In Defense of Underwater Basket Weaving
There is no such thing as elite overproduction.
Amos Wollen beat me to the punch in defending Amelia Louks. I agree with Amos. Bashing English literature as stupid or unproductive is generally motivated by aggressive resentment mixed with sexual jealousy.
Many men look at an attractive woman with a PhD and resent the fact that she is out of their league:
[Uneducated] Men may imagine that, in an alternative world, these women [with PhDs] would have married them instead [of going into academia]. In actuality, it is the women of their own socioeconomic class who are their match and who are rejecting them. It would be kind of like peasants saying that without the class system they would be marrying the baron’s daughter in town because they can’t find a wife in their village. Entirely different mating pools!
When conservatives attack academia, they are insecurely asserting their superiority over academics. According to conservatives, academics are useless, pedantic, entitled, privileged, pettifogging, quibbling fools. Conservatives hate academia in the same way that Lutherans hated the Catholic church.
I want to address three conservative objections to academia:
Academia opposes conservatism;
Academia isn’t economically productive;
Academia promotes “elite overproduction.”
Academia opposes conservatism.
Every mainstream media outlet is a product of academic journalism (you have to be a journalism major to get a job). Taken together, media and academia (aca-media?) are the two most liberal sectors of society. But if conservatives were successful at defunding academia (specifically, non-STEM college majors), would this have any appreciable effect on the political landscape? First, let’s examine how things have dramatically changed in the last 12 years.
In the last 12 years, whites, overall, have shifted 1% toward Democrats. Not much of a change. But within whites, polarization emerges. Whites without college degrees have veered 13% toward Republicans, while whites with a degree have veered 17% toward Democrats. Whites with college degrees are much more likely to support reproductive freedom, trans rights, proactive pronouns, affirmative action, and other “woke” causes.
On the other hand, whites without college degrees haven’t become more right-wing since Obama. In terms of their values, they have also shifted toward the left.
In 1970, 46% of post-grads went to church; in 2010, this dropped to 27%.
In 1970, 34% of dropouts went to church; in 2010, this dropped to 23%.
The collapse in church attendance has been much more dramatic among the educated, while among the less educated, it seems to be hitting a limit around 20%.
In 2024, college educated whites made up nearly 40% of the Democratic vote. Prior to 1984, they made up less than 20% of the Democratic vote.
At every level of education, Republicans had negative views against university institutions at 3-4x Democrats. In fact, Republicans with advanced degrees were the most negative toward educational institutions. This reflects the fact that Republicans blame universities for ideologically inculcating students with liberalism.
Every partisan group has increased its college participation, although since 1990, the gap between conservatives and liberals has widened.
It is possible that, by 2030, 50% of self-identified liberals have college degrees, as opposed to only 35% of self-identified conservatives.
There are three possible explanations for these trends:
Good conservative boys and girls are going to college and being brainwashed by woke professors;
Partisanship is already well-established by age 18. Liberals are attracted to college, while conservatives avoid it;
College graduates are a selected population with higher IQs and higher conscientiousness. As Republicans embrace vaccine skepticism, election denialism, and nepotism, high SES whites flee.
In the first case, conservatives would benefit from defunding colleges. By defunding colleges, they will protect good conservative boys and girls from the dastardly effects of the wok mind virus.
In the second case, defunding college will not help conservatives, because partisanship is already determined by age 18. Conservatives who go to college maintain their conservative beliefs, while liberals who are denied the right to go to college due to defunding will remain liberal. This is because most political opinions are formed by K-12 education, social media, family influence, or peer influence prior to 18.
In the third case, defunding colleges will hurt Republicans, because smart people will become even more disgusted with Republicans for their anti-intellectualism.
A great way to test these three theories would be to ask college students at 18 and at age 22 about their political opinions.
There is some research to show that Republicans are much more likely to leave their party than Democrats between ages 18-29. As Republicans get older, they are less likely to leave the party. As Democrats get older, they are more likely to switch.
Between 2011 and 2017, over 20% of non-college white Democrats LTC left the Democratic party. For college whites, nearly 13% left the Republicans, while 7% left the Democrats, for a net swapping of +5D. Zooming in on party swapping for ages 18-29 would give a more granular view — let me know if you can find that data anywhere.
The reasons for swapping parties seemed to have to do with immigration, race, and economic views. Pro-immigration Republicans swapped to Democrats at a rate of 30%; anti-Muslim Democrats swapped to Republicans at a rate of 20%; free-market Democrats (Clinton Democrats) switched to Republicans at a rate of 30%.
“Social views” in this study did not cause mono-directional party swapping. This indicates that Republicans and Democrats have “known the score” on social issues for a long time, and the parties are already thoroughly selected on these issues. But that still doesn’t tell us very much about the effects of college.
In the absence of better data, I assume that most of the leftward drift in college educated whites over the last 50 years has more to do with K-12 sorting than leftist professors. By K-12 sorting, I meant that whites who are status-seeking (Machiavellian), high in openness, and more intelligent self-select into college. These whites are already leftists by age 18, and going to college is just a rubber stamp to show the world how cool they are, but it doesn’t significantly change their views. In other words, even if college was abolished tomorrow, these sorts of whites would still move leftward as a form of social signaling, so long as left-wing views were still considered high-status in the media.
The only way conservatives can reverse this trend is if they make conservative views high-status in the media. Traditionally, the “media” was “preacher on a Sunday.” I doubt that conservatives can get people back into church. Their best hope is that the liberals stop having kids, and that they simply outbreed the woke.1
Academia isn’t economically productive.
Amelia probably got some government funding for her thesis. Maybe she received student loans; maybe her academic institution received funding from the government; maybe she received a grant; maybe her tuition was reduced. Some PhD students get stipends, so it is possible that Amelia was actually getting paid to research racist smells.
But colleges only get $174.9 billion, out of a federal budget of $6.75 trillion. That’s 2.59% of the federal budget. At a minimum, 20% of spending in education goes toward STEM, although it can be as high as 50%. The actual federal spending on non-STEM federal education is somewhere between $87 billion and $140 billion.
Additionally, between 5-15% of non-STEM funding goes towards law degree programs. Many conservatives would suggest that these degrees are also useless, since a minarchist state would eliminate all regulation. Putting this aside, that leaves $74 billion for non-law and non-STEM degrees.
For comparison, the average social security check is $23,016 per retiree per year. For 51.2 million retirees, that’s $1.18 trillion.
Maybe underwater basket weaving is useless, or maybe even harmful. But we spend 15.9x as much on retired people, who, by definition, are unemployed.
I would respect conservatives more if they proposed we start funding monastic or cathedral schools, or bring back theocracy. That would be reasonable. By reasonable, I mean that 10% of the medieval economy was dedicated to reading the Bible, writing commentaries on the Bible, translating Arabic texts into Greek, translating Greek texts into Latin, teaching kids Latin, and so on… Most of these texts were theological in nature. In other words: underwater basket weaving.
If you are a Catholic, you can claim that studying the Bible pleases God, and God blesses those who honor him. If you are a leftist, you can claim that studying olfactory racism will bring humanity closer to moral perfection. The atheist or agnostic position assumes that society can function without a moral core, that “mere economics” is enough to keep people going. This bourgeois attitude is ignorant of metrogenesis. States develop not because of economics, but because of morality. Neglecting morality creates a vacuum which will be filled. In fact, it was this very bourgeois-atheist attitude which created wokism in the first place. It is the ecumenical conservative (Vivek, Vance, Elon) who creates the preconditions for wokism. Theocratic conservatives don’t actually provide a solution to this problem, since it was their failure which created the ecumenical conservatives. It is only the left which can provide a solution.
Regarding economic productivity, non-college workers are losing money (adjusting for inflation), while college students are beating the system and holding onto their wages. The conservative fantasy is that:
College students go deep into debt, but soon they enter the real world. In the real world, they realize their degree is worthless, and they are deep in debt.
In fact, college students earn an extra $25k per year on average. Since the average student loan debt is $37,853, that should allow college students to pay the debt off within two years. In reality, students generally stretch these payments over 10 or 20 years, but they don’t have to.
Getting a college degree is like buying a car to commute from the suburbs. It is expensive up front, but the economic benefits are enormous. It’s not impossible to find a job that doesn’t require a car, or to use Uber every day, but the net costs of not buying a car are generally negative on average.
I suggest people go read Glenn for more facts on why college is great, and conservatives who skip out on college are generally shooting themselves in the foot.
Elite overproduction.
Zoomer Schopenhauer argues that the problem with underwater basket weaving is that it is an example of elite overproduction. Amos also mentioned elite overproduction as a problem. This is a hoax.
The case against elite overproduction goes something like this:
A society (pre-revolutionary France) starts handing out degrees, certificates, positions, education, literacy, skills, and all sorts of disruptive status-modifiers;
However, this society only needs so many cooks in the kitchen;
There are now too many cooks in the kitchen;
The cooks go crazy and cut off the king’s head.
Here’s the same formula put in a different way:
A society (pre-revolutionary Russia) starts developing its educational system;
However, the regime refuses to integrate these intelligentsia into the state bureaucracy, generally for reasons of religious, ideological, or ethnic discrimination (non-Russians, especially Jews, were excluded from the state bureaucracy);
As a result, these “homeless intellectuals” start fomenting a revolution to take out the elite (Bolshevism).
All of this would make sense to me if English majors were starving in the streets. But they aren’t.
There just isn’t much evidence that English majors are starving in the street. Yes, engineering majors have better employment prospects than English majors, but that’s just because engineers are in high demand and there is a low supply of them.
English majors have a similar employment profile (in terms of under-employment) as physical sciences (geology). They aren't far beyond math majors (gasp!). And they're doing better than law majors, business majors, biology majors, and education majors (gasp, gasp, and gasp!).
It’s true that English majors, on average, make less than $40k a year as a starting salary. However, over their lifetime, they will make more than criminal justice majors, graphic designers, and biologists, well over $60k per year. The top 10% of English majors also make much more money than nurses, easily clearing $130k. English majors have a slow start, but their lifetime earnings are above many more “practical” majors.
Maybe English is totally useless, like philosophy. Or at least, it has no tangible economic benefits. But it is possible that smart people are interested in it, and English majors are a selected population which does better economically because it is more intelligent.
My point is that there is no discriminatory, bureaucratic, or economic plight which is going to force English majors to start plotting a communist revolution.
If there was a major economic depression, and English majors were out on the streets prostituting themselves for a loaf of bread, then the theory of elite overproduction would make more sense to me.
The other thing I want to mention here is that elite overproduction only works as a theory when the elites being overproduced have some kind of class-based, ethnic, religious, or caste-based distinction with the ruling aristocracy. For example, the bourgeois in revolutionary France were not nobles; the intelligentsia in revolutionary Russia were not Orthodox Christians. But in America, English majors face no discriminatory ceilings that would cause them to plot revolution.
One could argue that white people are discriminated against, and as a result, white people will foment revolution against the government. January 6th was “whitelash,” where disenfranchised white people tried to overthrow the government.
“Elite overproduction” is not a useful phrase to describe that phenomenon. It would be more useful to discuss “discriminatory pressure.” When a group is denied equal opportunities (non-noble bourgeois in France; Jews in 1917 Russia; whites in America), it begins to plot to overthrow the government. English majors don’t qualify under this theory.
PhDs are only 2% of the population. Medieval priests were 5-10% of the European population prior to the Reformation. We have a long way to go.
With regard to the Investiture Contest, there is a case to be made that “overproduction of priests” in the 11h century led to a major theological conflict between the imperialists and papists. The imperialists defended the right of the king to appoint bishops, while the papists advanced the idea that only the Pope could appoint bishops. In the same way, overproduction of PhDs is used to explain why “wokists” are so aggressive in advancing obscure social agendas which defy tradition.
This theory seems backwards.
Wokists are only attempting to fill a vacuum left by Christianity. Nothing is being “overproduced.” If anything, America has a priestly vacuum, not an overproduction!
The problem is not “too many priests,” or “too many PhDs.” The problem is that America’s mainline churches have collapsed. Now, it’s possible to link the collapse in Christianity back to education by blaming radical professors in the 1920s for undoing America’s belief in Christ. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 indicates that the cracks were already forming by this time.
But again, there is a quantitative and qualitative difference between linking education to atheism and blaming “elite overproduction” for every problem. Elites were being produced in 1925… they were not being “overproduced.”
Elite overproduction is a hoax, because there is no such thing as overproduction of elites. The problem is discrimination pressure, which occurs when a group begins to get “too big for its britches,” and it bumps up against discriminatory limits imposed by an existing elite. This was the problem in France and Russia, not “elite overproduction.”
But aren’t degrees becoming useless?
According to the market, no. English majors earn more than those who don’t attend college. The gap isn’t closing, but widening.
The biggest threat to education is AI. AI allows cheaters to get a medical degree without really understanding medicine, and that means worse health outcomes for patients. The solution is to return to cheat-proof exams, like oral examinations. Unfortunately academia has an incentive to aid cheaters rather than uncover them. More graduates = more money. Until the federal government imposes some regulations on colleges, or until private corporations pressure universities to raise their standards, the problem will likely get worse.
The problem with English majors, and all “woke” college majors, is not that a morality is being pushed, but that we as a society cannot agree on what our sacred religion should be. If we were all Catholic, we would have no problem with $100 billion going to fund cathedral schools. If we were all woke, no one would be bothered by dissertations on racist smells. The problem isn’t “elite overproduction,” but moral nihilism.
By nihilism, I am not referring to “a lack of morality,” but rather “a diversity of morality with no clear victory.” It is not the absence of morality, but a clash between competing visions which produces nihilism. In some ways, our age is too moral. In comparison, the Europe of Crusaders and Conquistadors was remarkably morally simple.
I’ll publish a future article about why I find that unlikely to happen.
The meme that English majors are down for the count is a self-defeating stereotype. Most people are aware of it, which means that the few people that still pursue it are doing so for some reason relating to a quirk of that type. As an English graduate, English is basically just a watered down version of a philosophy program, exemplified by their GRE scores which are similar to philosophy in terms of verbal and analytical writing ability.
Our math is worse, but averaged out, English majors have similar scores to engineering majors. As with most things, intelligence is important and will allow them to punch above their stereotyped income. Like with most majors, it's just signaling their inherent traits.
As an aside, my math is better than most of my English peers, and I took calculus in college and got like a 26 on the math ACT. Amongst other English majors, that puts me in the 99th percentile of math ability. It’s true though that your typical STEM grad clears us in mathematical ability. Fortunately for the workplace, verbal ability goes a long way.
https://www.umsl.edu/~philo/files/pdfs/ETS%20LINK.pdf
>the net costs of not buying a car are generally negative on average.
Citation needed. I would say simply moving close to your job so you can walk or bike to work is the easiest ways to enjoy financial abundance and get rich on the savings. Even if the rents are more expensive close to your job, the savings from not owning a car (or even owning a car and just reducing operating costs by driving less!) will easily cover the difference. A long car commute has to be among the most common ways Americans shoot themselves in the foot, financially speaking.
These numbers may not be adjusted-for-inflation, but this old blog post has major life-changing implications for a lot of people: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/
"If these numbers sound ridiculous, it’s because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid. I did these calculations long before getting my first job, and because of them I have never been willing to live anywhere that required me to drive myself to work. It’s just too expensive, and there is always another option when choosing a job and a house if you make it a priority."