No… I’m not talking about discrimination, at least not racial or gender discrimination, but about the growing inability of younger Americans, say a huge percentage of those under fifty, to integrate information and knowledge into their studies, lives, and social and economic behavior.

This is scarcely just my personal evaluation. Since my wife is a university professor, and one daughter a secondary school teacher, and two others graduate school professors [one in law and the other in medicine], and all of them interact with others in their fields, the data-base from which I’m drawing is both broad geographically and in terms of fields. And all of them, and the vast majority of their colleagues, all agree on one point – the majority of U.S. students cannot integrate information. They cannot offer a coherent, fact-based oral or written presentation that is both organized and logically supported.

This deficiency goes well beyond education. We have far too high an unemployment rate, and an especially high underemployment rate, in this country, yet we have business after business claiming that they cannot find skilled employees and, often, not even potential employees who can be trained. Why not? Because pretty much every job above the basest form of manual labor requires a degree of information integration.

In the case of students, the majority of them are not stupid, nor are they inherently slow. They couldn’t be with the speed at which they text. But they’ve never been taught how to take discrete bits of information, to evaluate them, and then to integrate that information into their world-view, or even just into their work-view or school-view.

Not only is this lack of information integration prevalent in schools and universities, but it’s now pervading everything, from politics to business to entertainment.

What is overlooked so often today are some very simple points. Without facts to back it up, any viewpoint is just prejudiced opinion. Without knowledge of how a tool works and what its limitations are, the worker who uses it is an accident waiting to occur.

According to poll after poll, around 90% of all Americans are displeased, if not furious, with the American Congress. Yet in the last election, over 96% of all incumbents were re-elected. A little bit of cognitive dissonance there? If you’re that displeased with Congress, why did you reelect the same folks you’re so displeased with? Take your choice – (a) people are incredibly stupid, (b) they can’t put the facts together, i.e., they can’t integrate information, (c) party loyalty supersedes factual information, i.e., most people are illogical, or (D) some combination of the above.

Now, polls show that the majority of voters in any given district/state have a favorable view of their own representative or senator, even when that elected official continually votes against the voter’s declared interests.

As I’ve noted more than a few times, all too many businesses seem unable or unwilling to integrate data and events that indicate that the insistence on higher short-term profits puts them on a long-term course for disaster and lower profits. GM’s faulty starter switch was a perfect example. Saving less than a dollar a car by installing substandard switches in roughly 30 million cars for more than ten years “saved” GM something like $30 million. GM has already paid the National Highway Transportation Board more than $35 million in fines and faces more than one billion dollars in costs, not including additional lawsuits by almost a thousand claimants.

The last thing the United States needs is another generation that is even less adept at integrating and analyzing information, but with schools clearly not being able to teach such skills and the instant-media-communication thirty-second news bite and the growing popularity of Twitter and texting, I’m getting the distinct feeling that information integration and analysis is falling even further behind in the list of skills valued by Americans.

Last week the New York Times book section led off with a review of a book whose title I’m not about to name, for reasons that will become obvious. The book in question was a “science fiction” novel by a “mainstream” author and was highly praised. The reviewer opens by stating that just as the Apollo missions showed the beauty of our planet, in the same fashion a “comparable journey takes place in the best works of science fiction – an imaginative visit to speculative realms that returns the reader more forcibly to the sad and beautiful facts of human existence.” So far, so good.

But then, even as the reviewer admits, the author breaks no new ground with his tale of a missionary’s trip and experiences on an alien world [with no reference to The Sparrow or A Case of Conscience, I might add], but praises him as “a master of the weird” and, after summarizing the plot of the novel, concludes by comparing the author to Hilary Mantel [whom he declares has made the historical novel “newly respectable”] and saying he hopes the author “can do something similar for speculative writing.” The author is, of course, an international seller with several movies based on his books.

All of this gave me the almost insane desire to borrow weapons – as many as I could – from Larry Correia and go on my own monster hunt against the so-called mainstream literati, such as the reviewer, who clearly feels that no existing F&SF writer, no matter how good, can possibly do what this author, as an outsider, may be able to do. The sad part is that the reviewer just might be right, not because there is not a great deal of highly literate and well-written F&SF, but because there seems to be a view among literary reviewers that such literature does not exist.

In the case of such “mainstream” reviewers, I just can’t forgive ignorance and/or total disregard of an entire long-standing genre, particularly when that ignorance has existed so long and so willfully. Praising a novel that clearly examines issues and tropes that have been examined in detail in F&SF for years, if not longer, often brilliantly, as if no one has ever done it before, in the hopes that a talented outsider can bring more readers and “enlighten” them to the fact that within &SF exist a great many brilliant works of literature, seems to me to reveal that the so-called mainstream literati continue to exhibit either ignorance beyond ignorance, or ignorance compounded by arrogance.

And for those reasons, I’m not about to give ink or mention to either the reviewer or the author,

… and the test results are in. Utah high school students just received the results of a new test that measures achievement in language, mathematics, and science… and on average, less than half the students met the standards in any of the test areas. Two things about the new test were especially interesting, first that the standards and what was being measured didn’t change and, second, that half of the new test required answers from the student – no guessing from choices provided. While there were schools whose overall student mastery levels reached or exceeded 90% mastery, there were also schools where the mastery levels averaged in the 10%-20% range.

What to me is so obvious, but what has been overlooked for years by both parents and educational bureaucrats, is that multiple choice tests don’t accurately show student subject mastery – they’re far more likely to reward speed readers with moderate subject mastery and great test-taking ability. And multiple choice testing certainly doesn’t measure the ability to reason out a mathematical concept or to write an accurate and grammatically correct paragraph.Those students who excel at multiple-choice testing are generally those who (1) have learned the material and can regurgitate or recall it quickly; (2) those able to read and process the questions quickly, (3) those with a comprehensive understanding of common and standard language and society, and (4) those with higher levels of self-discipline. Not surprisingly, those abilities tend to be associated with families with higher incomes and with students from more demanding schools [most of which are either schools in high income areas or charter schools with extraordinarily dedicated and highly professional staff, as well as generally better resources. There are exceptions, of course, but exceptions, as the saying goes, often prove the rule.

The other long-standing problem with multiple choice tests is that they provide an unrealistic view of the choices in life outside and after schooling. Sometimes, usually very infrequently, life presents you with clear and multiple choices. Most of the time, your choices either aren’t obvious, tend to be between less obnoxious alternatives, or you don’t have a real choice at all. Even when choices seem obvious, they often aren’t, because the most appealing one in the short run may turn into a long-range disaster.

The “advantages” to multiple-choice tests are that (1) they’re theoretically more objective, since whether one adequately written paragraph is better than another can result in subjective grading; (2) theytake far fewer resources and are far easier to grade; (3) they allow theoretically more objective comparisons of teachers, schools, and school systems [except most really don’t measure how much a given teacher has improved the skills of a particular student or set of students].

The fact that Utah test scores dropped drastically across the board when open-ended questions were added underscores dramatically just how limited multiple choice tests are – as almost any veteran classroom teacher can explain.

But then, since multiple choice tests are graded on the immediate answer, and we have two generations in a row raised on multiple choice tests, is it any wonder that we’ve become a society dominated by instant gratification and superficial knowledge, with a continuing decline in true critical thinking?

Last week, just a week before the election, two candidates for an open Utah congressional seat got into a “contest” of sorts in which each claimed to hold the most “Mormon/LDS” views, although the assertions weren’t quite that boldly stated… but enough so that the headline from the Salt Lake Tribune played it that way. The idea of claiming “values superiority” isn’t something unique to Utah, unhappily. I’ve seen more than a few elections over the years in which candidates vied to prove who held the more “Christian values.” And for that matter, isn’t the primary cause of ISIS in the Middle East to create a land governed by the most “Islamic” values? Didn’t England suffer through centuries of internal conflict over which church’s values would be predominant? Not to mention the bloody conflicts that wracked Europe immediately after the Reformation?

Just what do people really mean by such assertions? Let’s see. “Most Christian” — today is that code for right-to-life, anti-feminist, pro-gun rights, anti-minority, and thoroughly patriarchal? If it is, that’s rather at variance with the doctrines of that carpenter on whose name and deeds Christianity is theoretically based. On the other hand, Joseph Smith was a patriarchal polygamist who was definitely a right-to-life type, but is that what those two candidates meant?

Or were they just trying to claim, “I’m just like most of you.” But… if most of their constituents want a supremacy of religious values in government, where does that leave all those who don’t share those values?

Like the Founding Fathers, I’m rather skeptical of putting religious values ahead of everything because one immediate question arises – whose religious values? And the second question is of even greater concern – to what degree will a candidate or incumbent attempt to use government to strengthen or impose those values on those who do not share them? All of which brings up a third question – if a candidate doesn’t intend to strengthen or impose those religious values he or she is trumpeting, exactly why bring them up except to gain an advantage. And if that’s the case, what does that reveal about how far the politician or candidate will go to obtain or maintain power.

As for me, I tend to vote against candidates who trumpet religious values – unless their opponents have even greater flaws, which, these days, is more often the case than I can ever recall… and that’s a sad commentary as well.

Amid all the political posturing and smears and counter-smears, one underlying aspect of American politics that is accepted without question by most Americans is the practice of lobbying, although a great many Americans rage against lobbyists for views they don’t believe in or for government programs they oppose. That is, lobbying for the “right” causes is fine, just not for the “wrong” ones, but lobbying itself tends to be accepted as a necessary evil.

Should it be?

James Madison worried greatly about “factions” marshalling votes and influence to shape government unwisely, but felt that restricting the “petitioning” of government allowed by the Constitution was a remedy worse than the illness, and felt that the competition of interests would restrict the influence of any one faction. In a sense, for most of the history of the United States, he was largely correct.

Except… reported annual expenditures for lobbying the federal government have gone from less than $200 million in 1975 to almost $4 billion last year, and the actual numbers are far higher, as I can personally attest, since I spent time as a “consultant” in Washington. D.C., where my earnings were not counted as lobbying because I was merely “analyzing” the effect of potential laws and regulations on business and the economy. Nor were most of the other consultants with whom I worked then classed as lobbyists.

If Madison were correct, lobbying wouldn’t be the problem it’s become. The problem is that it takes money, big money, to analyze and determine the impact of policy and laws… and to package and present such analyses in easily understandable format to legislators and federal bureaucrats. The result is that close to three quarters of all lobbying expenditures are made by large businesses and business organizations. It also takes a continual presence, which requires more money, and the most effective lobbyists are those who know the system – such as former bureaucrats, former staffers, and former members of Congress, all of whom have greater access.

When I left my position as a Congressional staff director to become Director of Legislation at the U.S. EPA, I was thirty-seven years old, with ten years’ experience in politics, and I was one of the older Congressional staff directors. Legislative aides were usually far younger and paid much less. From what I’ve been able to determine, this situation hasn’t changed, and isn’t likely to, not when staff directors’ pay is statutorily capped at far below that of lobbyists and consultants and when most senior Congressional staffers work 60-80 hour weeks, and sometimes longer, with no overtime, and can be dismissed literally instantly [I saw this happen personally several times].

The Congressional staff workload is incredibly heavy; most staffers are young and with little experience, especially compared to the lobbyists, and they don’t have enough time to research anything in depth, while the lobbyists do and can also rely on long experience.

The result is a foregone conclusion, and exactly what we see today, a legally permitted lobbying system heavily slanted toward those interests with the most resources, predominantly but not exclusively those of business. Unhappily, there’s another aspect that Madison and the Founding Fathers didn’t and probably couldn’t have foreseen. It’s simple enough. Because society has become incredibly more complex since 1789, the federal government has expanded into regulating and influencing almost every aspect of American society, and while “purists” insist much of this is not necessary, in fact much of it is, unhappily.

Before we had food and drug safety laws, buying food and medicines was often the equivalent of Russian roulette, especially in cities. The growth of industry meant that state laws were inadequate to deal with trade and industrial problems, and legal conflicts required resolution. Before there were environmental laws, rivers literally caught fire and swimming in some could literally kill you. Before finance legislation, bank failures were a common occurrence, and borrowers neither had access to information on which to make decisions nor recourse if a bank failed.

The upshot of all this is that there are a multiplicity of individual interests as the result of an expanded government and an economy with international impacts, and each individual interest competes with every other interest for getting the attention of government. Those interests representing the most money or the most votes generally are those pushed most successfully by lobbyists, and the overriding problem is that the sum total of those “noticed” private interests doesn’t equate to the overall public interest.

Over time, while there are times when governments need to run deficits, public revenues, i.e., taxes, need to come close to the level of public expenditures. That’s a definite overall public interest. Breathing clean air and having clean water to drink is an overall public interest. Not having mine wastes spill into drinking water is a public interest. Having a taxation system that doesn’t give special breaks to some industries and not to others might also be considered an overall good. But we’re running massive deficits and have for years; we still have air unfit to breathe in many parts of the country; and we’ve had massive drinking water pollution from failures of mine tailings impoundments and from agricultural impoundments. We have a crumbling transportation infrastructure, an increasingly fragile electric power distribution system, and municipal water systems that leak and waste incredible amounts of water… and those are just a fraction of the real problems out there.

But comparatively few lobbyists are out there pushing the public good, and all too often those “public interest” lobbyists are attacked and ridiculed for being anti-business, or opposed to someone’s “rights” to run an organization or as business as they choose. Even the “go-gooders” apparently pushing for public interests tend to focus on the popular causes, and there’s nothing new about this. Some twenty years ago, the U.S. EPA did a study on funding for environmental causes, and discovered that the environmental problems that caused the most deaths and health problems were far down the list, while high profile problems that actually affected comparatively far fewer people topped both federal appropriations and public concerns.

In the end, lobbying costs money, and businesses have more of it than anyone else, and that means they most often have most of the best hired guns, access to the best information, and the best systems for presenting their cases. That doesn’t even account for the impact of campaign contributions.

The real wonder is that there are as many cases where government actually tries to promote the overall public good as there are, but those instances are becomingly increasingly rarer… because most lobbyists aren’t interested in the public good, only in pushing for favorable treatment for their private good… and as the increasing welter of special interest provisions in law and regulations indicates, private interests are increasingly trumping public good.