A Plague of 'Credentialed' Experts

Someday 2020 will be behind us, and we’ll tell our kids and grandkids about the year we were smitten by the plague.

By which I don’t mean COVID-19, which is at best a nasty disease with death tolls the equivalent of a bad flu year – if we accept the numbers we’re being fed by an establishment desperate to cash in on the cash bonus for each COVID-19 diagnosis – but the plague that has laid this country low, destroyed our economy and brought us to a place that no external enemy could have brought: this plague of experts. Or perhaps I should say “experts” since most of them have behind them only a long string of failed prognostications, followed by promotion within the “civil servant” echelons.

Yes, I am talking about Doctors Birx and Fauci. I’m already seeing people pointing fingers at the president and complaining that he’s relied too much on these “experts.”

In fact, some months ago I saw people complaining in the comments at one of the conservative sites that the president hires “establishment” people which he then has to fire. Why can’t he hire the people who will be good and not beholden to the – largely left – political establishment?

Which brings us to the real plague of experts.

Sure, what happened in 2020 and taking our economy down to protect us from what will emerge in retrospect as a not particularly lethal illness is a problem.

If we survive – we’ll survive, right – and there is still a Republic at the end of this, we'll need to talk about the plague of experts as a systemic problem.

You see, just like COVID-19 is a virus similar to those that cause the common cold, this overreaction to COVID-19 bears a strong resemblance to “expert-directed” faux pas in everything from aviation to business to healthcare to, yes, politics.

In the early 21st century – largely because of a hyper-litigious society, in which everyone and anyone might sue you for discrimination – we’re faced with the inability to judge merit or competency.

Because you cannot simply test someone and see if they can do the job – if you do that, and you happen to hire more men than women, or you fail to hire the population-representing numbers of some minority – you have to rely on what we’ll call, for lack of a better term, “credential factories.”

The problem is that the credential factories are not very good because they also can’t test anyone, but must rely on externally quantifiable proofs of merit.

It used to be that a high school diploma was worth something, but more and more all it means is that you’ve spent 12 years warming various desks and have failed to do something so heinous as to get expelled.

So, we moved on to a college degree as a credential, which is why you find ads for the most ridiculous things requiring a bachelor’s degree.

As someone who has taught bonehead English 101 to college freshmen, let me disabuse you of the impression that the majority of them enter college capable of writing a simple sentence or expressing the most straightforward of meanings.

But it gets worse. Because instructors are evaluated by their students, you can’t – unless you have tenure – fail everyone that needs failing. So you pass them on ahead, to be someone else’s problem.

Modeling COVID-19 and the Lies of Multiculturalism
Which means – I suspect – that these days there’s little hope that someone with a bachelor’s degree in anything will be able to express himself in writing in a way that would have satisfied an early 20th-century elementary school teacher.

If the problem were only with our education, it would be bad enough, though the U.S. still has – thank heavens – the ability for citizens to educate themselves if they so choose. There are enough courses online, and various courses of study from serious to frivolous, where you can learn what the schools failed to teach you.

But unfortunately, this problem, of substituting the credential for the competence, is everywhere.

In medicine, for instance, doctors are told to practice “evidence-based medicine.” Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Except that it’s not really “evidence-based.” It is “studies based,” i.e. your clinical practice has to conform with whatever the latest studies dictate. The problem is that most of these “studies” are weak and done to a predestined result, and are, frankly, irreproducible.

However, once they are published they are considered “evidence” which must be followed in treating illness. This is, just in case you wondered, why for so long we were told we should be eating all carbs all the time and that this is what would make us slim.

Unfortunately, this applies to practically everything.

This ridiculous nonsense is why we have people banning straws, when most of the plastic waste in the world comes from China. Or why we have a generation of kids shaking in their boots because they’ve been told (and shown pretty models “proving”) that in twelve years the Earth will burn up.

And it is why Trump can’t find anyone to hire with the right credentials – and you know if they don’t have the right credentials he’ll be crucified for it – who isn’t corrupted by a system in which you collect tokens by being a good little boy or girl and parroting back/behaving in the right way. Which, in point of fact, in most establishments, from scientific to political, means the left way.

Sure, there is still merit out there, but considering how hard the establishment punishes non-conformity, Trump would have to search for people with some very strange credentials indeed.

I would like to say that we’ve been inoculated to this nonsense after this most ridiculous shutting down of the economy on the word of experts who were probably themselves not badly intentioned so much as trying to look at the work of other credentialed experts, like those at the Imperial College of London, say.

But we probably haven’t.

Just like a virus takes over a healthy cell, eviscerates it, and turns into a factory to create more viruses, so the plague of experts has taken over all our systems of science, education and even the arts, and turned them into factories to turn out more phony “experts.”

We have a disease, and unless we let in sunlight to illuminate the problem, Western civilization will die of it.

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Wendy’s is running out of burgers, but deregulating the meat industry can end the shortages

First, we ran out of toilet paper, and now, we're running out of... hamburgers?

As the coronavirus crisis and ensuing societal lockdown hit roughly the two-month mark, we’re starting to have serious problems with the meat supply chain due to meatpacking plant shutdowns and preexisting regulatory dysfunction. Now, the New York Times reports that hundreds of Wendy’s fast-food restaurants are no longer offering burgers and that many grocery stores are starting to ration the quantity of meat purchases permitted per customer.

Meanwhile, Rep. Thomas Massie’s bill, the PRIME Act, would fix this situation by getting government red tape out of the way. It continues to attract co-sponsors and must be passed immediately.

Otherwise, things are only likely to get worse.

President Trump has attempted to address this crisis by classifying meatpacking plants as “essential” and pushing to keep them open, but this approach fails to acknowledge that the industry was seriously broken before the coronavirus hit. A dysfunctional labyrinth of regulations had already essentially subjected the meat supply chain to the whims of big government at tremendous cost and inefficiency.

Hannah Cox summarized the situation, writing for the Washington Examiner:

In 1967, the federal government blocked states from making their own decisions on how meat was processed and promptly handed the power to the Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

What followed was essentially a takeover of control of the industry. Farmers had to travel long distances and sell their livestock to a small number of USDA slaughterhouses instead of to local butchers, small processors, or directly to consumers. This relationship began to severely impact their profit margins as the government was able to force farmers to sell their product for pennies on the dollar. When you limit the number of places the producers can sell, you control the prices.

Even before the current crisis, this was a powder keg of cronyism waiting to blow.

Here’s where Massie’s PRIME Act comes in. The bipartisan bill rolls back the regulations that force farmers to jump through the federal government's hoops and, subject to their states' rules, would allow them to deal with consumers and businesses, such as Wendy's, directly.

This simple fix could resolve the problem plaguing the meat supply chain. Until it gets passed, well, I hope you like veggie burgers and tofu.

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There’s A Problem With This Talk Of Inequality Of Lifespans

It is a standard part of the current political conversation that lifespans are unequal in the UK. This has the merit of being true – people do indeed die at different ages, lifespans are therefore unequal. A further contention is that said lifespans are correlated with wealth, perhaps income, certainly socio-economic status. This also has the merit of being true.

However, the further claim that lifespan is determined by socio-economic status is not true – and therefore the insistence that we must equalise status in order to level lifespans is not either. For there are, as is so often true, two effects going on here. One is that yes, richer people probably do live in healthier places, eat better, exercise more, smoke less and so on. But it is also true that, through just some vicissitude of fate, a failure of health leads to a lower income. That middle aged man with the significant heart problem is going to have a lower income than if the problem did not arise. Long term sickness and an inability to work – or even just a lower likelihood of being promoted at work – will reduce income and thus that recorded socio-economic status.

That will also mean that sure, we can agree that poorer places might well be unhealthier places. But also that unhealthier people will self-select into poorer places as they’ve less cash to pay to live in those healthier ones.

We’ve those two effects. And the general conversation – Sir Michael Marmot and all that – insists that there is only the one, that it is socio-economic position that determines health and that alone.

There is a second problem here. I checked this with the Office for National Statistics yesterday:

"You asked whether our localised life expectancy figures were based on place of birth or place of death – they are based on place of death."

This poses a significant problem for the way those local lifespan statistics are used in public debate:

Let’s take Marmot’s contention that life expectancy in the poorest ward of Kensington and Chelsea is 22 years lower than in the richest. As with the Marmot Review into inequality, this fundamentally misunderstands the way life expectancy is measured.

Imagine a world in which Boris Johnson had succumbed to coronavirus – would that have registered as a change in life expectancy in London or New York? It would be recorded as one in London, the place of residence at time of death, not the place of birth. For the numbers used to calculate lifespans across geography are years lived allied with place of death – not the place of birth.

At the national level this is fair enough, even if not totally accurate. Some 15% of the current countrywide population is foreign born, so measuring lifespan by age and place of death is only ever going to be some 85% accurate. When the attempt is made to narrow this down to council ward level it’s not going to be accurate in the slightest. The assumption being made is that some useful portion die in that same little geographic area containing 5,000 or so people that we were born into. This is simply not supportable.

Thus the linkage between place of birth and lifespan might well be there, logically it probably is, but it’s not something that shows up explicitly in the data. This also means that any claims about Sure Start and lifespan, early years education, even nutrition or income levels in childhood aren’t going to be well supported either. The data is collected in a manner that doesn’t allow the extraction of that information.

We do not know how socio-economic position in childhood influences lifespan. On the very simple grounds that we don;t collect the data that would allow us to extract that information. Whatever Marmot or anyone else says, we do not and cannot know.

Probably best not to base public policy on such ignorance eh?

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Prohibiting Religious Services Makes the First Amendment a Coronavirus Victim

A Massachusetts pastor, Kristopher Casey, will be punished with a $300 civil fine for convening more than 10 people at his Sunday church service. If he does it again, the fine will increase to $500, and he could face criminal charges, Masslive.com reports.

And where has the press been in the face of what seems, on its face, to be an egregious violation of the First Amendment's protections of peaceable assembly and the free exercise of religion? The newspapers have been basically cheering it on.

"The constitutional guarantee of civil liberties is not absolute, and its abridgment is not necessarily an act of tyranny," a Washington Post editorial advised. "In this pandemic, the reach of an individual's freedom to be foolish ends an inch away, where the next individual is entitled to protection against the peril posed by the fool's heedlessness." The Post insists that "the same rationale" that closed "concert halls, sports arenas, restaurants, and gyms," also "justifies and requires closing the doors to churches, synagogues, mosques, and other traditional venues of worship."

A New York Times editorial took a similar position: "Bans like these are legal, as long as they are neutral and applicable to everyone…. Under Supreme Court precedent, any infringement on speech or religion must be incidental to the central goal of the restriction, which in this case is clear: stopping the spread of the coronavirus."

If state, local, or federal authorities were shutting down newspaper printing plants, restricting reporters from newsgathering, or preventing the physical distribution of newspapers on pandemic-related public health grounds, the Times and the Post would almost certainly take a different, and less casual, view of the matter. They'd be in court complaining about First Amendment violations faster than you can say Floyd Abrams.

Back in September, the Times' publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, had a long article asserting that "a tour of our nation's history reminds that the role of the free press has been one of the few areas of enduring consensus," that "the First Amendment has served as the world's gold standard for free speech and the free press for two centuries. It has been one of the keys to an unprecedented flourishing of freedom and prosperity in this country and, through its example, around the world." Sulzberger insisted that "in the United States, the Constitution, the rule of law and a still-robust news media act as a constraint."

The same First Amendment and rule of law that protects the free press is the one that protects the freedom of assembly and the free exercise of religion. For that self-interested reason alone, you'd think that maybe the newspapers would be less eager about cheering on the abridgment of civil liberties.

A few brave journalists have taken a different view of it. Veteran economic columnist David Warsh is critical of what he describes as "news media that pass along orders without questions." An editorial in the New Boston Post observes disapprovingly that "all this is happening in the state where people prized their liberty enough to start the American War for Independence."

Pastor Casey of the Adams Square Baptist Church in Worcester, in his April 22 letter to Governor Baker of Massachusetts and to the mayor and police chief of Worcester, quoted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which is older even than the federal First Amendment: "It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship."

The federal Constitution does expressly provide that some rights are limited in extraordinary circumstances. The suspension clause in Article I, for example, provides that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." But there's no such language about suspending the First Amendment. And even the habeas corpus language applies only specifically to cases of "rebellion or invasion," not as a blanket "public safety" concern. Whether the novel coronavirus qualifies as an "invasion" may yet be a matter for litigation.

In the meantime, leaving aside the legal questions, as a practical and political matter it seems highly unlikely that Americans will stand idly by indefinitely while the government forbids them from gathering in their places of worship. The newspaper editorial writers may roll over for it, but Pastor Casey and his congregants, and many others like them, will not.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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