when you look at the Progressive support base, I don't think it's us -- it's the 20 and 30 year old "hyper-educated" people who are driving and supporting the current misadministration. They are going to get the future that's being fashioned now -- and I do hope they enjoy it. Our grandkids are more/less caught in the flowing river.
Maybe she is using the term "hyper-educated" to suggest that these folks are filling their heads with information. And maybe she means it to be pejorative, since their information ends up coming from sources that repeat the same information among themselves. It's true with conservative sources, too, but if all you do is read the Times and listen to NPR, you're in the same boat as the guy who watches Fox all day.
I've been yammering for years about the fact that, as McCardle points out, only a third of the country has a college degree. Always comes as news to my fellow Dems, and they express skepticism, but that percentage has held for years. If the only people you talk to are college educated and white collar, that's the world you know, and no other world is valid to you.
After berating myself for being quiet among my liberal friends on certain topics, I decided I needed to try harder to find a way to speak up without greatly antagonizing them, knowing how some would react. My goal was to influence, not create more distance. After a couple of interactions, I’ve alienated one person, but have succeeded in my goal in helping them at least see another reasonable perspective. A couple even said the conversations were the best we’ve had in a while. They didn’t change their minds, of course, but they know I’m not evil…:). So my point is even the diehard liberals in my case proved to be more amenable to discussion than I thought, and I think - just a guess - that they want to talk about these things more deeply than simply repeating talking points to each other. Our ecosystem right now doesn’t encourage that at all - just the opposite.
I think the term "under-educated" would be more accurate.
I knew much more (& was much more sure of what I knew) when I received my bachelors degree than I do now, thirty years on.
A classic but timely pejorative. I encourage everyone to use it in context today…
They only think they are hyper-educated. In truth, they are the know-nothings.
Ah, but I was so much older then: I'm younger than that now.
Ah, but I was so much older then: I'm younger than that now.
It’s a humble brag about how they’ve all attended fancy colleges, not podunk state or Christian colleges.
Hyper educated means more ignorant and stupid.
Colleges are not making people smarter. Quite the opposite. These "Hyper" educated dumbshits know so much they can't actually learn or adapt.
Joe Biden is the smartest person supporting the regime.
Joe Biden is the smartest person who thinks he is a better president than Donald Trump.
The rest of you are just fucking stupid people.
only a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree.
Serious Question... What portion of the population SHOULD have a bachelor's degree?
20%?
10%?
1%?
Even MORE Serious Question... What portion of the population
a) has Gone to University ? (i am NOT talking about vocational college)
b) did NOT receive "even" a bachelor's degree?
c) has school loans that "society" TOLD Them to get
WHY? WHY are we encouraging people to take out school loans and then drop out of school that they'd NEVER be able to graduated from?
We are shackling are youth with unforgivable debt... Just to provide jobs for White professor types
"Hyper-educated" strikes me as a term with two overlapping but distinct meanings. First, the political class who make up these staffs and appointed bureaucracy are increasingly weighed down by formal credentials such as MBAs, Ph.D.s, J.D.s, various professional certifications, etc. Second, they often obsess over the details of esoteric debates that most normal people have no interest in. It's not enough to support abortion rights, they have to be able to repeat theories about how abortion is critical to decolonialism of black and brown spaces in the post-WWII American west and how this relates to the political struggles of indigenous laborers in central America as evidenced by the writings of some obscure African poet... blah blah blah.
BTW, does anyone else hear "hyper-educated" and think of the scene from Spaceballs?
"No, hyper-education is too slow. Prepare to jump to LUDICROUS EDUCATION!"
...
"The American Left... they've gone plaid!"
Ann asked, "But hyper-educated? What the hell is that?"
Mark Twain wrote, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
Socrates said, “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing”.
The hyper-educated know everything. That's what makes them special.
Trump was prescient.
"We won highly educated. We won with the poorly educated... I love the poorly educated!"
I call them EBSS
Educated but still stupid.
It isn't just the level of education that separates this group from everyone else. They are primarily white and from affluent backgrounds, raised to think that they are the ones with the answers, the ones who are destined to lead and remake the world. It's a bit like England before World War I, when members of the aristocracy believed they were born to rule. And everyone else meant to serve and should do so gladly.
Unfortunately our smug, self-important wokesters are nowhere near as fun to observe in action as the Crawley family on Downton Abbey.
My son and I were talking about this the other day. The problem with the so-called elites in the media podcasting and blog world is that very very few of them have technical degrees. Nobody is really educated if they avoid taking physics chemistry differential equations etc. The reason being is that unless you are tested against the standards of the universe rather than the vagaries of ridiculous human behavior you really don't know how the world works at a fundamental level and if so facto therefore you are an idiot tool we just thinks you're smart but fails to recognize shit from shinola.
This also holds true to non college educated people. Those that work in the trades are tested daily against the laws of nature whereas clerks and paper pushers exist in the dream world of idiot humans with their arbitrary and capricious structures that make no logical sense.
The post gives us the tools to make sense of Ms. McArdle’s locution. “Hyper” can mean “over” (or “excessively”), and that is how it is usually interpreted, but it can also mean “beyond.” “Over”-educated can make sense as a comparative expression (to describe a cabdriver with a PhD, for example), and McArdle might mean that education likewise offers little advantage in the practice of political activism and is therefore wasted on such activists (an interesting claim). But I think a better interpretation involves “beyond.” Today’s university experience is about indoctrination as much as education (my own experience was in the 70s but by all accounts it has only gotten worse since then). The members of the “activist base” under discussion are “hypereducated” in that they are “beyond educated” — they are brainwashed.
There are none so ignorant as the hyper-educated.
There is "educated". Then there is "credentialed". They are different things, and neither is necessarily wise.
I've noticed an obnoxious trend of people describing themselves as "educated." This tends to be more prevalent as they stack up useless degrees. It amuses me because it seems to be an intentional subversion of terms like "smart" or "intelligent" or "successful," as obtaining a certificate is note remotely the same thing. Just about anyone can get a student loan and complete a degree program, so having a degree doesn't really tell you anything about them as a person. When I see someone emphasizing their education instead of their intelligence or success, I feel like they are deliberately undercutting their own achievements.
"Shor thinks the left has a major problem with its youthful and well-educated activist base"
Hyper-educated, well-educated: let's just say anointed.
But the left has always Known Better. Which never meant actually knowing anything.
The whole point of “listen to the science” and “trust the experts” is so the credentialed don’t have to consider the other 2/3 of the country at all.
I think the term hyper-educated only applies to certain disciplines. For example, one majors in gender studies as an undergrad, that person is educated. The degree is useless and they probably are not truly educated at all but they have a degree. Perhaps this person has wealthy parents or a high tolerance for debt so they continue on in their filed and get a masters or doctorate in gender studies. They have learned nothing new buy have additional degrees, this person is now hyper-educated. The same would not apply to a student who pursues degrees in business, economics, science or math, they continue to be educated more as they proceed through the higher degrees.
Hypereducated, as used herein, means those who have received so much education as to how evil America is that they now believe America should be destroyed.
Great quote from Joyce. Never more apt than today.
When the progs feel they can drag the mob along with them, all hell usually breaks loose.
the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack.
The public-television drama series Downton Abbey portrayed that "generation which is on the wane". That generation's qualities characterized the Crawley family.
The series begins in 1914, the same year when The Dubliners was published.
One of the Crawley daughters elopes to Ireland with an Irish man who reads a lot (is "hypereducated") and is politically radical. After she gives birth, her family returns to Downton Abbey, where she soon dies. Because of the child, the Irish widower stays with the Crawley family.
One of the interesting aspects of the series is that this Irish radical, who initially had despised the Crawley family, eventually comes to appreciate the family's qualities.
That Joyce quote seems prescient. Or, more likely, history is repeating itself.
" the more they talk to themselves.”
The Rolling Blunder Presidency. Afghanistan. The border. Inflation. CRT and arresting parents. The vaccine "mandate" and flight cancellations.
McArdle and Yglesias clearly mean by "educated" that a person has graduated from a top-tier (like top 100 in the US News rankings) college. Whether such people are educated in some other or deeper sense of the word is not relevant to the point at hand, that the goals and beliefs of that class are at odds with those of the average American voter.
You might consider such people "hyper" educated in the sense that their level of education exceeds their level of experience with working at jobs, raising families, maintaining homes, and the other similar things that occupy most people's time.
Hyper-educated might refer to the type of education instead of the amount.
Hey, I looked it up in the OED. Not only is the prefix "hyper-" defined — it means beyond/over...
Guess that's why the late Frank Zappa called such people "overeducated shitheads".
Here are Hammond's thoughts about
..Megan McArdle's reaction in the Washington Post to
....Ezra Klein's piece in the New York Times about
......an article by five contributors in Politico discussing
........partisan poll hacker David Shor:
Pass. Looks like political pimpery all the way down.
Althouse seems to be disagreeing with McCardle. But it seems to me the two are using pretty much the same connotation of hypereducated: people whose fancy education has gone to their heads and made them dizzy.
""Hyper-educated?! Who's hyper-educated?""
-----------
/educated/ people who can act /hyper/ because : 'reasons'
Thanks so much for passing along that quote, Ann. And hooray for the OED!
These discoveries that nothing is really new are both disquieting and oddly comforting. They make me want to re-read the Stoics. "All things are either cause for laughing or weeping" indeed.
“Hey, I looked it up in the OED. Not only is the prefix "hyper-" defined — it means beyond/over” I’m a high school dropout with a GED diploma, so I lookup up the antonyms to hyper online in Merriam-Webster and got:
•
• imperturbable,
• nerveless,
• unexcitable,
• unflappable,
• unshakable
None of which seem particularly to apply to my educational status, although I suppose in one sense “nerveless” could be fairly applied to my conduct in high school. But it’s odd that James has a representative of the hypereducated, not the uneducated, as the one who feels unnerved.
I have a B.A., two Master's degrees, and a Ph.D. I guess that makes me hyper-educated. I don't want to think about how much money I've sunk into all those letters I can put after my name!
The usual phrase is "Over-educated". Or as someone said: "Its so stupid, only an intellectual would believe it".
BTW, sitting in a classroom listening to Marxist theory or Critical Race theory isn't "education" its "Miseducation". Maybe Twitter/Facebook can help out.
"I don't even know if I'd call people who've gone to college educated."
Thank you for stating the obvious. And a great find in the quote pulled from "Dubliners".
Life gives you an education. Being alive, being around others, learning a trade, dealing with life struggles, meeting more people at age 40 than you did at age 26- these things and others give you an education. Going to college these days? When I left college in the 70s I was as stupid as I could be, but I thought I was brilliant. Today's students are far more indoctrinated, less likely to be able to critically think through most topics, less likely to engage in a proper debate of ideas, and surely seem less anchored to reality.
Collecting degrees does no more for knowledge than going to a batting cage makes you ready to face major league pitching. Life. Making mistakes. Practice. More life. More mistakes. More practice. After awhile you gain enough knowledge to reognize that you know nothing. At that point you've started to become educated.
Ezra Klein has not learned a thing so far in his life.
"Overcredentialed" might be closer to the mark, or as somebody called them "people with more than one college degree." I think there was an attempt to make some acronym out of that. But a lot of those young activists have only one degree. Often it's from one of the once prestigious colleges or universities. Today, that's likely to mean that they aren't necessarily educated but are privileged, either because of their parents' wealth and position, or because the college chose to bestow its privileges on them.
It seems like wherever you go in the political establishment you will find a Rhodes Scholar. I guess that corresponds to Cecil Rhodes' vision. He was a man of action who wanted to tie the ruling classes of the English-speaking country together. Lately, the Rhodes committees are choosing activists and social justice warriors. Once upon a time a poet or a classical scholar might slip in, but those days are gone.
I think her use of "hyper-educated" is tied to the idea that it's too small of a set of voters to win elections, but she really just means people who have an elite education, such that they become political staffers, in a bubble, imagining that they can use their own values to appeal to the general public. I think she means this in both a flattering and a negative way. They may, in their eliteness, have the best ideas, but they need to be realistic about how to win elections (which is Shor's point).
So they are "hyper-educated" in the sense of highly educated in the very best schools. Beyond the staffers, there are the college-educated people who might be in a position to understand what these elite staffers are idealistic about.
I'm mostly making a cynical remark about the state of education. I don't believe the colleges — highly elite or average — are putting people in a decent position to understand the problems of our time and to design good solutions. McArdle is mainly concerned about how to win the votes of all these people who are not even college educated and how Democratic politicians need to adjust their appeal to be practical.
Dubliners is the best, best short story book of all time.
Ellen Gilchrist is underrated and great fun. Alice Munro has that thing down. V.S. Pritchett, amazing. I won’t bore on with my Sixties guys or a bunch of Russian dudes. Breece D’J Pancake wrote one book of extraordinary stories and blew his head off with a shotgun. But, Dubliners. It’s like having spun gold in your hands. It’s the one book I won’t re-read because I want to remember the awe of reading it the first time.
Everything was downhill from there for Joyce. And he definitely knew it. He lost his faith and ended up with Finnegan’s Wake. Sort of a sad metaphor for all of Western Civilization.
They may, in their eliteness, have the best ideas
Or they may have no idea how the actual world works.
See: Biden, Joe; Harris, Kamala; Blinken, Anthony; Kerry, John; Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandra; Sanders, Bernie; et al.
“Hyper” means “over,” not “super.” You can hyperextend your knee by pushing it just a little beyond a normal standing position.
For being 'Hyper educated,' lefties can be awfully damed dumb most of the time.
I know too many people like this in my life. Advanced degrees in complex subjects, but they have no problem with open borders, for instance.
I don't even try any more...
One thing I've noticed among my college educated friends--and we're boomers, not the young SJWs that are driving some of these conversations--is the assumption that we're among this group of elite, hyper-educated. Some of my friends went to small private schools, lots to public universities. I'm sure they read what McArdle is saying and think they're part of the elect. They're not.
For that reason, I think McArdle cast the net wide to refer to the NYT, New Yorker, NPR folks who read and hear what those sources say and nod, believing they're not part of the great unwashed--that they are, in fact, the hyper-educated.
That group is the 34 percent of the population that has degrees and thinks it knows what is best for all of us. In truth, the number of people who actually control the conversation is a small slice of that 34 percent, and their job seems to be to tell the rest of the group what to think and do.
I call them EBSS
Educated but still stupid.
Not bad, but I still prefer Nassim Taleb’s IYI: intellectual yet idiot
Our elite post-secondary schools are IYI factories.
I would prefer the term "mis-educated." They literally know nothing that is practical. We see the result in the idiots running Biden. None knows anything about running a large organization, let alone a country.
Secretary Buttplug is off on maternity leave, which is a good spot for him. Meanwhile, the country is in a traffic jam.
First off, "hyper-schooled" not educated. Education is not knowing a myriad of information, nor it is having passed a lot of tests.
" Usage: Education, properly a drawing forth, implies not so much the communication of knowledge as the discipline of the intellect, the establishment of the principles, and the regulation of the heart. Instruction is that part of education which furnishes the mind with knowledge." [1913 Webster]
In the past, college was where a person could become exposed to complex ideas, have access to books and even have professors exhibiting an educated mind, especially if they had not grown up with books and been inculcated with a habit of reading. But these days, better minds can be found on the internet, and a multitude of differing perspectives on complex topics can be explored in minutes when the "learner" wants, not on some facility use/professors schedule. Sadly, an increasing amount of college denigrates "the best that was ever thought or said" instead of using it as the medium to develop the students' discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions and establishing principles. If a student becomes educated, long after the professors are done with them, and as Carlyle said, depends on what they read after their schooling. In the past, students might have the seed to become educated after college. These days, not so much
So, hyper-schooled, not hyper-educated. And this "educated strata" has a long an storied history of being gullible and easily manipulated.
"The fading of the critical sense is a serious menace to the preservation of our civilization. It makes it easy for quacks to fool the people. It is remarkable that the educated strata are more gullible than the less educated. The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The intellectuals were never keen enough to see the manifest contradictions of their creeds. It did not in the least impair the popularity of Fascism that Mussolini in the same speech praised the Italians as the representatives of the oldest Western civilization and as the youngest among the civilized nations. No German nationalist minded it when dark-haired Hitler, corpulent Goering, and lame Goebbels were praised as the shining representatives of the tall, slim, fair-haired, heroic Aryan master race. Is it not amazing that many millions of non-Russians are firmly convinced that the Soviet regime is democratic, even more democratic than America?"
--von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
And, of course, C.S. Lewis revealed it eloquently:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Credentialed ≠ educated.
More and more, the credentialed class is making an inadvertent argument against the kind of education that instilled so much mush into their brains.
I studied engineering at a state university. The curriculum required students to take one humanities class each semester, with the remaining classes STEM related. That approach gave a good grounding in critical thinking and problem solving, but it also broadened minds toward the world beyond engineering. I feel fortunate now to have had that kind of education.
I think the hypereducated took courses in anthropology, sociology and psychology rather than history, literature and philosophy or STEM or medicine or law. The social sciences usually present a critique of a society, an institution or a personality-type - always a critique but based on ever-changing principles. You have to be quick using your knowledge of the social sciences or you'll be outdated. You don't get any solid principles or a knowledge of any enduring literature or any math except statistics. You go on like that to a PhD. Then, as everyone here is saying, you get a job on staff in politics or an NGO. Still no contact with solid principles or reality - just sharing with others your age the latest in critique which must become policy before you all become outdated. Then you are hyper-educated. And when people don't like your ideas and resist, you become frightened because you have social-sciences-theories-shelf-life-clock ticking in the back of your head like the biological clock that ticks for women. It's now or never for you. So, trample on the people.
Hyper-educated…hyper-active. It’s a neurological problem that we can fix with medication. Or, maybe, they’ll just grow out of it.
This group of young graduates are “educated” beyond their intellectual capacity. They do not know how to think logically or rationally because of all the propaganda they’ve been taught that has warped their underdeveloped brain. So, we have a bunch of young people who know more than most middle-aged adults even though their life experience is limited to the college campus or their utopian social group. They only talk to each other and will not have a discussion with someone who disagrees with them because they are superior (in their own childish minds).
"Effete snobs" goes back to the sixties, and is more on the nose, and while we are at it, why not throw in "nabobs of negativism." He should have come right out and said "effete," but he didn't want to offend the people he was trying to reach.
Perhaps hyper-educated means they stayed in school too long and could never make the transition to the "real world". By real world, I mean the place actual value is produced and provided to others.
I remember being briefly caught in that trap in my early 20s, thinking my bullshit low level academic (social sciences grant) job was worthwhile, even though it produced a neglible income. Necessity got me out of there, thank goodness.
I have in mind some 30-or-so's I know who work for very worthy non-profits. Thinking back to compare myself to my wife, who spent years similarly situated but in medical research, I wonder if these guys equate themselves with their undergrad classmates who know do useful research in the sciences. (I know, I know, not all scientific research is created equal.)
"A couple even said the conversations were the best we’ve had in a while. They didn’t change their minds, of course, but they know I’m not evil…:)."
I don't want to piss in your punchbowl, Breezy, but I think you are likely misjudging their reactions- behind your back they are probably saying amongst themselves that they need to placate you because you are a loon.
I would argue that they are neither well nor educated. They are credentialed, which in today's era means little or nothing.
Daskol has beaten me to it, but here is the source for "Intellectual Yet Idiot".
"Brainwashed" is a better word for it.
Just yesterday, I listened to The Federalist Radio Hour's interview, "Former Facebook Engineer Ian Haworth On Censorship And The Future Of Big Tech". Haworth writes for the Daily Wire now, but was a programmer at Facebook for 4 years. His insights are quite good.
To the point of this post though, he commented on the middle ranks at the social media companies, those like the Facebook "whistleblower" come out of college believing they know what will make the world a better place. Of course, that is youth, but those in social media bureaucracies have been GIVEN jobs that let them impose on others. Given, in that these "hyper-educated" don't earn their power, but are anointed by HR. And to me, it seems the social media companies have very poor management controls, i.e., enforcing those policies that keep employees from usurping management's control of the company's direction.
Example: The Facebook "whistleblower" apparently only worked for Facebook for two years, yet KNOWS just how Facebook should be run. Knows, much better than those in the C-suite or who have a decade or more at the company.
cr (11:42)
In those humanities courses, did they teach you that Shakespeare was gay and a running dog of capitalism or did they try to expose you to at least some of the best that has ever been thought or the said? The latter was common until around 1970, then declined to be almost non-existent in the humanities since the mid-1990s. To wit, look at how little notice the humanities departments in the US made of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015. It would have been a great recruitment event for Western Civ courses, but crickets.
"But hyper-educated? What the hell is that?"
Upthread, Althouse gives a persuasive critique on McArdle's meaning and message. Sounds right to me.
The term 'hyper-educated' reminded me of the song from South Pacific, "You've got to be taught, To hate and fear, You've got to be taught, From year to Year, It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully taught." The cadres of Dem staffers the article is stereotyping were clearly all carefully taught, and for sure it's been drummed into their little ears what they're supposed to hate and fear.
But it does make it hard to win elections.
I'd agree that Joyce's Dubliners is his best book. Ulysses has writing as good, but its mashed up with hundreds of pages that aren't.
Hyper-educated = mal-educated.
Glenn Reynolds puts it this way, and I think he's on the button. It's that these folks are "credentialed", not actually educated at all.
To be fair to McArdle, I'm not sure she means hyper-educated as a compliment.
"hyper-educated political science major".
I laugh in Engineer.
My brother is a PhD professor and an actual rocket scientist. He likes to say "When I got my BS I thought I knew everything. When I got my Masters, I realized there's a lot I don't know. When I got my PhD, I realized nobody knows anything." Unfortunately his attitude seems rather rare amongst the hyper-educated. Or maybe it's the ones who think they know everything that make the most noise.
I live in Atlanta, which is heavily Democratic. (I'm talking about the city itself, not the 'burbs.) If you think the low-fo voters of Atlanta are "hyper-educated"--or even just "educated"--you must think Joe Biden is a scholar and an intellectual.
"Hyper-educated?! Who's hyper-educated?"
It's not a characteristic of an individual, it's a characteristic of the group.
When 99% of the members of the group have a college degree then they're "hyper-educated". Which is to say: they're lacking any input from the significant chunk of Americans who do not have pieces of paper from some college.
"Hyper indoctrinated" would be more true, but less political correct.
Look -- the people who ate of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge did NOT become smarter or wiser or more knowledgeable. Just the opposite in fact.
Very often stupidity and ignorance are learned.
R C Belaire said...
I spend time now and then worrying about the future our grandkids will be inheriting and wonder what we (the boomers) could have done differently.
It's not the boomers who screwed this up, it's the "greatest generation". Which is to say, it's the people who put a "college deferment" into the draft, in order to protect their kids from being drafted.
Without the college deferment, far fewer people would have wasted their time in college, and the anti-war protests wouldn't have been nearly so fierce: either you get drafted at 18, or you don't and it's done. Which means 17 year olds care, and parents care, but no one else does.
Without the mass college entry, society wouldn't have redirected things so that "you had to get a college degree to succeed in life."
But when you look at the Progressive support base, I don't think it's us -- it's the 20 and 30 year old "hyper-educated" people who are driving and supporting the current misadministration.
That's true. But it's your generation, and mine, the provided the "teachers" who warpped that generation
If you think the low-fo voters of Atlanta are "hyper-educated"
No, they aren't.
Which is the point of Shor's analysis: those people do not agree with the "hyper-educated" crowd. And if the left keeps on pushing the HE way, those voters are going to abandon the Dems. They probably will just not vote. but that's enough for the Dems to lose, unless they can fraudulently "absentee vote" them.
It is stuff like this that makes me think that the strongest animating force of the Left these days is compensating for various inferiority complexes.
When I got my PhD, I realized nobody knows anything." Unfortunately his attitude seems rather rare amongst the hyper-educated.
IMO, The main advantage to reaching that academic level (aside from career) is that you start to grasp just how much is not understood by you and most others in your chosen field. That is painfully obvious to me now that I am retired and not trying to chase a buck.
they continue on in their filed and get a masters or doctorate in gender studies. They have learned nothing new buy have additional degrees, this person is now hyper-educated. The same would not apply to a student who pursues degrees in business, economics, science or math, they continue to be educated more as they proceed through the higher degrees.
As a PhD in Economics, I can testify that this is not really true in my field. In grad school I learned a bunch of mathematical and statistical techniques, but not much of anything about how the economy actually works. Most of what I know about that I learned as an undergrad or even earlier by reading Milton Friedman on my own in high school.
As a first-year graduate student I was a TA (teaching assistant) for one of those huge survey classes wherein the professor lectures hundreds of students a couple of time a week. The big class was split into sections of about 40 students taught by a TA once a week. So there I was, with no experience of training at all, teaching 40 students Introductory Microeconomics.
It turned out that I was actually pretty good at it and I had a lot of fun. Of course I had to spend a lot of time preparing for class and trying to anticipate what the students would have trouble with. Fortunately, that gets easier with experience. But nothing I was taught in graduate school helped me then or since with teaching at the undergrad level.
I didn't go into teaching: my working career was spent at the Federal Reserve. The most useful skills in that world were not part of the Econ PhD curriculum either. Things like programming, statistics, and problem-solving. It seems to me that graduate education in Economics, at least, is largely useless. I suspect the same is true of most other fields, with exceptions like medical school, law school, and some STEM fields.
I would venture to guess that people here learned more AFTER they graduated than when they were in university.
I like history so much I got a job as a librarian to support my habit.
Actually, I realized early on that the teaching life is not for me, and got my masters degrees in history and library science (their term, not mine, so save your breath) slowly, as a fringe benefit of working in the (state) university library. Nights and weekends, for many years.
I did some history adjuncting, and regularly taught and lectured on a variety of history and library-related topics.
I'll be the first to say that teaching history takes chutzpah--or at least it would if the students didn't start from a state of abject ignorance 99.9% of the time. And too many professors know all there is to know about very narrow slices of the past, and have not much in the way of general or mundane knowledge.
History and libraries are good fields for generalists, to generalize. I was lucky to get a very well-suited gig.
I have friends with advanced degrees who probably haven't read a serious book in decades.
I have friends with advanced degrees who probably haven't read a serious book in decades.
I quit the econ track because of what Jeff said…
Jeff said...As a PhD in Economics, I can testify that this is not really true in my field.
Economics is more art than science, and as with the rest of the arts, practitioners are rewarded for pushing the envelope. Being bad at what a layman might think of as a core competency—like drawing well or understanding supply and demand—is not an obstacle to a successful career.
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