America Is Dumbing Down

However, there's good news for the President: his master plan is working. Each day, the fraction of people in America who make him feel mentally inferior is shrinking. Business Week reports:

How did the U.S. become the world's largest economy? A key part of the answer is education. Some 85% of adult Americans have at least a high school degree today, up from just 25% in 1940. Similarly, 28% have a college degree, a fivefold gain over this period. Today's U.S. workforce is the most educated in the world.

But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline slightly, warns a report released on Nov. 9 by the National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education, a nonprofit group based in San Jose, Calif. The key reason: As highly educated baby boomers retire, they'll be replaced by mounting numbers of young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees.

Because workers with fewer years of education earn so much less, U.S. living standards could take a dive unless something is done, the report argues. It calculates that lower educational levels could slice inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in the U.S. by 2% by 2020. They surged over 40% from 1980 to 2000...

Callan's projections are based on the growing diversity of the U.S. population. As recently as 1980, the U.S. workforce was 82% white. By 2020, it will be just 63% white. Over this 40-year span, the share of minorities will double, to 37%, as that of Hispanic workers nearly triples, to 17%. The problem is, both Hispanics and African Americans are far less likely to earn degrees than their white counterparts. If those gaps persist, the number of Americans age 26 to 64 who don't even have a high school degree could soar by 7 million, to 31 million, by 2020. Meanwhile, although the actual number of adults with at least a college degree would grow, their share of the workforce could fall by a percentage point, to 25.5%.

STEEP SLIDE IN TEXAS
These trends aren't carved in stone, of course. Bush's No Child law is helping to lift minority kids' test scores, says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank that studies No Child. But the gaps are still enormous. On the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, 39% of white eighth graders were proficient in reading, vs. just 15% of Hispanics and only 12% of blacks. "Given these scores, there's no way the country will reach the 100% proficiency goal" of the No Child law, predicts Jennings.

Even with No Child, backsliding already has happened in Texas, the laboratory President George W. Bush used for the law when he was governor of the state. Why? The Lone Star State's Hispanic population is exploding. Because minority students are far more likely to drop out of high school, Texas now ranks dead last among the 50 states in the percentage of adults who have a high school degree. That's down from 39th in 1990.

Similarly, Texas ranks 35th among the states in the percentage of adults who have a college degree, down from 23rd in 1990. State demographer Steve H. Murdock is telling anyone who will listen that Texas public schools will be 80% minority by 2040, up from 57% in 2000. If the education gap persists, he warns, the income of the average Texas household will fall by $6,500 by 2040, after inflation adjustments -- potentially fueling a spike in poverty, the prison population, and other social problems. "We've been very hard hit," says Murdock.

This helps explain the long term problems of the LA Times. I rather like the LA Times -- it is sober, intelligent, staid, and high-minded, an NY Times Jr. that's just a little weaker than the NYT in most regards (especially science). But that's exactly the wrong approach for Southern California's demographic trends, changes that the LAT (suicidally) supports editorially. It should instead be giving us front-page color pictures of bullet-riddled corpses, telenovela starlets caught in sex scandals, and cute puppies.

Now, LA is one of the most interesting cities in the world if you want to study where we're headed. But where we're headed is the last thing the LA Times wants to think about, both because any valid inferences are politically incorrect and because there won't be much room for the LAT in its current incarnation in the LA of the future, so the LAT is both dull and irrelevant to its own city.

Fred Reed writes:

The hemorrhaging circulation of the paleomedia gratifies me better than bubblegum. Lord I love it. The tube worms of the network suites have discovered that lo! Fewer of the citizenry sit nightly before the flickering propaganda modem. The readership of newspapers yet falls...

What are the topics of most fascination in the United States? Of most importance? Certainly among them are race, sex in the social sense, crime, and immigration. Now, let’s see whether we can name four subjects about which the media speak with calculated mendacity obvious to everyone one. How about…oh, say…race, sex in the social sense, crime, and immigration?...

I found the account of a black man, one Dr. (of what, I wonder?) Kamau Kambon , who while speaking to a panel at the law school of Howard University (a black school in Washington, DC) said that the white race should be exterminated.

This is not my interpretation but rather his explicit, repeated statement. I quote: white people "have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks and they're monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that, in my estimation, is the only conclusion I have come to. [sic] We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem." He wants to kill me, my daughters, and my friends.

This produced from the media…near silence. From Howard University…silence. From professional blacks…silence.

Now, this column is not about race relations, but about the dishonesty of the media. I do not think that blacks want to exterminate whites, though Mr. Kambon needs to take his medication. Nor do I want to exterminate anyone, with the possible exception of lawyers and people in public relations. Nor do I know any whites who want to exterminate blacks. (You can find some very strange websites that might, though.)

We all know the pattern. When Larry Summers, president of what once was Harvard University, mentioned that men are better than women at mathematics, a fact studied to death and well settled, it was national news practically forever. Hissyfits were everywhere thrown. Summers duly whimpered and licked all feet within range. Ah, but when Mr. Kambon wants to kill most of the United States, why…ah, heh…cough.

Also about the same time, the coach of the football team of the Air Force Academy suggested that his team was faring badly because it didn’t have enough black players. “It just seems to be that way, that Afro-American kids can run very, very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me they run extremely well," DeBerry said, not too articulately, in remarks first broadcast Tuesday night by KWGN-TV in Denver.”

Conventional outrage gurgled tiredly forth as from a broken drain. Like Summers, DeBerry ended up squirming on the rug in apology. (Why? Whatever happened to manhood?) It is of course a fact that blacks run fast. Are they overwhelming in the running slots of the NFL because they are slow, do you think? Then why does the league not recruit me at, say, six million green ones a year? I am, I promise, far slower than any running back in football.

To point out that blacks are good athletes is virtually a firing offense, but to urge killing millions is fine. Welcome to the media.

What has this to do with the circulation of newspapers? Lots. For one thing, whites who are to be killed may weary of hostility from the media, and they are most of the readership. Except I’m not any longer. For another, coverage is boring because predetermined, irritating because antagonistic and mendacious, and useless because it contributes nothing to solving, or even to understanding, the racial problems of the country. Or any problems of the country.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer