TLP Weekend Edition (June 7-8, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📰 “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice,” by Michael Sandel. An oldie but a goodie—one that remains as relevant as ever. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel argued that the Democratic Party, whose coalition is home to a growing number of credentialed professionals, had erroneously come to believe that the only way for people to get ahead in a post-industrial age was through acquiring more formal education. But, as Sandel writes:
The politicians espousing [this] have missed the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they are offering: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault…By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism—an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees…
The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris…Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.
“Less educated” is a lousy term but Sandel’s point is still a good one.
🇨🇳 “China's Abundance Problem—and Ours,” by Lauren Teixeira. On her new Substack, Lauren Teixeira digs into the flip side of “abundance” with a detailed review of one particularly horrific example of Chinese overbuilding: the Beijing Daxing Airport.
You’ve probably heard about Abundance. If you’ve been under a rock: some big brain guys have coalesced around the idea that America makes it too hard to build stuff like housing and trains; that unnecessary regulation slows down projects while “citizen voice” statutes let incumbents block pretty much anything; and that we should do a bunch of policy reforms to unleash an era of big beautiful infrastructure. I find this all pretty hard to object to…
China plays a crucial role in Abundance discourse by serving as an example of what we could have, if not for the stranglehold of the regulatory state and tedious citizen input processes. Abundance guys point to China’s tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail; to forests of high-rise apartment buildings ripped straight from a YIMBY fever dream.
I find myself getting oddly territorial whenever I encounter this part of discourse, as if, you know, I invented being obsessed with Chinese infrastructure. Which of course I didn’t. But I did spend a lot of my twenties wandering around the Chinese built environment, and thinking about it, and writing about it. And a lot of that writing had to do with what is now an important theme of Abundance discourse, which is the tradeoff between protecting citizens from harm and building big.
Back then I was very preoccupied with the phenomenon of destruction and forced resettlement, or chai-qian (literally: destroy-move). I wrote a bunch of articles about it, including one about an artist colony in Beijing and one about a historic neighborhood in Nanjing. These were only very tiny instances of a phenomenon so enormous in scale it can be hard to get any mental purchase on it. During China’s most frenetic period of building, you would see about a Robert Moses’s lifetime’s worth of chaiqian in a week. The displacement toll from the Three Gorges Dam alone is thought to have amounted to around 1.5 million people....
As I’ve gotten older I’ve...become more circumspect about chaiqian. I still think the amount of demolition and displacement was excessive—but a lot of it was inevitable, and necessary. When you are living through the most rapid economic transformation of all time, it is somewhat unavoidable that you will be tossed around by the bulldozer of history.
For what it’s worth every Chinese person with whom I discussed chaiqian (aside from those directly affected) was extraordinarily unsentimental about it. Whenever I would bring it up, my interlocutor would grin and invoke a mythical class of people called the “chai-er-dai” or second-generation displaced—people supposedly generationally wealthy due to resettlement compensation.
In the end I guess where I come boringly down on this tradeoff is that there is probably, to bastardize the old Stalinist adage about omelettes, an optimal amount of egg-cracking to be done. China cracked too many eggs, and America too few. Now China has a bunch of rotting useless omelettes and we’re starving for them.
🌥️ “The Weather Forecast That Saved D-Day,” by Christopher Klein. For the 81st anniversary of D-Day, Klein offers readers a great historical anecdote about the critical role that luck—and shrewd weather forecasting from a small station in western Ireland—played in preserving the Allies’ element of surprise on June 6, 1944:
German Luftwaffe meteorologists, however, relied on less sophisticated data and models than their Allied counterparts, says John Ross, author of The Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble. “The Allies had a much more robust network of weather stations in Canada, Greenland and Iceland; of weather ships and weather flights over the North Atlantic and observations by secret agreement from weather stations in the neutral Republic of Ireland,” he says.
Those weather stations, in particular one at a post office at Blacksod Point in the far west of Ireland, proved crucial in detecting the arrival of a lull in the storms that Stagg and his colleagues believed would allow for an invasion on June 6. As rain and high winds lashed Portsmouth on the night of June 4, Stagg informed Eisenhower of the forecast for a temporary break. With the next available date for an invasion nearly two weeks away, the Allies risked losing the element of surprise if they waited. In spite of the pelting rain and howling winds outside, Eisenhower placed his faith in his forecasters and gave the go-ahead for D-Day.
And who says talking about the weather is just idle chit chat?! (h/t: RealClearPolitics)
🎾 The French Open, Women’s and Men’s Finals, live on TNT and truTV. It’s the battle of the top seeds at Roland Garros in Paris. First up, American No. 2 seed Coco Gauff faces off with world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the women’s final at 9AM EST on Saturday. Then on Sunday, world No. 1 Jannik Sinner takes on No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz in the men’s final after the Italian defeated the all-time great Novak Djokovic in what is likely Nole’s last appearance on the French clay.
🎸 That’s the Price of Loving Me, by Dean Wareham. Ex-Galaxie 500 and Luna guitarist/songwriter Dean Wareham recently put out a new solo record that makes a splendid companion for a laid-back June weekend. Wareham produced the album with his old buddy Kramer from back in the Galaxie days and “features his wife, Britta Phillips, on bass, as well as contributions from drummers Roger Brogan (Spectrum, Alison’s Halo) and Anthony LaMarca (the War on Drugs), as well as cellist Gabe Noel.”
TLP is looking forward to hearing this new track “Bourgeois Manqué” live this Sunday night at the Bond Street Bar in Asbury Park, NJ. Enjoy!
Had D-Day not occurred on the scheduled day, the backup was June 20. That was the day of the great Channel storm that was not predicted and wrecked the American Mulberry with heavy damage to the British one. An invasion on that day would have been a shambles.
It is amusing if you are a Rep, and terrifying if you are a Dem, that Dems seem utterly incapable of describing 60% of the US, in a non insulting fashion. Generally speaking, Dems seem to finally grasp "uneducated" is a slur. Yet somehow, they inexplicably also believe, "less educated" is not.
Like members of the LGBTQ community marching for Palestine, a few Dem field trips would be very useful, addressing the issue. Technology is omnipresent in US industry, and those who may not have graduated college, utilize it daily. The inside of most farm equipment now resembles a spaceship. The machinery often comes with 7 figure price tags, so it stands to reason imbeciles do not operate it. Most farmers are also simultaneously hedging commodities, without the benefit of a Harvard MBA. These people are not uneducated, they are differently educated.
The men and women who bring oil out of ground and refine it to bring us light, heat, AC and transportation, often begin their careers, when they are 18 years old. Much of the work is labor intensive, but it is also complicated, which is why workers can earn well into 6 figures, before they can legally buy a beer.
The examples are endless. How many Americans can fix their own heating system in a blizzard , or revive or install an AC unit? How about repairing your car? Americans take their non washable laundry to the dry cleaner, for a reason. We do not know how to clean it, but someone else knows how to utilize chemicals, to do so. Live without the guys who pick your garbage for the month of July, and tell us again what ill educated rubes they are, and how anyone could do the job.
The crux of the Dem problem with the "less educated" is a superiority and arrogance that was once rare in the US. And like many bad ideas, it feeds on itself. Until someone produces Dems with an appreciation for the broad swath of knowledge required to make the US and the world go round, they can hold all the 6 star resort soirees they wish. It will not fix their inability to connect with young men, or anyone else, who has never set foot on a college campus.
College does not render everyone who attends a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist. For Dems, it does seem to produce an inordinate amount of people with an overly developed sense of self worth and self entitlement. Not to mention, and a near complete lack of appreciation for the skills and knowledge of others, educated in different ways.