With President Biden’s nomination for the next Supreme Court justice, standardized tests are once more in the news, along with the fallacies offered on both sides.

What both sides fail to admit, at least publicly, is that standardized tests are a tool, nothing more and nothing less. If the tool is poorly constructed, it won’t work well. Even if it’s decently constructed, if it’s applied poorly, the results may not be accurate.

Often overlooked is the fact that tests such as the ACT and the SAT were initially effectively designed to measure the qualities needed by white, predominantly male, upper middle class students to succeed in college. The tests have proved to be, despite claims to the contrary, moderately effective for determining collegiate success for that socio-economic group and for certain hard-working Asian minority students. They’re less effective for other socio-economic groups, for a number of reasons.

Well-designed standardized tests will measure certain results accurately, no matter what detractors claim. The problem is that the results they measure aren’t precisely what the proponents of such tests claim. Tests such as the ACT, SAT, LSAT, MCAT, or GRE measure not only certain types of knowledge, which is their stated purpose, but they also measure indirectly other abilities.

The tests measure the ability to read and comprehend quickly, to recognize and analyze patterns, and to quickly recall facts and techniques and to apply them to a situation, problem, or text presented in verbal or mathematical form.

That means that someone who takes the test who reads quickly and accurately has a tremendous advantage on timed tests, and that advantage effectively allows the test-taker more time and places more pressure on the test-taker who knows just as much if not more but who cannot read as fast. In addition, the tests often don’t measure depth of knowledge or the ability to solve complex and multi-faceted problems.

Tests given at the primary school level can reflect as much the students’ socio-economic backgrounds as their intelligence, because a student from a well-read and well-educated upper middle class background will often have greater exposure to the terms and structures of testing.

Such tests are biased, no matter what backers of the tests say, against individuals who do not read the test language quickly, against individuals from a differing socio-economic background who don’t know all the indirect cultural referents embodied in the test, and against those who have high intellectual levels but who do not process information quickly.

What that does mean is that the tests are generally more accurate in assessing the abilities of an upper-middle-class male who reads moderately quickly than in assessing actual intellectual abilities of someone who comes from a different background.

Such tests can be a useful indicator, but they shouldn’t be used as the sole indicator. Unfortunately, the problem today is that many of the other indicators used previously have become useless. Grade inflation has gotten to the point where there’s almost no statistical difference between students in many schools, and where class rank is often decided by a single bad mark in a single course in the ninth grade [FYI, this isn’t hyperbole]. Neither are outside activities.

Tests also don’t reflect the character and determination of the test-taker. Every year, my wife the professor sees students with good high school grades, high test scores, and good native ability flunk out because they were unwilling or unable, for other reasons, to do work that should be well within their capabilities.

But right now, standardized test scores, flawed and biased as they are, are the most accurate predictor of performance for their original target population, simply because there aren’t any other reliable measures.

For everyone else, whatever other yardsticks are being used to determine their abilities are in fact somewhere between estimates and guesstimates.

Last week, amid the personal, geo-political, and humanitarian disasters caused by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, it also dawned on the tech world that between forty and seventy percent of the world’s pure neon gas [depending on which source is reporting] has been refined and provided by Ukraine. We can certainly do without any more garish neon signs, but nearly perfectly neon is required for the production and manufacture of the majority of computer chips, and it takes time to build and get into operation a plant that can provide the 99.9% pure neon required for high-tech uses..

Most chip manufacturers appear to have between three to eight weeks supply of neon, but some have less than that. China also has neon, likely enough for its needs, and Linde built a neon plant in Texas in 2016, but some chip-makers will soon exhaust their supplies, and that means another chip shortage in the months ahead.

Outsourcing and offshore manufacturing to get the cheapest costs is based on the assumption that trade patterns remain stable and reliable, and that all nations value economic stability over military objectives, but Putin’s attack on Ukraine illustrates the dangers of national and industrial policy based on that assumption.

And this doesn’t even take into account that Ukraine also supplies the majority of wheat and vegetable oil for countries like Egypt, where shortages could also result in hardships and socio-political unrest.

So long as the world contains nation-state powers that can disrupt trade and supply lines, it’s foolhardy not to have critical reserve capabilities. So…in effect, to maintain a stable industrial economy, the U.S. either needs to maintain overwhelming military power and considerable economic power to keep rogue regimes in line or an industrial policy and programs to insulate our manufacturing and wholesale production economy from supply interruptions.

Right now, it appears that we’re not doing that well on either front, largely because politicians won’t or can’t address either and because too many of the giant corporations don’t want to do anything that adversely affects their immediate profitability in the slightest… and because too many Americans fail to understand that cheaper at all costs is seldom better in the long run.

But, hey, who cares about the long run (at least enough to really do anything about it)?

The other day, I was in the local Walmart, which actually has a good grocery and produce section, and which might be because it sits right next to I-15, and I-15 is the main interstate for produce flowing out of Southern California. On my grocery list was either Chinese plum sauce or sweet and sour sauce. Now, the oriental food section in Walmart isn’t huge, but it runs from floor up to eight feet and extends twelve to fifteen feet from side to side.

In that entire space, I could not find any form of sweet and sour sauce or plum sauce. In fact, I couldn’t find anything besides soy sauce and sesame oil that wasn’t hot, hotter, hottest, or super hot. Except for soy sauces and sesame oil, everything was spiced with some degree of heat, many vowing to be the hottest ever.

That got me to thinking, and as I went searching for some plain Cheetos, I found one bag, barely visible, surrounded by various versions of “hot” Cheetos, again in copious quantities. The same was true of the Dorritos. In the meat section, almost all of the Italian sausage is “heated,” with two lone packs of “sweet” Italian sausage.

I could go on in detail, but it seems like everywhere, from grocery stores to fast food chains, even to upscale restaurants, there’s a heat craze. I don’t like bland food, and I’m quite fond of cinnamon, but I draw the line at food spiced so much with chilies of various sorts that all I can taste is the intensity of the chilies, and that only for an instant before my senses and taste buds burn out.

Not only that, but now I’m even seeing chili ice cream, and there’s an Italian chili ice cream that you can’t get without signing a liability waiver.

Apparently, not only are our politics going to heated extremes, but so, it seems to me, is far too much of our food.

Americans, in particular, embrace a conceit that the United States is special because it has, if you will, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and they tend to believe that the United States is unusual and almost unique in that regard as being the first modern nation to embrace that ideal without transitioning from a monarchy.

And I have to admit that I semi-consciously bought into that general feeling, that is, until I began to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a massive and quite scholarly tome that in the first 400 pages [which is how far I’ve read to date] effectively disassembles factually so many myths about human history. As the authors document, there have been quite a few societies, some of them powers in their own time, that were not ruled by kings, monarchs, oligarchs, emperors, or other authoritarian systems of governance. The book also shows examples of cultures run by sophisticated and intelligent people who chose societal structures based on a need to maximize individual freedom. From what I can determine, none of those cultures survived contact with more aggressive cultures, possibly because maximizing personal freedom minimizes the cooperative sacrifice of freedom necessary to fight off aggression.

There are several points implied by these analyses (and I’m making the implications, because I haven’t finished the book). The first one that struck me was that egalitarian societies tend to be more vulnerable because they reject or minimize physical coercion for societal ends, while authoritarian societies can more easily and readily mobilize and employ force on a massive scale. The second is that, effectively, money in a culture with a banking system is a means of storing and wielding power. Without a banking system, the value of tokens, i.e., money, rests on either the value of the token itself or voluntary acceptance of the value of those tokens, which allows a would-be recipient to refuse the tokens. Some earlier societies consciously rejected the use of money because they believe it concentrated power in too few individuals.

One of the basic points hammered into me in economic history was the fact that a society cannot develop much in the way of tools and technology without an agricultural surplus, that is, that those growing or hunting the food have to produce considerably more than they consume. There are effectively only two ways to get that result: either pay the growers more or compel them to do so.

From these basics, it seems to me, certain results are almost inevitable. Because the creation and maintenance of higher technology requires concentration of wealth/power, and of individuals with specific skills, higher tech societies must either bribe or force workers. If bribery (the free market way) is employed, those with skills deemed less valuable or useful are going to be less and less satisfied.

If the examples cited in The Dawn of Everything are accurate, and they seem to be, authoritarian societies persist in some form or another until they’re destroyed by a more successful authoritarian regime, or very seldom, by a successful and popular egalitarian movement, while more egalitarian societies are destroyed by greed and dissatisfaction or by conquest because the culture cannot or will not sacrifice enough to be able to defend itself.

Over the weekend, both Bill Maher and The New York Times made essentially the same observation – that large U.S. corporations are engaging in wide-scale self-censorship with regard to China. Movies are being censored as they’re being made to remove any subject matter, no matter how small, that might offend Chinese authorities – like removing the flag patch of Taiwan from the Tom Cruise’s flight jacket in the next “Top Gun” movie.

It doesn’t matter to corporations that the Chinese government is an autocratic surveillance police state that is operating concentration camps against minorities within its own borders or that Chinese corporations are the largest-scale thieves of intellectual property. All that matters is the bucks to be made by access to the Chinese domestic market.

“Bucks above all” isn’t limited to corporations, of course. The International Olympic Committee has continually turned a blind eye to the rampant Russian doping scandals, and allowed the fiction of the “Russian Olympic Committee” to send athletes to the Winter Games, clearly for financial reasons.

This kind of behavior by corporations also isn’t new in the United States, either. Even before the U.S. entered WWII, both General Motors and Ford allowed conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents showed they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their U.S. plants. Ford’s German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, even used slave labor from a concentration camp to produce military materiel.

IBM supplied the punch card technology that allowed the German government to identify and track “undesirables,” such as Jews and Gypsies, so they could be exterminated by the Nazis. Even after it was apparent that the system was being used for the Holocaust, IBM continued to supply Germany with machines. IBM subsidiaries in Europe still delivered punch cards to Nazi Germany, and IBM executives directed operations through neutral Switzerland.

Until the US officially entered WWII, Standard Oil re-registered its oil tankers under the flag of Panama, enabling the ships to carry oil to Nazi Germany, and also provided tetraethyl lead to Japan.

The bottom line is fairly simple. For far too many large U.S. corporations, the opportunity to make more bucks transcends U.S. national interests, environmental stability, basic morality, and truth. And that hasn’t changed in over a hundred years, which is why corporations need strong federal oversight… and why the corporate sector fights such oversight. They want the freedom to maximize their bucks, regardless of the impact on everyone else… and the world.