Wokeness as a Luxury Good

Watch the video of our weekly livestreamed conversation.

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In this week’s Dispatch Live, Sarah starts off with a very exciting announcement about her growing family.  Then, Sarah and Jonah have a very wonky conversation that asks “Is wokeness a form of a luxury good in the economy?” And rather than us trying to sum up that conversation in a few sentences here in this description, we think you should just give it a listen and/or watch it to see what they had to say. Stick around for some marriage advice at the end. 

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Comments (21)
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  1. Dkklop

    Sarah!! Congratulations to you and your family. I'm so excited for you!

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  2. Rmaupinjr

    I absolutely love every Collab between these two. Jonah has shaped my political understanding more than anyone and meeting Sarah is the best part of subscribing to the dispatch. The mutual respect comes across between you two, especially when you disagree and I find that helps explain and clarify issues because there is a desire to understand the differences. I wanted to post something to highlight that this was wonderful. Congratulations Sarah.

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    Jonathan

    So, the thing about “woke” (which I argue is at least somewhat distinct from critical theory) is that, to the extent this is an actual phenomenon (outside of elite spaces, it is not) in many ways it has replaced religion not class inequality. I’m not really calling it a religion as some do. But it used to be that elites condescended by complaining about improper religiosity. Indeed, much (not all) of the right-wing agenda today is complaining that Christianity is no longer the measurement by which elite society judges and patronizes the masses. So I don’t think elites are woke because of increased economic egalitarianism, I think they’re woke because of increased secularism. The only constant is that elites are still obsessed with huffing and puffing about manners. For progressives it’s bigotry. Conservative elites are fewer but they are still obsessed with a lack of religiosity.

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  4. Pketsche

    Congratulations Sarah and family. After learning from the flagship podcast AO about your suffering from an ectopic pregnancy last year, it is nice to hear this happy news! Thank you for sharing the news.

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    NashLives

    I'm late to listening so probs no one will see this comment, but regardless, two things:
    1) Congrats Sarah!!
    2) Let's not conflate the US news rankings and SAT scores. SAT scores really are basically a proxy for IQ and very little else, the correlation between the scores/iq is quite high. The US news rankings are a composite index of educational quality, and which ingredients you include in that soup AND how you weight them dramatically impact the results of the index. The rankings they put out should really be presented with uncertainty bounds rather than as pseudo precise point estimates. Moreover, individuals should be able to more directly manipulate the weights (i.e., what if I only care about academic rigor and not, say, alumni donations or whatever). There are better resources for making admissions choices that attempt to do this, but they're fragmented across different fields, levels of educations, outcomes of interest, etc.

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    Justindcook

    Congrats Sarah! Glad to hear that your family is growing.

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    M.E.

    A few notes on terminology:

    "The Crits" broadly subscribe to critical theory which, descended from the Frankfurt School, aims to critique and change social structures generally. Applied to a specific academic area, this becomes critical legal studies, critical race theory, etc. I think the reason they won out over the Marxists (though most critical theorists would say they are Marxist, or descended from Marxism) is that it's much easier to simply critique the language used in any subject rather than to propose, say, workable economic policy or deal with the failures of "actually existing socialism."

    On equity versus equality, it's probably less important which angle you take than what you propose to do about it. If one is concerned with equality of outcome, one could propose directing additional resources toward underperforming people or groups, which I think even proponents of equality of opportunity could accept where they clearly have different starting points. You target the literacy program at kids reading below grade level, for example. It's another thing entirely to hamper the performance of high achievers in ways that materially harm them in order to get the stats to look better, as with the school district not informing kids and their parents of their qualifying for scholarship status.

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    Kyzyl Tuva

    Wow! Congrats to you and your growing family Sarah. That was THE best Dispatch Live I’ve heard yet. Love you two geeking out on these topics. Please do more like this.

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    Phil H

    I'm sorry I missed the Dispatch Live! Congratulations Sarah (and Husband of the Pod as well)!

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    Alexander

    Congratulations!

    When my wife was pregnant with our second, we found Simon was a wonderful, age-appropriate cartoon. Simon's (~age 5) interplay with his little brother Gaspard (~2) did a great job showing what a little brother actually is. (https://www.youtube.com/@SimonSuperRabbit).

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