Appropriating an innovator (Tesla, Forever21)

Forever 21 might be a classic example of a small-time family enterprise that went super-nova.

It's owners continued to run it as if it were a small business, even as the company surpassed its own grandiose ambitions.

Forever 21 pioneered a new category of retail -- "fast fashion".

Fast fashion is dirt-cheap yet trendy.

Fast fashion, however, is not an example of "disruptive innovation".

Disruptive innovation consists of an obscure, cheap and inferior market that is entirely outside the mainstream finding a niche and improving over time until finally, and unexpectedly, it displaces the dominant market.

Fast fashion was actually the lower end of the incumbent market, and not a distinct market.

Mainstream corporations imitated Forever 21 and stole its fire.

This might be part of a larger pattern.

It is a pattern that one finds in the evolution of amusement parks, of the mafia and of Las Vegas:

A crude, small-time operation becomes big-time and corporate, then gets displaced by corporations from the mainstream.

That is, mainstream corporations appropriate a new product category that was pioneered by a outsider.

Is this now happening to Tesla?

Tesla, like Forever 21, is not an example of classic disruptive innovation.

However, Tesla is not at the low end of the mainstream market.

Like Uber, Tesla is actually at the high end of the mainstream market and working furiously to move downmarket and make its products available to ordinary people.

Unfortunately for Tesla, ordinary Americans are mostly not interested in sporty electric cars.

Ordinary Americans are smitten with big, bulky trucks.

That might even be true if Tesla makes futuristic trucks.

It will be affluent tech workers from Silicon Valley who will buy Tesla's trucks, just as they are the market for Tesla's cars.

Tesla may not pose an immediate threat to the mainstream auto and truck market in the USA.

However, Tesla is eating away at market share in high end vehicles.

In this way, Tesla is a bit like the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch seems to be displacing Swiss watches.

https://www.ft.com/content/eda695f0-516b-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, the Apple Watch, launched less than five years ago, now outsells the entire Swiss industry, which has been manufacturing wristwatches for 152 years. Last year, Apple increased sales by 36 per cent to almost 31m watches while the Swiss industry shipped about 21m in total, a 13 per cent decline.

The one solace for Swiss watchmakers is that they still generate more revenue: $21bn to Apple’s $11bn. But on current trends Apple will overtake the Swiss on that measure, too, by 2023.

However, there are different market segments in the wristwatch industry.

The low end of the wristwatch industry may be obsolete due to the rise of the smartphone.

That is classic disruptive innovation.

The new, disruptive product -- a clock you inconveniently keep in your pocket -- might not be perfect, but it is free.

To the ordinary person, a free portable digital clock is more valuable than the cheapest of wristwatches.

In contrast, the low end of the luxury wristwatch market is being disrupted by smartwatches.
The Apple Watch is killing Rolex at its low end.

But the high end of the luxury wristwatch market is doing better than ever.

René Weber, a luxury analyst at Bank Vontobel in Zurich, highlights the sharp contrast in performance between the low and high-end watch segments. Since 2000, Swiss watches costing less than $1,000 have seen their unit sales halve, while watches costing more than $5,000 have seen volumes triple.

Mr Weber says sales of the most prestigious watches made by Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet have been little affected by the smartwatch revolution. Indeed, there are waiting lists for some of their top-end products because of capacity constraints in manufacturing complex mechanical watches.

“You buy these Swiss watches for eternity, whereas you throw away a smartwatch after two to three years,” he says. “It is a different kind of watch, a different kind of experience.”

The flourishing of a luxury market at the high-end might represent a backlash to the democratization of luxury at the low end.

That is, what might be perceived as the product of growing inequality might actually (or might also) signify the devaluation of moderate luxury as it becomes more accessible.

The problem would be growing equality and a rise of status anxiety among those who were most affluent.

For example, higher levels of educational attainment reflect growing equality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

However, those higher educational attainment rates makes it that much more of an imperative for people to send their kids to the most expensive schools.

Since lower-division students are basically reading the same textbooks wherever they go, there is an increasing emphasis on luxurious amenities to distinguish schools.

So the obsession with exaggerating status symbols at the high end reflects increasing democratization in the middle (e.g., smartwatches, state universities).

Indeed, the democratization of the smartwatch market has been taking place since the introduction of the Apple Watch.

That is, the price of the Apple Watch has been falling since its release in 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/fashion/watches-design-audemars-piguet-apple-watch.html

Initially positioned as a luxury product, with an 18-karat gold version that started at $10,000, the watch now starts at a new low price of $199 and is promoted as a health and fitness tool.

Another motive behind the growth of high-end luxury would be the desperation of incumbents who find themselves being disrupted.

Incumbent industries find themselves faced with a choice between adopting a new disruptive innovation or somehow competing against it.

Adopting a cheap, alien technology is neither what an incumbent wants to do nor even what the incumbent is capable of doing.

The rise of digital watches in the 1980s is an example of this.

The Swiss doubled down on sticking with mechanical watches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis

In watchmaking, the quartz crisis (or quartz revolution) is the upheaval in the industry caused by the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, that largely replaced mechanical watches around the world.^[1][2] It caused a significant decline of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which chose to remain focused on traditional mechanical watches, while the majority of the world's watch production shifted to Asian companies such as Seiko, Citizen and Casio in Japan that embraced the new electronic technology.

One strategy is to try to undercut the disruptive innovation on price.

This is exemplified by the creation of the Swatch in the 1980s.

The Swatch was an attempt to compete against cheap digital watches by making accessible, trendy, entry-level mechanical watches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch

Swatch (stylized as swatch) is a Swiss watchmaker founded in 1983 by Nicolas Hayek and a subsidiary of The Swatch Group. The Swatch product line was developed as a response to the "quartz crisis" of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Asian-made digital watches were competing against traditional European-made mechanical watches.

The name Swatch is a contraction of "second watch",^[1] as the watches were intended as casual, disposable accessories.

The other strategy is to move upmarket.

This is "sustaining innovation", in which established products are improved upon.

https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

Disruption theory differentiates disruptive innovations from what are called “sustaining innovations.” The latter make good products better in the eyes of an incumbent’s existing customers: the fifth blade in a razor, the clearer TV picture, better mobile phone reception. These improvements can be incremental advances or major breakthroughs, but they all enable firms to sell more products to their most profitable customers.

The iPhone -- the quintessential disruptor -- is itself an example of how incumbents flee upmarket in the face of disruption.

The cost of Adroid phones keeps falling.

https://www.statista.com/chart/4954/smartphone-average-selling-prices/

Apple's response in 2017 was to create the $999 iPhone X.

The falling cost of technology exemplified in Android phones might be a result of "efficiency innovation".

https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-capitalists-dilemma

Efficiency innovations help companies make and sell mature, established products or services to the same customers at lower prices. Some of these innovations are what we have elsewhere called low-end disruptions, and they involve the creation of a new business model. Walmart was a low-end disrupter in retailing, for example, and Geico in insurance. Other innovations, such as Toyota’s just-in-time production system, are process improvements. Efficiency innovations play two important roles. First, they raise productivity, which is essential for maintaining competitiveness but has the painful side effect of eliminating jobs. Second, they free up capital for more-productive uses.

Toyota’s production system, for example, allowed the automaker to operate with two months’—rather than two years’—worth of inventory on hand, which freed up massive amounts of cash.

Eventually, improved efficiency will push down the cost of smartwatches so that they will become as ubiquitous as smartphones.

In the light of all of the above, it seems counterintuitive that Tesla is trying to manufacture electric cars for the ordinary "everyman".

That sort of mass production is too stressful, and undermines Tesla's image as futuristic and exclusive.

https://www.businessinsider.com/some-tesla-workers-say-company-has-made-big-production-mistakes-2020-3

It is thus puzzling that a luxury brand like Tesla would try to move downmarket as it has with the Model 3.

Rather, as with iPhones and Rolexes, the conventional strategy would be for Tesla to move relentlessly upmarket.

Tesla's move downmarket reflects Elon Musk's impatient desire to transform the auto industry.

Little does Musk seem to realize that he has already triggered the future transformation of the automobile industry into pure EV production.

The popularity of Tesla's high-end cars among luxury auto buyers seems to be exerting pressure on luxury car manufacturers.

Thus, the high-end of automobile manufacturing seems to be shifting toward EV production.

This acceptance of EVs in the luxury market is happening prior to broad acceptance of EVs in the middle and low end of the American automobile market.

The conquest of luxury car markets by EVs might transform EV technology and its public image.

Eventually, EVs may become both affordable and acceptable to ordinary Americans, who currently reject concerns about fuel economy and the environment.

That is, efficiency innovation will drive down EV costs gradually, so that what was a luxury vehicle will become a car for everyone.

Again, one sees this with global smartphone prices falling by 5% a year since the iPhone was launched in 2007.

But this is the dilemma that has always faced innovative companies like Tesla.

On the one hand, the innovator faces an industry paranoid about change, and that industry will try to drive the innovator out of business.

On the other hand, the status quo will eventually adopt the new idea and drive the original innovator out of business.

The third stage of this process is when the innovator ends up working for the establishment.

["Tucker: The Man and His Dream", 1988, trailer]

https://youtu.be/ty93RYkzYQQ

The movie "Tucker" was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by George Lucas.

Coppola and Lucas were young outsiders and great creative filmmakers during the rebellious "New Hollywood" of the 1970s.

Coppola and Lucas were eventually absorbed into mainstream Hollywood.


Perhaps Elon Musk will end up working at Ford.

Openness & rigor (plagues, primaries, sports & schools)

Abstact: Openness and rigor comprise a duality. Openness and rigor may seem mutually exclusive, but in the world of decision-making policies, neither can properly exist without the other. This can be found in the response to epidemics, the selection process of presidential candidates in the USA, the method of ranking competitors in sports and the exclusivity and inclusivity of college admissions.

Response to epidemics

There were two widely cited shortcomings in the response of the government of China to the emergence of COVID 19 in Wuhan:

1. a lack of openness and transparency, and
2. a lack of strong, decisive measures to contain the virus.

In a sense, the government of China has become a kind of military regime.

Openness cannot be expected in such an environment.

This regime has a habitual determination to deny any sort of social problem in China.

In fact, it cannot seem to admit these problems to itself.

Thus, the government failed to take the kind of tough action that one would expect from such an authoritarian regime.

It's the worst of both worlds.

So there might be several lessons to be learned from this episode.

• A combination of openness and toughness is the best policy.
• People tend to have temperamental inclinations to embracing exclusively either openness or rigorousness, making a combined policy less likely.
• Without a combination of both openness and rigor, the policy outcome might end up exhibiting neither openness nor rigor.

Openness and rigor apply to the procedures of the electoral process.

Primaries

Idealists and populists want a political system to be as open as possible.

That in itself is not a bad thing.

In fact, it is an excellent thing insofar as it brings in new ideas and perspectives and new talent.

But by itself it is a very bad thing.

A competitive system should be as open as possible, but also as rigorous as possible.

For example, in the early stages of the primary season in a US presidential election, there should be as many people on that stage as possible.

But there should be a steady process of weeding.

For those who do get weeded out, it feels like yet another example of the great injustices in the world.
That is irrational.

That's like the contestants on "American Idol" being given the boot because they just don't have the talent.

Even the nice judges are saying, "Look, honey, you just cannot sing."

With tears in her eyes the contestant protests that "I know in my heart that I can sing!"

The weeding process can fail to happen during the primaries.

The top candidates may switch places in the polls, but they are secure in their overall status as the serious contenders.

It's not a nice thing to say, but everyone else is a waste of time.

That's just simply the reality.

Can the principle that a system should be as open as possible and as rigorous as possible be applied to sports?

Sports

"Sudden-death elimination" seems too arbitrary.

It seems neither rigorous nor open.

It's less open because a competitor who loses just one match is sidelined for the season.

It is less rigorous because the element of luck takes on a more central role in such a system of rapid elimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-elimination_tournament

A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion.

The arbitrariness of single-elimination competitions can be seen in tennis tournaments.

Sometimes a champion having a bad day will be suddenly and unexpected defeated and eliminated from further play by a middling player having a great day.

Because the lucky middling player will soon enough be defeated and eliminated makes this system absurd.

Single-elimination competition does have the benefit of providing an exciting life-or-death gladiatorial struggle.

But by taking a top-ranked contender out of contention for the rest of the season, matches that would have been even more exciting at the higher levels are not going to happen.

A more thorough system of competition would be "round robin".

It is more open because each competitor plays against every other competitor.

It is more rigorous in that it insures that it is the better competitor advances up through the ranks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_tournament

A round-robin tournament (or all-play-all tournament) is a competition in which each contestant meets all other contestants in turn.^[1][2] A round-robin contrasts with an elimination tournament, in which participants are eliminated after a certain number of losses.

One problem with round-robin systems is that because each competitor must play every other, the playing season is long and tedious.

But there might be a way of addressing this.

Games would be scheduled earlier in the year than the current system.

The first games would involve the lowest ranked competitors from the previous year.

So the very first game would involve the competitor that came in last place versus the competitor who came in second-to-last place.

Only later in the season would the top-ranked competitors from the previous year begin to play.

But there might be an additional measure taken to make the competition more intense.

There would be two leagues, major and minor.

A major league competitor could be demoted into the minor-leagues for losing too many games in a season.

A minor-league competitor could be promoted into the majors by, say, winning enough championships over the years.

Can openness and rigor be applied to the educational system?

Education

Meritocracy consists of the promotion based on talent and effort rather than inheritance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

Meritocracy (merit, from Latinmereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class.^[1] Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.

The NYT columnist David Brooks claims that there are two forms of meritocracy at work in the USA -- one that produces the elite and one for the rest of us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/markovits-meritocracy.html

There are at least two kinds of meritocracy in America right now. Exclusive meritocracy exists at the super-elite universities and at the industries that draw the bulk of their employees from them — Wall Street, Big Law, medicine and tech. And then there is the more open meritocracy that exists almost everywhere else.

Those who manage to survive and thrive in the hyper-competitive world of the elite meritocracy tend to become ultra-liberal in order to broadcast their virtue.

In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject. The elite universities reject 85 to 95 percent of their applicants. Those accepted spend much of their lives living in neighborhoods and attending conferences where it is phenomenally expensive or hard to get in. Whether it’s the resort town you vacation in or the private school you send your kids to, exclusivity is the pervasive ethos. The more the exclusivity, the thicker will be the coating of P.C. progressivism to show that we’re all good people.

The elite meritocracy has a serious work ethic.

People in this caste work phenomenally hard to build their wealth. As Daniel Markovits notes in his powerful new book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of workers in the top quintile of earners who work more than 50 hours a week nearly doubled.

Their talents and efforts translate into massive productivity.

People in this caste are super-skilled and productive. There are more than 70 law firms, Markovits notes, that generate over $1 million in annual profit per partner. When Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion, it had only 13 full-time employees.

It has been asserted that the problem with growing social inequality is with inequality of wealth, not income.

That is, the problem is not high incomes of professionals but with stock and real estate ownership of businessmen.

Actually, the problem might be the income of the elite-educated professional classes, not stock owners.

That is, the problem is not the top 1% of stock owners, but the top 20% of income earners.

A few years ago, people in this elite professional caste seized on research by Thomas Piketty, who argued that rising inequality is caused by the shift in income away from labor and toward capital. The investors are to blame! But, Markovits argues, roughly 75 percent of the increase in the top 1 percent of earnings is caused by shifts in income within labor. These highly educated professionals attract vast earnings while everybody else gets left behind. A cardiologist used to earn four times as much as a nurse; now it’s seven times as much.

The liberal professional classes have become a quasi-aristocracy that reproduces itself by passing its advantages on to its own children.

Parents in the exclusive meritocracy raise their kids to be fit fighters within it. Markovits calculates how much affluent parents invest on their kids’ human capital, over and above what middle-class parents can afford to invest. He concludes that affluent parents invest $10 million more per child. The resulting highly honed, high-performing young people are amazing — and endure the stresses you’d expect. At the best law school in the country, Yale, 70 percent of the students say they experience mental health challenges.

It's a closed system.

The elite meritocracy promotes talent, but from a limited, over-educated pool of students, typically from the liberal professional classes.

What Brooks does not mention is that the professional classes are really just highly paid super-technicians.

The result is a kind of clueless sterility, devoid of creativity and critical thought.

Here is the Amazon description from William Deresiewicz's 2015 "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life":

A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation’s top schools should be—but aren’t—providing: “The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those ‘sheep’), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem” (People).
As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass.

Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it.

“Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz’s book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness” (The New York Times).

The poster child of the liberal upper-middle class professional caste might be Mark Zuckerberg, son of a dentist and a psychiatrist.

For all his bold talk -- "Move fast and break things" -- he is a technician, not a rebel.

For all his technical brilliance, Zuckerberg is devoid of critical thought and creativity -- perhaps less reflective than the average person.

Zuckerberg was once naively idealistic, but now all he has is a reactive combativeness and a determination to win.

At no point has he attained any wisdom.

Following the 2016 election, President Barack Obama gave Zuckerberg a long personal lecture about how Facebook is hurting and not helping American democracy.

Zuckerberg came away puzzled.

The sole life experience of affluent technicians from the professional class is a harsh technical education.

These people have assumed positions of leadership.

The leaders of old -- say, George Washington -- might have been less intelligent.

But the old elite was educated into the humanities at elite schools, and they did serves as officers in wartime, they did have life experience.

The Excellent Sheep are closed.

The are over-trained too narrowly and are inbred within the professional class.

Oddly, however, by being "hothouse flowers", their education is not truly rigorous.

They are admirably scholarly in their method and focus, but not erudite in their breadth.

Brooks contrast this closed elite with what he calls an "inclusive meritocracy".

Arizona State University, which is led by Michael Crow[,] defines itself not by how many people it can exclude but by how many it can include. The need for higher education is greater than ever, so A.S.U. has rapidly expanded to meet that need. Between 2013 and 2018, undergraduate enrollment rose by 45 percent. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of engineering students grew to 22,400 from about 6,400.

A.S.U. has done it by increasing its reach into those who are underserved. The number of first-generation students has more than quadrupled since 2002.

Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.

The system seems open enough.

But is it rigorous?

The quality has risen along with the size. Research expenditures double every six to eight years, and a number of academic departments are nationally recognized as among the best for the quality of their research.

Despite all this research, the focus is pragmatic.

The atmosphere is much more democratic and accessible to all. Faculty members are treated less as scholars within rarefied disciplines and more as interdisciplinary intellectual entrepreneurs. The goal is immediate social impact as much as expanding knowledge, so, for example, A.S.U.’s Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions is enmeshed with local residents to transform a Phoenix neighborhood.

ASU might be inclusive.

But is ASU rigorous?

There was once a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education as to the rigor of state universities.
The comment asserted that there are three types of higher educational institutions:

1. Elite universities for the best and the brightest.
2. Small college for those who want to teach and learn.
3. State universities for those who need credentials for the job market.

The comment went on to note that when one visits the library at an elite university on a Thursday evening, the library is packed with students and professors preparing for a long, hard weekend of study.

It then said that when one visits the library at a state university on a Thursday evening, the place is vacant of patrons because "The drinking has commenced."

The research done at a state university might be rigorous, but the academic program is probably not at the level of a prestigious college or elite university.

To increase rigor at a state university, the rigor would have to be built in to the primary and secondary levels of public education.

For example, academic standards and funding of public elementary and high schools would be raised in order to create a "college ready" student body.

But then, in another strategy to improve rigor, students who are not academically inclined would be prepared for a non-college career track -- despite being given a high quality academic education in K-12.

That's probably not going to happen.

It might be added that inclusiveness must be an active process.

That is, inclusiveness is not just admitting large numbers of people into what is a self-selecting process dominated by the upper classes.

And insofar as inclusiveness is active, it has its own rigor and exclusiveness.

One example is giftedness.

Most students in gifted and talented programs are supposedly not really classic gifted students.

They might be better understood as the kind of very bright, high-achieving students who attend small prestigious liberal arts colleges, who are generally:

• from New England or the northeast in general,
• Asian or Jewish, at least in part, and/or
• the offspring of schoolteachers or professors.

Giftedness is distributed evenly throughout the social hierarchy and all ethnic groups.

Such underprivileged gifted students can be identified, but it does take some effort to do so.

Yet such efforts are usually not taken.

The exception might be sports, because coaches will approach tall, fast or large students and try to entice them into a program.

Would society dedicate resources to identifying gifted and potential high-achieving students hidden among the academically unremarkable student population?

More pointedly, would the upper-middle class, which values the education of their own offspring so highly, push for such a policy?

That is, would they want such a policy of active evaluation even if it created more competition for their own kids?

So far, they have not.

What about the working class?

They generally don't value things that have little practical purpose, and they don't want their kids to develop abnormally (which is what giftedness is).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindergarten_Teacher_(2018_film)

This is a tragedy of the commons because developing talent is a matter of national security.

This might shift the focus away from colleges and universities in terms of inclusive meritocracy.

That is, the real focus should be on cultivating all students at the elementary level, and later at middle school and high school.

The process now seems quite passive and unsophisticated.

But even if a more advanced form of evaluation were implemented, it seems inherently difficult and expensive.

Moreover, creativity in particular is difficult to identify.

Certainly, there does seem to be a need to find some sort of upward path for the working class.
In 2005, the New York Times published a series on social stratification in the USA entitled "Class Matters".

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/

https://www.amazon.com/Class-Matters-New-York-Times/dp/0805080554/

https://www.amazon.com/Class-Matters-New-York-Times/dp/0805080554/

The Wall Street Journal seemed to respond with its own article -- not as a refutation, but as a confirmation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111595026421432611

The articles mention that in the 1950s, when C. Wright Mills wrote "The Power Elite", there was a barrier to entry to the tiny ruling class.

That barrier between the "power elite" of policy decision makers -- politicians, elite bureaucrats, corporate leaders -- has disappeared.

Today, most of the elite decision makers derive from the upper-middle professional classes.

However, a new barrier has appeared between the working class and the middle class -- something that did not exist in the 1950s.

Back in 2005, the intuitive solution to this unexpected development was to send the working class to college.

In retrospect, that is problematic.

The working class, even when they are academically prepared for college -- and even when they are gifted -- do not understand college, and cannot relate to it.

There is a tendency for them to amass student debt and then drop out.

College may be synonymous with opportunity for those who have ascended through the academic ranks, but for the working class, there is no such connotation.

In equating personal and social progress with higher education in such a narrow fashion, the system is ironically closed to the working class.


The system is neither really open nor is it rigorous.

Ideology & fluoridation

The element fluoride exists naturally in the environment.

It is found in the water supply, often in high levels.

It is often added to water in moderate amounts to help fight tooth decay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

Water fluoridation is the controlled adjustment of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay. Fluoridated water contains fluoride at a level that is effective for preventing cavities; this can occur naturally or by adding fluoride.^[2] Fluoridated water operates on tooth surfaces: in the mouth, it creates low levels of fluoride in saliva, which reduces the rate at which tooth enamel demineralizes and increases the rate at which it remineralizes in the early stages of cavities.^[3] Typically a fluoridated compound is added to drinking water, a process that in the U.S. costs an average of about $1.11 per person-year.^[2][4] Defluoridation is needed when the naturally occurring fluoride level exceeds recommended limits. In 2011 the World Health Organization suggested a level of fluoride from 0.5 to 1.5 mg/L (milligrams per litre), depending on climate, local environment, and other sources of fluoride.

In the USA, there has long been opposition to fluoridated water.

The water fluoridation controversy arises from political, moral, ethical, economic, and safety concerns regarding the water fluoridation of public water supplies.^[82][106] For deprived groups in both maturing and matured countries, international and national agencies and dental associations across the world support the safety and effectiveness of water fluoridation.^[3] Authorities' views on the most effective fluoride therapy for community prevention of tooth decay are mixed; some state water fluoridation is most effective, while others see no special advantage and prefer topical application strategies.^[12][16]

Those opposed argue that water fluoridation has no or little cariostatic benefits, may cause serious health problems, is not effective enough to justify the costs, is pharmacologically obsolete,^{[2][107][108][109]} and presents a moral conflict between the common good and individual rights.^[110]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy

Without going further into the details of that controversy, a review of ideologies might explain objections to water fluoridation.

However, there is a bigger point being made in this survey of ideologies.

Distinct ideologies form alliances with other ideologies.

Over time, a coalition comprised of diverse worldviews will clump together in a fused identity that denies that internal differences exist within.

That is, political parties get amnesia about their own internal diversity.

Libertarian. Libertarians maintain that rational choice at the individual, micro level is the most effective, efficient and practical basis of all public policy. For example, fluoridation may not be so necessary in places where fluoride toothpaste is fastidiously used.

Conservatism. The conservative worldview sees society as complex, organic, slowly evolving and mysterious in its operation. For the conservative, it is wrongheaded for the government to impose its rationalist agenda on a social reality that nobody really understands. For example, historically, farmers all over the world have resisted the advice given to them by scientists who refute the superstitions and traditions that govern farm work. After all, it was know-it-all, rationalist scientists who recommended that the skeletons and brains of slaughtered cows could be dehydrated, powdered and fed to herbivorous cattle as a supplement -- a practice which led to bovine encephalitis (mad cow disease). Unlike libertarians, conservatives emphasize morality over rationality and practicality. In particular, conservatives are wary of "moral hazard" -- rewarding wrongdoing and penalizing virtue and hard work. Hence, conservatives oppose bank bailouts, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and universal ("free") health care. For conservatives, parents need to teach their kids to brush their teeth and avoid eating candy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Romanticism. A romantic worldview is not a political ideology, yet strains of romanticism can be found throughout the ideological spectrum. In the 19th century, the backlash against the excesses of the French Revolution led to a refined articulation of the conservative worldview. Conservatives opposed the centralization of state power as the imposition of artificial, mechanical structures on a complex, living organic whole (community, culture). Romanticism weaponizes this worldview and advocates the overthrow of repressive structures. Romanticism, in fact, calls for liberation from all structures, even the traditional structures that conservatives seek to preserve. Romantics rebel against moral restrictions imposed on the emotions, against the persecution by society of the free individual, and against the colonization of indigenous peoples -- in particular, against the conquest of Europe by the Muslim Turks. Ironically, romantics tend to be upper-middle class and/or over-educated -- the classic "tenured radical". On the one hand, their radicalism is informed by their lack of common sense and real-world experience. On the other hand, they are also driven by semi-conscious feelings of guilt over their semi-privileged background. They are neither the "haves" nor the impoverished "have-nots", but rather "semi-haves" raised in prosperity and later marginalized. Likewise, racially, they are not mainline white Protestants, but neither are they the black underclass. Rather, they are so often ethnically "in between" -- Asian Americans, Jews, Catholics or mixed race. In the USA, young, over-educated, urban "socialists" are not really socialists or populists, but rather romantics who would rebel against socialism and (rural) populism if they actually lived within the confines of a socialist economy or a (small-town) populist community. For romantics, fluoridation of the water supply, like GMOs, represents a corporate-state conspiracy against what is natural.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sanders-chapo-trap-house.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

Populism. Populists are egalitarians and localists who despise control of society by distant, out-of-touch elites. They tend to live in rural areas. In the USA, they used to be Democrats. Unlike libertarians, who share their localism, they are not rationalists. For example, populists hate elites, they hate change ("neophobia"), and they hate outsiders (xenophobia) -- but what they hate most of all is education. Unlike conservatives, who share with populists a distrust of change and of "big government", populists do not have a problem with moral hazard. For example, populists do not have any problem at all with "free" universal health care. They do have a big problem when health care coverage is mandatory and they are forced to sign up for it (e.g., as with the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare"). In general, populists don't care about fluoridation of the water supply because they don't even know what fluoride is. In fact, they might support it if it means that they can land a job with the government. But if libertarians, conservatives and/or romantics make an issue over fluoridation, populists just might join in the opposition against "all these things being crammed down our throats nowadays by those elites in Washington".

All four of these ideologies can now be found in the Republican Party.

Libertarians and conservatives have long been pillars of the Republican Party.

This alliance is unique in some respects, although Americans so often equate libertarians and conservatives.

In contrast to this very American fusion of libertarianism and conservatism, in the rest of the world the dominant form of conservatism has long been Christian Democracy.

In American terms, Christian Democrats can be understood as socially and culturally conservative, yet fiscally liberal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy

In practice, Christian democracy is often considered centre-right on cultural, social and moral issues, and is a supporter of social conservatism, but it is considered centre-left "with respect to economic and labor issues, civil rights, and foreign policy" as well as the environment.

Angela Merkel of Germany is a Christian Democrat, although she advertises herself as progressive.

In fact, it could be argued that Barack Obama is similar to Merkel in this respect -- a cultural conservative who hides it brilliantly.

The Conservative Party of the UK are akin to Christian Democrats.

In this light, Margaret Thatcher was an outsider, an American-style libertarian-conservative hybrid.

Indeed, perhaps Ronald Reagan might have been the converse of Barack Obama -- a libertarian who hid it brilliantly.

The neoconservative movement had a strong romantic strain.

They were typically over-educated Jews and Catholics who were once leftists (liberals, socialists, communists).

Now the Republican Party is overrun with populists.

This four-part coalition -- libertarians, conservatives, romantics, populists -- keeps the Republicans in power.

But it doesn't make them happy with each other.

When Nixon began to woo northern Catholics and white Southerners into joining the Republican Party during the 1970s, he was opening the door to populists.

Interestingly, populists share a general political orientation with the Christian Democrats -- socially conservative, fiscally liberal.

["30 Rock", "Subway Hero" episode, Dennis Duffy explains his politics to CEO Jack Donaghy]

This would not make a libertarian happy.