16 thoughts on “Generation Katniss”
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Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
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My youngest daughter is a fan of Hunger Games. She is 25 and working in South Carolina. She got a pretty good job right out of college and is now in Charleston working as a bartender at a destination resort. She says she will make more money than she was making in the insurance business (40K to start). She is very conservative and moderately religious. More libertarian. I have my doubts about her career plan but she is determined to be on her own (with Dad as backup of course). She has not had a steady boyfriend and I don’t know if she wants to get married or have kids.
My middle daughter, who is a lefty, is very well educated and speaks four languages. She is married but has an odd relationship and may or may not want kids. She told me she didn’t until seeing her sister-in-law with her kids. She is not religious. She is, however, open minded enough that I can talk to her. I don’t know if she watches Hunger Games but she is older (35 this year).
I just don’t know about these kids.
I talk to lots of kids who are joining the military and I have a much higher opinion of most of them than I do of college kids.
One thing I thought was interesting was that 75% of the Katniss Crew worried about terrorism, vs 66% about “climate change.” I wonder if the relationship between these numbers would be the same in the US: I’m guessing not.
This is just more of the typical nonsense from the Republican slice of the political class, intended to provide justification for what they want to do anyway.
It starts out discussing the political and ideological viewpoints of teenage girls, which reminds me of how the left bases its political power upon the ignorance of young people and the foreignness of new immigrants, and takes it as some sort of base upon which policy should be made. It continues on to attack the traditional morality that actually produced functional people able to take care of themselves, then oozes a warm, weepy love of the welfare state that is destroying American society.
But that’s just window dressing. The real message is that conservatives should stop fighting against the welfare state that provides the ruling clique its base of indigent voters, and above all stop fighting against the open borders that will provide it an endless future stream of low wage workers.
By making the vulnerable a primary focus, conservatives will be better able to confront some common blind spots.
The country is being bankrupted by entitlements of all sorts- and we aren’t concerned enough for “the vulnerable” already?
And conservatives should instinctively welcome the immigrants who want to earn their success in America.
Open borders above all, or else you’re racist, or something. But in any case, shut up, because if you don’t hurting conservatism- and you don’t want that do you?
Arthur Brooks, I’m not a fan.
Teenage girls will be voters in a few years, and will be voting for a long time.
The survey wasn’t done by Republicans but by a Brit who appears to be generally on the Left.
Teenage girls will be voters in a few years, and will be voting for a long time.
The survey wasn’t done by Republicans but by a Brit who appears to be generally on the Left.
True.
I wonder what the viewpoint of teenage boys happens to be. Is it the same, different- or are future male voters just irrelevant?
I also wonder what the viewpoint of the teenage girls would happen to be if the left had any sort of actual opposition, here or in the UK. Or what that viewpoint will be, in a few years, when those young ladies meet up with a bit more reality.
For example I wonder just what fraction of the English population has heard of the events in Rotherham and other cites, during which gang-rapes by muslims were covered up lest they inspire “racism”. I suspect the English equivalent of what Americans call “low-information voter” is happily oblivious. Of course, the left won’t give the public information that might cause the electorate to oppose the left’s favorite policies- but someone should do so. Similarly, the young ladies of England are apparently concerned by “climate change.” Perhaps they would be less concerned if they knew how often warmists get caught falsifying data, or if they knew how badly their models had failed.
Or even if they how the costs of combating global warming, if real, would fall almost exclusively upon them and their future, and not upon other countries more beloved by the left.
Forgive my rambling, but what always jumps out at me is how craven and worthless the supposed opposition to the left manages to be, both in the US and from what I hear from England.
I find it especially grating to be lectured about the awesomeness of the welfare state and open borders for the United States by a supposed American conservative based upon a study by an English leftist.
With friends like that, American conservative have no need for enemies, as the old cliche accurately reports.
The summary of what G-K thinks strikes me as a mixture of delusions and self-defeating propositions. If 35% (at most) of G-K don’t want children, then their successors…..
“Conservatives are fighting a losing battle of moral arithmetic. They hand an argument with virtually 100% public support—care for the vulnerable”
And someday people may learn that funds raised from taxes are limited, that government takes more than it gives, that government “caring” fails. As long as people confuse charity with government entitlements, the current crises will continue.
Note the following cluster of beliefs:
–many of the group do not want to get married, preferring to focus on their careers
–virtually all (90%) view it as important to be successful in a high-paying profession
–yet 86% are worried about getting a job
–and many are disturbed by “gender pay gaps” and “the attitude that women cannot be engineers” (and by extension, I assume cannot be considered for other high-paying jobs)
The simultaneous holding of these beliefs, it seems clear, is a recipe for anger and bitterness.
Whence comes “the attitude that women cannot be engineers?” Were there older sisters turned down for introductory calculus or rejected for electrical engineering jobs on grounds that “women don’t do that?” Did their high school counselors steer them away from such fields? It seems most unlikely…certainly, it would be very unlikely in the US. Much more probably, they are picking up on media messages *telling* them that women are discriminated against in engineering, etc.
Re Arthur Brooks: I think he’s right that Republicans should hit school choice–and public school dysfunction–a lot harder, and point out who the victims of this dysfunction are–NOT by preaching about their “concern for the vulnerable” but by well-crafted storytelling about specific human victims of the Democratic-led educational Blob.
“the attitude that women cannot be engineers?”
They were told by feminists that math was a europhallologocentric oppression of the natural, holistic female mind; or as Barbie put it “Math is hard.”
Re Arthur Brooks: I think he’s right that Republicans should hit school choice–and public school dysfunction–a lot harder, and point out who the victims of this dysfunction are–NOT by preaching about their “concern for the vulnerable” but by well-crafted storytelling about specific human victims of the Democratic-led educational Blob.
I can’t disagree with this.
However, I think Arthur Brooks and his “concern for the vulnerable” is a shining example of why the Republican Party and the conservative movement has been such a miserable failure in the United States.
Arthur Brooks, by the way, is the President of the American Enterprise Institute, supposedly a major conservative think tank. Yet he was quoted at Ricochet endorsing the welfare state, open borders, attacking conservatives who disagree with him, while praising the viewpoint of of leftists who supposedly do not. Essentially, he conceded right away that the leftist view is correct, and went on to attack conservatives for not being leftists.
Remember, this guy is the head of a conservative think tank. Is it any wonder that conservatives get nowhere with conservative leadership like this?
It seems to me that an excellent case could be made that there is simply no such thing as the Republican Party or conservative movement. Despite the grassroots energy of conservatives and widespread dissatisfaction with American governance, it all amounts to nil because the leadership is essentially comprised of people just like Brooks, who apparently believe the leftist caricature of conservatives as hate-filled monsters who hate the saintly “vulnerable.”
So instead of attacking leftists for their relentless corruption, incompetence, deceit, etc, the leadership spends its time trying to fix the badthinking of conservatives.
Once again please forgive my rambling, but I think it is relevant as to exactly why the GOP et al is so utterly unable to accomplish anything anything at all. For example, about school choice, I think the real issue here is that no one in the GOP has had the guts to attack the education bureaucracy head on.
School choice essentially means that the teacher’s union will keep
Sorry, that was incomplete, obviously.
Continuing, school choice means that the teacher’s union will get to keep its lucrative death grip upon the vast amount of wealth Americans spend to educate their children- but some of the children will be allowed to escape the festering incompetence, although much of the money will remain with the failing disaster of the public schools.
Once upon a time the American public school system was the best in the world, but no longer. Now the best we can hope for, I suppose, is that the some of the students might be able to escape.
That’s failure, even if it’s better than the status quo.
I want more ambitious goals- such as the complete obliteration of the teacher’s union, the termination of incompetent teachers, and the ability of the schools to expel troublemakers.
Even if they happen to be “vulnerable,” as Albert Brooks might describe them.
Too bad there isn’t an edit button.
I bet the Mexican and Somali and Brazilian and Vietnamese and Puerto Rican teenage girls don’t suffer from an uncertainty as to whether they want big healthy nuclear families.
This sort of puling, self-pitying blue-state suburbanite crap is self-inflicted democide. Full stop.
Xennady – At least in the US boys tend towards the right of girls. I don’t know if it’s the same in the UK.
I suspect that eventually, either by my own project or someone elses, the deficits stopping political BI apps from informing those who are mislabeled low information voters will be fixed and we’re going to find out that what many of them actually are is high rational ignorance voters. At present that’s a distinction without much of a difference but the IT revolution has barely touched the area of democratic oversight of the ruling class. Nobody makes “the whole widget” for that, yet.
They have the same existential fears humans have always had (in an earlier day it would have been “I’m scared the barbarians are coming over the ramparts”), and yet, at the same time, disparage the solutions humans have used to ameliorate those those fears from time immemorial, to wit, marriage and family.
It is likely we are looking a heavily indoctrinated group here, with the all the ethnic/gender/equality stuff crammed into them and displacing reason..
Is this Yuri Bezmanov’s prediction in action? Seems like a classic case of cognitive dissonance.
Interesting also they had no trust in either corporations, or government. (as an aside, what is government anyway, but the largest corporation of all?)
Someone once said the effect of prolonged propaganda, was not the belief one side was right, and the other wrong, but the erosion of trust in all-
I suspect that eventually, either by my own project or someone elses, the deficits stopping political BI apps from informing those who are mislabeled low information voters will be fixed and we’re going to find out that what many of them actually are is high rational ignorance voters. At present that’s a distinction without much of a difference but the IT revolution has barely touched the area of democratic oversight of the ruling class. Nobody makes “the whole widget” for that, yet.
I suspect you’re correct, for a variety of reasons- but it strikes that this sort of project should have been a high priority for the Republican party a long time ago.
However, I’ve rambled enough in this thread already so I’ll stop there.