Links - 10th November 2026 (2 - University Majors)

Thread by @C_Harwick on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Even in school the math students tended to know more about the humanities than the humanities students."
"I believe this because based on assessments at my university, knowledge in every field has the same rank-order by major.  Finance students know the most, in every business field. Marketing students know the least in every field, including marketing.
This also seems like strong firsthand evidence of a signaling over a human capital theory of education. Interesting deep-dive into stratification by major. Apparently psych wasn't always the throwaway major.

Crémieux on X - "When it comes to cognitive tests, something like this is (almost) true! Let's look at some examples, old and new.  First, let's go back in time, to the long-forgotten year of 1952. Or really, 1946, since that's the year the sample was gathered in.  Wolfle & Oxtoby published an enlightening study on the distribution of ability of students specializing in different fields. Wolfle & Oxtoby gathered this data for the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training, since it was a topic of considerable interest at the time whether and how people who picked different majors differed in their abilities.  Let's take a look at their results:  You can see that, on top, there's a broad physical sciences category, followed by chemistry, then engineering. But then we have what some today might consider a shocker: psychology?!  Yes, in the past, psychology was a "smart" major. Psychology then was more biophysics: it was more generally focused on measurement and understanding the mind through things like reaction times and law-like behaviors, and it was far less "social". The field has changed. Nowadays, it's often a washout field. Consider the result reached by Yu, Kuncel & Sackett in 2020.   With a longitudinal sample that included nearly a million students at 249 colleges and universities, they observed that most students who majored in psychology didn't initially express an interest in the field. Instead, people who majored in psychology were often people with poor performance in some other area who then transferred into psychology from another major—and in particular, from STEM courses.  Now, contrarily, a considerable number of students who did initially express an interest in psychology filtered out of the discipline. These students were often higher-performers:   "Students with poorer performance in college often transfer into psychology from majors that may be perceived as difficult (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and math), whereas higher-performing students appear to leave psychology for these same majors, which may also be perceived as more lucrative."  But I digress. We're supposed to be talking intelligence-by-major, not how some majors end up with lower or higher levels of measured intelligence.   In Wolfle & Oxtoby's study, the physical sciences were above engineering were above humanities were above the biological sciences were above the social sciences were above business were above agriculture were above education.  Among 38,420 American college seniors assessed between 1951 and 1967, the order was the same using the Selective Service College Qualification Test:  In the Project Talent study, we observe a pretty similar pattern of differences:  In this diagram, verbal, spatial, and mathematical test results are given by the initials V, S, and M.   Engineers, physical scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists performed admirably; humanities students performed much worse when it came to intelligence (general ability), and they managed to perform comparably or a bit better in verbal skills. Education majors did very badly. Also take notice of how the V, S, and M means relate differently in the smartest groups.   But the Project Talent sample was gathered from 440,000 American high schoolers in 1960. We need more recent data! Using the GRE between 2002 and 2005, we get the same result!  Average GRE mathematics and verbal scores were
- 594 for engineers
- 592 for physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists
- 561 for biological scientists
- 560 for the humanities
- 537 for artists
- 526 for social scientists
- 517 for business majors
- 492 for educators
The gaps between major categories grew considerably over time, as university educations in general became more selective while the content required to earn these majors didn't really drift, so selection among them became far more intense. Just look at the jumps between the hard majors (engineering, physics, mathematics, etc.), biology, and then the arts/social sciences/business, and finally, education.  Even more recently ,we have SAT mathematics and verbal results by intended major from 2014. The results are similar:  There's a consistent patterning of majors, with some changes over the past few decades that mostly have to do with gap sizes rather than ranks. Overall, the smartest kids are going into exactly the majors you'd intuitively think they would: the hard sciences and other financially lucrative majors.  I don't think this reality escapes anyone. People who are honest recognize that those in the "hard" subjects seem to be more capable in general than the people in easier subjects. But anyone looking at this clearly also recognizes this is down to selection that makes total sense for a market society. In fact, this may relate to another phenomenon people often find fascinating: the Flynn effect!  In a recent publication, Hermo et al. used Swedish administrative data and, using exams taken at military enlistment (there's a draft) and earnings records from the tax register, the relative returns to logical reasoning skills were observed to increase over time. The returns to logical reasoning skills increased relative to vocabulary knowledge. In Sweden, it's become more valuable to be better at logical reasoning than vocabulary, directly favoring smart people moving into STEM majors if they're motivated by money, as basically everyone is.  The changes in returns in this data were actually capable of explaining 37% of the measured increase in reasoning scores, as well as a concomitant decline in vocabulary knowledge. There was even evidence that parents and teachers responded to the labor market and placed greater emphasis on logical reasoning relative to vocabulary knowledge.  Let's imagine the cognitive abilities of teachers relate to the quality of their teaching and the impacts they can have on students. Places like Singapore and Finland seem to hold to this belief: they exclusively recruit teachers from the top 30% and 20% of test scorers, respectively. South Korea is even more extreme, recruiting only the top 5%! If these countries are right to do what they do (and the jury is out), the fact that the labor market strongly disincentivizes being a teacher could be a problem, not a source of mere fascination."

The End of the English Major | The New Yorker - "The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent... For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)  For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous... During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade... For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods... Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.
There're hints in the article of how the left's long march through the institutions and corruption of the humanities (e.g. Black artists, the canon and clay pigeons) could also be to blame, but this idea isn't really explored

Major Marriage Metrics: How Your Major Affects Your Marriage Rate - "If getting married sooner is your goal, aside from finding the right partner, consider majoring in education, boosting your income, and being a woman, as these factors have shown strong correlations with marriage rates."

The top 10 most-regretted college majors - "Journalism 87%
Sociology 72%
Liberal arts/general studies 72%
Communications 64%
Education 61%
Marketing management + research 60%
Medical/clinical assisting 58%
Political science + government 56%
Biology 52%
English language + literature 52%"

Philosophy Majors Beat Every Other Major On Critical Thinking Tests - "Prinzing and Vazquez compared how students performed when they entered college versus when they graduated, adjusting for differences in ability at the start.  The idea is simple: if philosophy students only looked better because they were already stronger thinkers, then accounting for those initial advantages should make them look ordinary. But if philosophy education itself provides benefits, philosophy majors should continue outperforming their peers even after those adjustments...   Students with stronger verbal abilities and greater intellectual curiosity were indeed more likely to major in philosophy, confirming that self-selection plays a role. A one standard deviation increase in SAT verbal scores corresponded to 57% greater odds of choosing philosophy as a major.  But even after adjusting for these baseline differences, philosophy majors still significantly outperformed students in other disciplines...   Philosophy majors also reported stronger intellectual habits during their senior year — such as curiosity, intellectual rigor, and open-mindedness — than non-philosophy majors, even after accounting for differences measured at the freshman year baseline.  When researchers ranked all 57 academic majors (with at least 200 students each) on five different measures, philosophy claimed the top spot on three: GRE verbal, LSAT, and intellectual habits. On open-mindedness, philosophy ranked sixth. On GRE quantitative reasoning, philosophy ranked 30th.  Mathematics and statistics majors dominated quantitative reasoning, but for skills involving language, logic, and habits of critical thought, philosophy was unmatched."
It's telling that TRAs are so upset at how "transphobic" philosophy is - it's harder to gaslight philosophers. Philosophy is also allegedly unwelcoming to women, but that may be a good thing.
The paper shows how people with different majors perform on the dimensions of LSAT, GRE Verbal, GRE Quantitative, Habits of Mind and Pluralistic Orientation

Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs? - "we find that recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time... recent research has shown that graduating with a math or science major is more difficult than pursuing other fields of study... We characterize the labor market situation for recent college graduates by looking at three possible labor market outcomes for each graduate: unemployed, employed in a job where a bachelor’s degree is required, and employed in a job where a bachelor’s degree is not required. We then identify the share of recent college graduates in each of the thirteen majors that has experienced each of these outcomes (Chart 7). We find that unemployment rates across majors range from 3 percent to 8 percent. The two majors with the lowest unemployment rates are health majors, at 3 percent, and education majors, at just under 4 percent. Relatively low unemployment rates for these majors likely reflect the stability of the education and health sectors, which grew before, during, and after the Great Recession and thus have tended to provide a growing number of jobs during this period. At the other end of the spectrum, the unemployment rate for architecture and construction majors was 8 percent—a finding consistent with the lack of jobs in housing-related sectors of the economy following the housing bust. Liberal arts and social sciences majors also tended to have relatively high unemployment rates, at 7 to 8 percent. Chart 7 also identifies the share of recent college gradu- ates working in jobs where a bachelor’s degree is required and the share working in jobs where a bachelor’s degree is not required. For example, 75 percent of those with an engineering degree worked in a job that required a college degree. We find that majors providing technical training—that is, training that focuses on quantitative and analytical skills—had the highest shares of graduates working in jobs that require a degree; engi- neering and math and computers majors are cases in point. In addition, education and health majors also had high shares of workers employed in jobs that require a college degree, again likely reflecting the growth of these sectors in recent years. At the other end of the spectrum, leisure and hospitality was the major with the lowest share of graduates working in a job that required a degree. Although degree holders with this major experienced relatively low unemployment, only 33 percent were working in jobs that required a bachelor’s degree, while 63 percent worked in jobs that did not require this degree. It is likely that many of the jobs such graduates took were in the leisure and hospitality industry, and these jobs often do not require a bachelor’s degree. Similarly, only 38 percent of recent graduates with a technologies major— which provides practical training in fields such as electrical and mechanical repairs, radiology, and biological technolo- gies—were working in a job that required a bachelor’s degree. This finding may stem in part from the fact that many of the jobs for people with this type of training often require only an associate’s degree. In addition, many of the majors that provide general training—that is, training that is not occupation- specific or highly technical in nature—also ranked relatively low on this dimension. In particular, only 40 to 45 percent of recent college graduates majoring in communications, liberal arts, business, and social sciences were working in jobs that required a degree... An important caveat about this interpretation is that the links we show between college major, unemployment, and underemployment are not necessarily causal. That is, the data may in part reflect the fact that people can sort into majors based on their skill level, such that those with higher innate skills and abilities select majors that tend to have better labor market outcomes."

Meme - i/o @rational_wiki: "Unsurprisingly, conservativism is associated with majors that tend to be more practical, potentially lucrative, and are less subjective and idealistic than those associated with liberalism."
"Figure 4: Effects of College Majors on Political Ideology"

The toolbelt generation: Why teens are losing faith in college - "Junior Achievement and Citizen polled 1,000 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 in July.  Roughly half, or 49%, believe a high school degree, trade program, two-year degree or other type of enrichment program is the highest level of education needed for their anticipated career path.  Even more, 56%, believe that real world and on-the-job experience is more beneficial than obtaining a higher education degree... Now, 86% of U.S. workers with education debt said their degree wasn’t worth the toll that student loans has had on their overall well-being. Further, 53% of workers said that knowing they would incur additional debt has prevented them from pursuing more education... Over 2012 to 2021, the number of registered apprentices rose 64%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, especially in industries such as construction, public administration and education.  From 2022 to 2023, alone, enrollment in vocational programs jumped 16%, the National Student Clearinghouse found.  A shortage of skilled tradespeople, due to experienced workers aging out of the field, is also boosting the number of job opportunities and pay... Federal data also shows that trade school students are more likely to be employed after school than their degree-seeking counterparts — and much more likely to work in a job related to their field of study."

Busting Bernie's BS

Bernie Sanders on X

We're told progressive ideas are "fringe." Really?

59% want Medicare for All
57% want a $20 minimum wage
61% want a billionaire wealth tax
63% want to pause AI development
66% want the wealthy to pay more into Social Security

Maybe it's the establishment that's out of touch. 

mike bski on X

Bernie.

A list of percentages is not a lesson plan.

I read your post. Then I read it again. Then I did what I do every single time a student hands me a lab report full of numbers: I looked for the source.

There isn't one.

No pollster. No date. No sample size. No margin of error. No question wording. Just five percentages floating in space like dust in a sunbeam, and a guy behind a desk telling us the "establishment" is out of touch. Senator, if one of my sophomores turned this in, I'd hand it back with one word written across the top in red: CITATION.

You're a weather report with no weather. A recipe with no ingredients. A lab report with a conclusion and no lab.

And before anything else, I have to talk about the poster.

Behind you, in your video, there's a red poster with a raised fist and the words "For the Many, Not the Few." Bernie, do you know where that slogan comes from? That was Jeremy Corbyn's campaign slogan for the British Labour Party in 2017. Corbyn ran on the exact same playbook you're running on right now. Nationalize this. Tax that. Free everything for everybody.

And then in 2019, British voters handed Labour its worst defeat since 1935.

So you hung the losing team's jersey on your wall and filmed a five-minute video in front of it about how popular your ideas are. That's like a guy giving a lecture on how to win at poker while sitting in front of a framed photo of his own repossessed truck. Bernie, your set decorator hates you.

Now. Let's talk about your polls.

"59% want Medicare for All."

Sure, Bernie. Ask people if they want free health care, and a lot of them say yes. Ask people if they want a free puppy, and you'll get the same kind of number. Then ask the follow-up question. The one you always leave out.

Back when the Kaiser Family Foundation polled this, support for Medicare for All was in the mid-50s. Then they told people it would eliminate private health insurance. Support dropped into the 30s. Then they told people it would require higher taxes. Support dropped into the 30s again. The second people heard what it actually COSTS them, the majority evaporated like a puddle in July.

That's not public opinion, Bernie. That's a sugar high. Everybody loves the cake until somebody hands them the bill for the bakery.

And here's my favorite part. If 59 percent of Americans want Medicare for All, why couldn't your own party pass it?

What's next, Democrats running the House, the Senate, AND the White House with a golden chance to pass Medicare for All... wait. I'm being told that happened in 2021 and 2022. It never even got a vote. Kamala Harris co-sponsored your Medicare for All bill back in 2019, then spent her 2024 campaign running away from it like it was on fire. Bernie, if your "popular" idea is so popular, why do the people in your own party treat it like a live grenade the second they have to put their names on a ballot?

You're a salesman bragging about how much everybody loves the free sample, while nobody ever buys the product.

"57% want a $20 minimum wage."

This one makes me mad, Bernie. Genuinely mad. Because I teach the kids this hurts.

Sixteen years old. Seventeen. No diploma yet. Nothing on the resume. Some of them have never lived in a house where an adult had a steady job. What they need more than anything in the world is a FIRST job. One manager willing to take a chance on them. One summer of showing up on time and learning how to deal with a cranky customer without quitting.

When the Congressional Budget Office looked at a $15 minimum wage back in 2019, it estimated about 1.3 million people would lose their jobs, and possibly as many as 3.7 million. Fifteen dollars. You want twenty.

Ask people "Do you want workers to make more money?" and of course they say yes. I say yes! Now ask them "Do you want 1.3 million fewer jobs, mostly for teenagers and people without a diploma?" Watch that 57 percent shrink faster than a cheap sweater in a hot dryer.

You're not raising that kid's wage, Bernie. You're locking the front door and hanging a sign on it that says "fairness." And then you're flying home on a chartered jet feeling good about yourself while my student sits on the curb wondering why nobody will hire him.

Quinn's Law Number Twenty-Four: every time a liberal tries to fix something, somebody somewhere loses their job. With your $20 minimum wage, that somebody is seventeen years old and sitting in the second row of my classroom.

"61% want a billionaire wealth tax."

Of course they do. It's a tax on somebody else. Ask 100 people if they want somebody ELSE to pay more, and you'll get a landslide every time. I could get 61 percent of people to vote for a tax on left-handed accordion players.

And we already know how wealth taxes end, because Europe ran the experiment. France had one, and money and wealthy people left in such numbers that Macron scrapped most of it in 2018. Sweden dumped theirs. Germany stopped collecting theirs. Norway's still got one, and wealthy Norwegians have been packing up for Switzerland. Your idea has been tried, Bernie. It has a return label on it in four languages.

"63% want to pause AI development."

Bernie, you posted that video on a phone, through a cell tower, onto servers in a data center, with captions running across the bottom of the screen that were very likely made with the same kind of technology you want to pause. You're using the internet to tell everybody the internet is too dangerous. That's like a guy driving to a rally to protest cars.

And while you "pause," China doesn't. China is building computing hubs as fast as they can pour concrete. Pausing AI in America doesn't stop AI. It just changes who's in charge of it. You're asking America to sit out the race and call it safety.

"66% want the wealthy to pay more into Social Security."

Okay, Bernie, let's talk about Social Security, since your party has been in charge of "protecting" it for my entire life.

The government's own Social Security trustees have been warning for years that the trust fund is headed for a cliff in the early 2030s, when benefits could get cut across the board if Congress does nothing. You've been in Congress since 1991. Thirty-five years. You've had decades to fix it. You've had a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate at the same time. And what did you do? Gave speeches. Wrote books. Posted polls.

That's not protecting Social Security, Bernie. That's standing on the dock waving at the Titanic.

Now. Let me name what you actually did in this post, because I teach this too.

It's called an appeal to popularity. Latin name, argumentum ad populum. "Lots of people believe it, so it must be right." It's one of the oldest fallacies in the book.

Do you know what else was popular once? Prohibition. So popular they put it in the Constitution. Fourteen years later they had to rip it back out because it was a disaster. Majorities have been wrong before, Bernie. Many, many times.

And that's exactly why the Founders built a constitutional republic, not a democracy. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 about majorities using their numbers to take the property of everybody else. He had a word for it. He called it a "wicked project." The Founders put up guardrails so that a poll, or a mob, or a mood, couldn't just vote away somebody else's paycheck because 61 percent of a survey thought it sounded nice.

The Constitution doesn't say "unless Bernie has a poll."

And let me show you how polls work, Senator. If I polled my classroom tomorrow, I already know exactly what I'd get:

100% of my students want no homework. 97% want pizza every Friday. 94% want school to start at 10 AM. 89% want their phones back during tests. And 100% want a "fair" grading system where my A students donate some of their points to the kids who skipped half the semester.
By your logic, Bernie, I'm "out of touch" for still giving a final exam.
That's Quinn's Law Number Nine: to a liberal, intentions are more significant than outcomes. The intention is "everybody gets free stuff." The outcome is a country that runs out of other people's money. Every poll in your post is the intention. Every single one leaves out the outcome.
And "maybe it's the establishment that's out of touch."
Bernie. Who do you think the establishment IS?

You've been in Congress since 1991. You've been in Washington longer than half the people reading this have been alive. You've had a Senate parking spot since before smartphones existed. You chaired the Budget Committee. You ARE the establishment, Senator. You're the furniture. You're the carpet. You're the slightly yellowed ceiling tile in the corner that nobody's replaced since the Clinton administration. You just keep talking like an outsider so nobody notices.

And the "fringe" label? Bernie, Republicans aren't the ones calling your ideas fringe. Your own party is. The Democrats who ran from Medicare for All. The ones who stripped the minimum wage out of the COVID bill. The ones who cleared the field for Hillary in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 and left you standing in the rain both times. You're not mad at the establishment, Bernie. You're mad at your own party, and you're taking it out on the rest of us.

So here's my standing offer, Senator, because I make it every time and you never take it. I keep hearing Democrats demand that "the wealthy pay more" while they ARE the wealthy. Three houses. $221,000 on chartered jets in one quarter of 2025. Millions in book money. So go first. File with the standard deduction only. No itemizing. Pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Post the return. Then, and only then, tell me what 66 percent of a poll thinks rich people should pay.

Quinn's Law Number Twenty-Five: liberals are great at giving away other people's money. Never their own.

You know what you are, Bernie? You're a carnival barker standing in front of a ride that's been shut down for safety violations, yelling about how much everybody loves roller coasters.

You're a toddler with a calculator. Lots of buttons pushed. No idea what any of the numbers mean.

You've got the economic instincts of a raccoon at a buffet. Grab everything, worry about who's paying later, and leave a mess for somebody else to clean up.

Your arguments are like a screen door in a hurricane. Lots of flapping. Zero protection.

You're a one-trick pony, and the trick is complaining.

You're so far behind the times, Senator, you think "streaming" is something that happens to a creek.

And if brains were taxed, Bernie, you'd finally be getting the refund you've always wanted.

But what do I know? I'm only a physics teacher who makes teenagers cite their sources, label their units, and finish the experiment before they announce the result, which is apparently three more steps than a 35-year senator takes before he hits post. 

 

 

Left wingers keep demanding more and more social spending, pretending that with just a bit more utopia will come. Luckily for them, most people have a short memory and are also taken in by simplistic left wing logic, so whenever they get what they demand, they just demand even more.

Links - 10th November 2026 (1 - Canadian Politics)

TOWN TALK (Aurora, ON) | Facebook - "Does no one else see the irony?  Not posting it here…edited….posted below as per someone’s request (end of edit) but the mayor’s lengthy post today that starts out by saying how residents are tired of the online personal attacks. Then the remainder of his post…is a personal attack on a candidate referring back to something from 16 years ago. You can’t make this stuff up."
On Tom Mrakas

Deputy mayor’s pals given huge DEI payday by city hall | Toronto Sun - "Toronto city hall has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a DEI consulting firm with long, personal ties to both Olivia Chow’s most trusted staffer and one of her deputy mayors... Contracts, invoices and other documents, some obtained via freedom of information and some publicly available, show more than $500,000 in taxpayer money has been paid to Monumental Projects Inc. since 2022.  In the fall of that year, Ausma Malik was elected the councillor for Spadina-Fort York. Malik has personal relationships going back years with Monumental’s founders, Zahra Ebrahim and Kofi Hope.  Ebrahim and Hope are also listed as founding advisers by the political organization Progress Toronto. Despite that, Progress Toronto founder Michal Hay appears to have personally signed a Monumental Projects expense on behalf of Chow, while serving as chief of staff to the mayor in 2023. In a series of statements, city hall confirmed its contracts with Monumental “on two separate projects” in 2022, but did not acknowledge invoices dated from 2023 to 2025, when Chow and Malik were in power... Monumental defended its work but did not address questions about the founders’ ties to Malik and Chow... Representatives for Chow did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Progress Toronto.  Monumental was paid for DEI-related consulting work, including training, speaking and public engagement, involving a range of departments at city hall, from the parks division to housing and planning all the way to the mayor’s office.  Many of the contracts and invoices were provided to the Sun by the political advocacy group Integrity TO, which obtained them in a pair of freedom-of-information requests. That group was founded by Daniel Tate, a vocal critic of Chow and her allies on city council, who is running for council in a downtown ward next to Malik’s. One request contained two six-figure Monumental contracts, one of them a sole-source deal.  The sole-source contract was for the planning department, with a listed delivery date of April 2023, totalling $107,563. Monumental was tasked with revising the city’s “equity tool with a gender-specific lens to support and reinforce work on the making space tool kit.”... Another contract, dating from March 2022, was for $124,116.67. That bought five months of “public engagement services for the City of Toronto’s recognition review for the economic development and culture division,” with two options to renew for one month. Article content  Part of that so-called recognition review was city hall’s maligned initiative to rename public assets bearing the name of Henry Dundas. A list of invoices makes that plain, saying Monumental’s contract was for a “City of Toronto naming project.”... A search of the city’s bids portal found only one publicly posted contract won by Monumental: a 2022 public engagement deal for $121,970, which was the initial estimate for its naming project work. It’s unclear how many other deals were put through competitive processes and how many were simply offered to Monumental. It’s also possible that the records obtained by the Sun may account for individual payments more than once, given they come from an array of sources, or that other payments are unaccounted for. The Sun asked for definitive totals for payments to Monumental, both since its 2020 founding and since Malik won election in 2022, but city hall ignored that request. Article content  Whatever conflict-of-interest rules were followed, Ebrahim did publicly endorse Chow for mayor in 2023 and, just recently, Malik for re-election in Spadina-Fort York.  Malik’s ties to the Monumental founders go back far before her time in politics. A Toronto Star article from 2017 said she had met Hope “more than a decade” before that year, while fighting police policies in the wake of the Summer of the Gun."
This is why left wingers push DEI so much

Op-Ed: Progress Toronto is not progressive in the slightest - "I could have given him an earful about Mayor Olivia Chow’s puppeteers, whose main mission has been to get rid of conservatives on council by endorsing like-minded candidates and putting out mean-spirited attack literature and online propaganda that spreads untruths about candidates who might expose their radical agenda.  They have been on the scene since 2018 — created by activist Michal Hay, who later became Chow’s chief of staff.  They were largely responsible for putting Chow in office in the 2023 by-election, along with the progressive wing of council, such as Ausma Malik (I call them the Hamas caucus).  Progress Toronto is, in many ways, all that’s wrong with the city and its decline.  They claim to subsist on donations, but it’s dubious.  They targeted my former Toronto Sun colleague Anthony Furey with hate literature alleging he was far right and racist when he ran for council in Don Valley West in 2024.  The executive director, Saman Tabasinejad, subsequently gloated about it in a missive to its followers.  If we needed any proof of their mission to promote a radical left agenda, their 37-question survey to pick what they call “Progressive Champions” is indeed revealing.  They ask potential recruits to support throwing more money at Indigenous in Toronto, a mere .08% of the population. They push all kinds of protections for tenants, good or bad, and ask would-be candidates to vote to prevent ‘renovictions’ and do “everything in their power” to prop up affordable housing and create more expensive shelter spaces.  The Progress Toronto questionnaire asks that their recruits support the use of social workers instead of police in violent situations and overdoses on the TTC or on the city’s streets (a ridiculous concept!).  Not surprisingly, their recruits are asked to vote against any bylaw that restricts the “constitutional freedom” of Torontonians to protest (of course they’d be happy to let the terrorist sympathizers occupy our streets with impunity). They make it clear they want to hike the vacant home tax to 5% from 3% of the assessed value, bring outsourced services back in-house and expand safe injection services.  The Progress Toronto questionnaire makes their anti-policing, pro-chaos agenda very clear: Spend with impunity on social programs, eschew policies that improve law and order, protect drug addicts and violent protesters.  Mazri said when he filled out the questionnaire, it became very clear that they are an “ideological group” that wants candidates “they can steer.”  He said his mission is to focus on accountability, lowering property taxes and doing what’s right for his community — not serving a special interest group’s agenda.  ”They endorsed my opponent because they know (she Ala’a Adib) can be managed… they knew they couldn’t control me,” he said.  ”I refuse to be anyone’s puppet.”  Sadly, their puppet Olivia Chow has done just about everything they’d hoped she’d do and, in the process, has contributed to the city’s decline. With Brad Bradford gaining in the polls, Progress Toronto and its activist recruits have tried to fling as much dirt as they can before election day"

Duncan Dee 🇮🇱🇺🇦 on X - "Brad Bradford wants to be mayor for all Torontonians. He aims to fix transit, improve housing, and keep residents safe.  Olivia Chow wants to use the mayor’s office to engage in global conflicts and foreign affairs (a federal matter), divide Torontonians (a moral matter), and virtue-signal (a pointless matter).  Toronto voters should elect the person who actually wants to be the city’s mayor: to fix its problems, make it a better place to live and to unite the city.  Enough division. Enough talk.  Vote Brad Bradford.  Olivia out!"

Dmitry Broytman | Facebook - "We have municipal election in Toronto on October 26. Mayor and city councillor candidates just started to put up lawn signs, so I did some statistical observations while running today. Along my route I discovered 6 signs for Brad Bradford, 4 signs for Olivia Chow, and 3 signs for Slow Down.  My guess is the latter one is just an alias for Ms. Chow, because this city slowed down significantly under her watch: almost every time I take a subway—and the last time I experienced this was also today—the train would slow down or stop completely in the tunnel, and you hear the same mantra: medical emergency… works on track… police investigation… we apologize for the inconvenience… And you keep looking on your phone: will I be on time for my appointment or event. This is especially bizarre after visiting European cities with similar—in terms of lines and daily passengers—underground transit network like Budapest or Milan, where underground trains just follow schedule and are highly reliable. Why bike lane photos—another “slow down” thing—was running/walking along two bike lanes today for 5-10 minutes each. The first one was in a residential neighbourhood: two metres wide, taking probably a third of the road, and not a single bike on it, only me; the second one—on the photo—along Eglinton Avenue, taking significant part of the road again, and in 10 minutes you can count 150+ cars (it’s Sunday), 3 buses, and you already guessed… not a single bike but quite a few delivery motorcycles, and I doubt this kind of usage was on the minds of those who invented this “slow down traffic” scheme. My completely unscientific survey shows that “Slow Down” candidate currently has a lead but I hope very much that Mr. Bradford, representing dynamics, and change, and lower taxes, and safety, and just common sense will win.
Update. I wrote this half-serious but also tongue-in-cheek (Slow Down) post and never expected it to be read by more than a handful of my Facebook friends. Coming from work and seeing it getting more than 8,000 views and counting was quite a surprise. So I have to add a few words and photos.
1. I went through the comments and did my best to remove all the insults — not towards me, I do not care, but towards both candidates and other people who left comments here, as well as some of the comments provoking such behaviour. Might have missed something but did my best.
2. Some people somehow completely lack the sense of humour and seriously think I do not know the meaning of "Slow Down" signs or make electoral predictions by counting a dozen lawn signs.
3. Quite a few commented something along the lines: "Oh, it is not Olivia Chow's fault, she inherited problems from John Tory and Rob Ford". She has been the mayor for 3 years and 3 months: quite enough time to stop blaming her predecessors.
4. I attached a few additional photos to this post. This is Midtown Toronto near Yonge & Eglinton: some are from Yonge Street and most from my street. Just look at the state of the road. My street has been getting progressively worse throughout the last three years of Ms. Chow's tenure. This summer there happened to be a huge pothole in the middle of the street: they just put an orange cone in it, and it stayed like this for about three weeks until it was "repaired" — and the quality of this "repair" you can see in the photos. It is a disgrace.
5. Delivery motorcycles and electric bikes on the sidewalks and bike lanes, or moving in any direction across the road in a dangerous manner. Nobody enforces any rules on them.
6. Unfortunately, this city is dysfunctional in many ways, and we cannot allow 4 more years of the same. The only candidate representing this change is Mr. Bradford. And this change shouldn't stop with the mayor. Mr. Josh Matlow, hey, have a look at the photos, this is your constituency — hopefully not for long.
#toronto #torontoelection #ttc #bradbradford #oliviachow"

Meme - "IS THE MAYOR OF TORONTO INFLUENCED BY THE MULLAHS OF IRAN?
Iranian Canadian Congress. The ICC says Canada should remove the IRGC - the tyrannical dictatorship that mass murders its people - from the terrorist list
Saman Tabasimajad former ICC policy chair, Progress Toronto advisor, which runs Chow's campaign.
Saman Tabasimajad former ICC policy chair, now leads Progress Toronto, which runs Chow's campaign.
REJECT FOREIGN INFLUENCE IN TORONTO! TORONTONIANS DESERVE BETTER! VoteOutChow.com. DEMAND BETTER LEADERSHIP ON OCTOBER 26"

Meme - "Palestine House-Toronto: A Palestinian community organization founded by Amin El-Maoued. El-Maoued was recorded on video holding a megaphone chanting "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammed is returning." The organization has publicly endorsed Chow's re-election."

Reto Baumgartner | Facebook - "Well, the BC election is over, and judging by some people's reactions, you'd think the world just ended. 😂 I actually find the whole situation almost funny. Let's look at what happened. For nearly 10 years, BC has been under NDP leadership. During that time, homelessness, drug problems, affordability and public safety have become major concerns. In my opinion, the province has been heading in the wrong direction for far too long. And then we have David Eby. The BC Conservatives were having leadership problems. Their party was divided, their leader had just resigned, and they were trying to get themselves back together. So what does Eby do? He calls an election. Two years early! Now, there's an unwritten understanding in politics that you don't take advantage of another party going through a leadership transition. Apparently, that didn't matter much to him. And his reasoning for calling an early election? Donald Trump, economic uncertainty and needing a stronger mandate to get things done. Hang on a minute. 🤔 You already have a majority government, and you're telling people you need another election to get things done? Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't your mandate. Maybe the problem is your leadership. Well, that gamble certainly didn't work out as planned. 😂 After years of controversies, growing problems and frustrated British Columbians, the people finally had their say. And what a message they sent! Now comes the part I find even more entertaining. Some people are already complaining about how terrible this new Conservative government is going to be. Really? The NDP had nearly a decade to show what they could do. Were the last 10 years really that wonderful that you're already convinced a new government will be worse? Here's a thought. How about we give Lorne Doerkson and his team a chance to actually govern before deciding they've failed? I'm not suggesting they'll get everything right. No government ever does. They should absolutely be held accountable for their decisions, just like every other government. At least give them the opportunity to prove themselves. Personally, I'm happy for the people of British Columbia. You have an opportunity for a fresh start, a different direction and hopefully a province that can thrive again. And here's the biggest lesson I take from this election. Politicians are elected to serve the people. They aren't entitled to stay in power, and having a majority doesn't mean voters owe you another one. David Eby took a gamble, thinking an early election was his opportunity. Turns out, it was an opportunity for the people of BC instead. Funny how that works. 😂"

Thread by @jonkay on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ".@Dave_Eby was an unmitigated disaster for BC & for Canada. He embraced every destructive progressive policy fad—drug decrim, genderwang, unmarked-graves social panic—and it is a special treat to see his arrogant election gambit end with his humiliation
(In the great tradition of trash-heap BC progressives, Eby will now get a well-paid sinecure at SFU or UBC teaching one grad seminar a month on the underappreciated awesomeness of all his policies)
He’s also the only politician of any significance in Canada who spends his time blocking critics on Twitter "

Lindsay Shepherd on X - "The BC teachers union president issued this statement today 🥴  "I recognize that with the outcome of a Conservative government, many of us may be feeling disappointed, scared, or deeply concerned about what might come next.  I know these results may be particularly concerning for Indigenous, racialized, and 2SLGBTQIA+ members. You are not alone.""
Clearly only deluded right wing extremist conspiracy theories think that the teachers unions are politically biased

Kari Hollend-Wright | Facebook - "Dear progressive, left-leaning Toronto friends,  I say that as someone who used to consider myself one of you. In many ways, I still am. I believe in justice, equality, human rights, social services, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting marginalized communities. I also believe that most decent people, on either side of the political aisle, care about these things. But here's where I seem to have lost my political home. Just because someone doesn't share every single one of your views doesn't mean you get to diminish their humanity. I believe in democracy. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in everyone's right to vote for the person they feel best represents their values and priorities. At the moment, I feel fairly politically homeless. I don't fit neatly into the boxes I'm apparently supposed to tick. So perhaps we can just file me under decent human being. Last night, Olivia Chow and Brad Bradford both demonstrated something I wish more people would learn from. They acknowledged one another with dignity and respect, despite their political differences. When Bradford acknowledged Chow, his supporters responded respectfully. When Chow mentioned Bradford, members of her crowd booed.  That contrast matters. And today, I saw a social media post attributed to a Canadian journalist and writer, someone whose work appears in mainstream publications,  suggesting that Brad Bradford should kill himself.  That is absolutely fucking disgraceful. And here's what I'm sick and tired of: the notion that identifying with progressive politics, social justice, or a marginalized community somehow grants you immunity from accountability. It doesn't. Your identity doesn't make you incapable of cruelty. Your politics don't automatically make you compassionate. And your belief that you're on the right side of history doesn't give you permission to dehumanize people who disagree with you. You don't get to be the bully and the victim whenever it suits you. We are constantly told that silence is complicity. That we are responsible for the company we keep. That we must call out hate, intolerance, and dangerous rhetoric wherever we see it. Fine. I agree. But those principles don't suddenly become optional when the behaviour comes from someone on your own side. You cannot demand accountability from the right while making excuses for cruelty, intimidation, and hypocrisy on the left. And when did "middle ground" get totally ruled out.  You cannot champion inclusion while deciding that certain people, communities, or political opponents are undeserving of your compassion. And you certainly cannot claim the moral high ground simply because you've memorized the language of social justice.   I voted for Olivia Chow in the last election. I believed in many of the things she stood for.  This time, I voted to replace her. Not because I suddenly stopped caring about affordability, housing, social services, or equality, but because my humanity, my community's safety, my children's safety and my sense of belonging in this city matter too. And to those who voted for her, I respect your democratic choice. I ask that you extend that same respect to people who voted differently. But supporting a leader doesn't mean giving that leader a free pass. If you believe in the values that brought you to the ballot box, you should be willing to hold your chosen leader accountable for upholding them for everyone. Not just the communities you identify with. Not just the people who agree with you. Not just when it's politically convenient. And Mayor Olivia Chow, that responsibility now belongs to you, too. You have been elected to represent an entire city, including those who didn't vote for you. I have spent my life standing up for people whose experiences are different from my own. I don't intend to stop. But I am exhausted by the expectation that compassion must flow in only one direction. If your humanity depends on someone's politics, religion, identity, or whether they voted the same way you did, then perhaps it's time to reconsider what you actually stand for. Because justice isn't justice when it's selective. Equality isn't equality when it comes with exceptions. And compassion isn't compassion when it's reserved for people you already agree with. Pick one. Either you believe in these values for everyone, or you don't. And if we're serious about making Toronto a safer, more inclusive city, then every single one of us has a responsibility to act like it."
Left wingers are full of hate as usual

Facebook - "And so begins the winter of British Columbia's discontent. BC just experienced what the US did in 2024. It's incredible the NDP learned nothing from that, instead following the Biden-Kamala model, loathsome-maxxing right into the abyss. And now, they've created another illustrative learning moment. The BCNDP have proven once again that trying to play progressive while still remaining the handmaiden of capitalism and neoliberal hegemony will always fail and alienate everybody, and in doing handed the province of my birth to trumpistic reaction. Sadness...but they had it coming. They crushed Appadurai and their own party democracy, they let militarized police go to town on the Ada'itsx/Fairy Creek protesters, and called an election in a fit of pique and cyncism. Eby's anti-leadership will be the stuff of legend. Marginally progressive public administration coupled with letting lumber companies aggressively mow down irreplaceable old growth makes you friends with no one. Reactionaries who make it their identity to cheer on clear cuts and spit on protesters aren't going to thank you.  AI-assisted right-wing cultural war brainrot has clearly seized large swathes of BC voters. They seem to have come out in droves simply out of contempt for the concept of progressivism, whatever that is meant to mean. It is pure reaction, primordial colonial white supremacy that condemns everything woke, rainbow, public, or indigenous, everything that isn't using power to punish, dominate, and exploit. Anti-science, anti-thought, anti-anything that counsels reflection or self-restraint. That is the essential character of the right-wing, that perpetual domination is the just order of the world. This is the Convoy-MAGA fascist blob, brought to us by capital, to aggressively assert the rights of power - the strong do what they will , and the weak suffer what they must - it's their fault for being weak anyways, right? Thus anti-everything, how dare anyone assert themselves, how dare the indigenous and the tree-huggers and the homeless and the transpeople exist at all, how dare temporary workers have healthcare, how dare immigrants vote, etc, etc.   Droves of people showed up for this. Their mobilization speaks to the hollowness at the core of "conservative" BC society, so lacking in identity they become defined as opposite, filled with contempt for whatever those dress-wearing *progressives* are doing, etc. There's nothing much new about any of that. What is new(er) is is the extent to which AI propaganda slop and social media manipulation can produce signal-boosting, constant repetition of vitriolic right-wing agitation, driving up outrage and turnout. That is the role of social media in reactionary politics. Filling all space with noise is what propaganda has always done, but social media AI slop is particularly good at it.  On the other side, those with enough internal dialogue to be immune to the above, once again learn how deadly inadequate everything is. Progressives are trapped in a system that actively militates against thoughtful, effective politics. But even without progressive vote splitting only ten or so ridings more would have gone orange, defeat still inevitable. Whatever the progressive project was, it has failed. A stunning case study. By calling the election, Eby alienated everyone, and gave the right-wing the perfect jump start ammunition to carry the momentum into a social-media fueled reactionary maelstrom - the decadent, deficit-happy lefties are at it again with a gratuitous election, wasting our money while blocking our precious precious oil, time to show them what real hard headed men can do, etc, etc. Outage begets engagement, and engagement begets advertiser revenue, so social media companies engineer the algorithm to reinforce the outrage and the biggotry that underlies it. It is an ugly cycle that utterly turfed Eby and will make all of BC suffer for his sins.  Indigenous peoples will no doubt return to their communities and territories and plan resistance on the ground where they live. I have no doubts that will be ugly as they face off against a government that has already stated their intention to "conquer". The same goes for any sort of ecological protest movement against the incoming clearcuts, pipelines, and terminals extravaganza. The left needs to rebuild from scratch. Surely over the incoming 4 years of fossil-fuelled austerity terror, something can be done, surely. The Con base is block of toxic reaction and petro-chauvinism, but it doesn't make up a majority, or even plurality, of people in rid8ngs that went blue. Younger workers at the ass end of a deeply precarious economy, rural communities that perhaps today are lost to the toxic minority can be won back after they're gutted and spitted by the new regime, their hospitals and schools closed while the oligarchs extend their private airports and their local poobah lackies build their 8 or 10 car garages, all fat from untendered contracts, unfunded tax cuts, and wholesale public giveaways. The deficit will be eye-watering, to be sure. But everywhere right now the narrative framing has been captured, or perhaps rather given, entirely to reactionaries. A lot of people, neither reactionary nor pleased with government, so alienated, thus barely showed up.  BC Greens and NDP need to decide what they are about and develop a modus vivendi. Against the fascist inferno, coherent left wing politics is a necessity. I know its a naive interpretation, but they both, in their essential character as social democratic and ecologist parties, are ultimately socialist, yeah? That private wealth is not the greatest good? And the right-wing is explicitly petro-chauvinist, burning fuel and consuming nature has become central to the "conservative" image, so its opposition must be ecologist. A non-ecologist leftwing is as useless and contradictory as pro-capitalist green (and not accusing current BCGreens to be guilty of the latter, to be clear). Establish some meaning in politics and vigorously defending it, would be welcome to all those who are lost. Signing a pact on electoral reform might also be a start. Once again though, unhinged electoralism has failed, and the left vanquished. They'll have a long time to pick through the ruins.  BC, and perhaps Canada as a whole, appear to be behind the American cycle. Corporate progressives of liberal and liberalish NDP flavors are making themselves rankly vulnerable to well-earned progressive apathy and maple maga flavoured outrage. Funny how that works out.  Attached: the conqueror, BC Con Mike Hicks, who won a progressive riding through vote splitting, sigh. Not that that actually matters, but it's still pretty cringe."
Left wing logic: the failure of far left policies means that they weren't far left enough and you need to double down

Crazy Rider Fan 🇨🇦 on X - "Canadas most woke, progressive and broken province just stunned the world by destroying the NDP (needles, drugs and poverty) party. British Columbia just annihilated David Eby and his NDP party by electing the first Conservative government in generations. This stunning victory proves a few things.
-David Eby is an idiot and so is anyone who voted for him.
-Progressives and leftists are willing to endure a horrendous amount of abuse and incompetence to defend their ideology before accepting and admitting to reality.
-Leftists and progressives do have a pain threshold.
-There were not enough immigrants, activists, criminals, communists and welfare recipients to overcome reality.
-Canadian politics is frustratingly schizophrenic. Trudeau and Carney did and continue to do to Canada what Eby did to BC. Yet Liberals are hailed as our saviours with a 3000% approval rating.
Something does not add up. Congratulations to BC for finally seeing the light. We have been pointing the flashlight at you for years. Welcome back "

Melanie Eresman on X - "I just saw a dispute between a “disabled trans” and an indigenous arguing about who has it worse now that the conservatives have won in BC. It’s like listening to satire but these humans are actually serious. What the fuck is wrong with people!!!!"

Mud-slinging Eby attempts to cancel his opposition | National Post - "As we wrap up a month of what has the potential to be one of the biggest missteps in British Columbia, or Canadian, political history, it bears examining whether David Eby’s attempt to position himself as a modern day Joseph McCarthy dedicated to rooting out thought criminals from his opposition will be ultimately effective. If Eby somehow pulls together a victory on Saturday, it will likely be a ringing endorsement that cancel culture is alive and well in Canada.  In a sort of pseudo-McCarthyist attempt, the B.C. NDP has gone full throttle since the writ was dropped with attempted cancellations and censorship of B.C. Conservative candidates and staffers. The predominant narrative put forward by the B.C. NDP is the message that there are dangerous extremists that might be sitting at Lorne Doerkson’s table should the B.C. Conservatives form government. So concerned are they with a litany of old Facebook comments, X reposts and offhand remarks that they have put together a handy who’s who: “Meet Lorne Doerkson’s Team.” Like a very dull and farfetched version of Guess Who, the website conveniently lists the purported offenders and offences. Since the campaign kickoff, the B.C. NDP has been committed to attempted cancellations and censorship of prospective B.C. Conservative MLAs. When asked whether British Columbians might look past controversial comments made by MLA candidates, Eby doubled down, stating “these views are relevant to voters as they consider who will best protect them and their family.”  But will this gamble pay off? While doubtless this strategy would have had a greater resonance during the 2020 “Summer of Love,” or the heyday of the “#MeToo” era, increasingly Canadians are fatigued with political correctness. A three-year-old Angus Reid poll found that over half of Canadians said the trend of cancelling public figures due to controversial statements suppresses free speech.  Since 2023, public attitudes towards cancelling have arguably gotten much less supportive. In a 2024 report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canadians rejected cancel culture, agreeing with the statement “political correctness has gone too far” by a margin of 78-22. Cancel culture fatigue has seen the rehabilitation of many previously cast aside from society, even seeing figures like persona non grata Don Cherry appointed to the Order of Ontario with minimal pushback. Highlights from the final week of the campaign included attempting to cancel Lorne Doerkson for holding private fundraisers, and claiming that holding two private maximum-donor fundraisers at “swanky downtown Vancouver hotels” was a sign that a Conservative government would sell out to “private interests.” Not to be forgotten, Conservative candidate Heather Maahs has been one of Eby’s primary punching bags over the past days, with the NDP positioning Maahs as a dangerous homophobe who does not belong in the public sphere...  The NDP called for the removal of Powell River-Sunshine Coast candidate John Henderson for having a copy of Tom Flanagan’s “Grave Error” at work while he was the mayor of Sechelt. In the NDP’s framing, merely having the book and discussing it with some senior staffers meant Henderson “pushed” the book...  In the 30 days of the campaign, the B.C. NDP has devoted a significant portion of its energy to the attempted censorship and cancellation of Conservative candidates, primarily based on shaky foundations of old Facebook screenshots, X reposts and Instagram stories long since expired. The results on Saturday will likely prove an interesting indicator of whether the all bark, no bite strategy of censorship and cancellation remains an effective one in Canada. Is slinging mud an effective strategy or will the consequences of reckless, largely unsubstantiated character attacks manifest in the opposite result intended?  David Eby’s attempt to root out those he deems unacceptable from the B.C. Conservative ecosystem reeks of a McCarthyist ethos determined to police the bounds of discourse in a way that should send a shiver down the spine of anyone committed to free expression. Much like McCarthy, it’s doubtful that Eby has any real self-awareness of the shaky foundations many of his accusations rest upon, instead finding himself completely enveloped in his quest to root out any and all thought criminals from the B.C. Conservative tent. Playing on fear and resentment might have worked 10 years ago, but I would bet that such an approach, especially backed up with few successes and minimal policy prescriptions, will be soundly rejected at the polls."
That would explain the sudden activity among the NPCs just before the election

Canadian society has high social trust—but can that survive our unprecedented immigration increases?

Left wing logic (when it's convenient) - it doesn't matter if trust goes down as long as it's still above the global average.

If elites undermine trust by lying, clearly the "far right" and "misinformation" are to blame.

Since integration is racist, good luck rebuilding trust. 

Clearly, if you oppose mass migration, you're racist. 

DeepDive: Canadian society has high social trust—but can that survive our unprecedented immigration increases?

"Canada is a high-trust country. Surveys consistently show that Canadians are more likely than most people in the world to say “others can be trusted,” to respect the rules, and to view government and civic institutions as broadly legitimate. In Q4 2024, for instance, 43.5 percent of Canadians reported that “most people can be trusted”, which is significantly higher than global averages and among the highest in the OECD.

This sense of collective trust is a huge advantage for the country. It helps to explain why our markets function as well as they do, why our democracy is relatively stable, and why Canada is generally seen as a good place to live and invest.

Scholars often note that only a small cluster of countries consistently report that a majority of people can be trusted. That makes Canada an outlier in the global context. Preserving that advantage has, among other benefits, major economic upside. Economic research, for instance, links a one-point rise in generalized trust to several percentage points of GDP per capita in the long run.

Trust isn’t a static inheritance. It’s continually shaped by social change, economic developments, and political choices. Immigration, in particular, has long interacted with these trust dynamics—sometimes straining them but more often reinforcing them. For decades, newcomers have contributed to Canada’s economy, enriched its culture, and, over time, come to share in its high-trust norms.

But the unprecedented scale of today’s immigration experiment raises new questions that haven’t yet been squarely addressed by policymakers or commentators.

The central issue is this: What happens when a high-trust society welcomes large numbers of newcomers from countries with lower levels of trust? Do newcomers converge toward Canada’s institutions and norms of cooperation, or does the sheer scale of change begin to alter those norms themselves?

In the past, the answer has generally been positive. Over generations, immigrants and their children have converged toward Canadian levels of trust. Yet scale, speed, and segregation matter. When half the population in some of our cities is already foreign-born, and when housing and settlement patterns reduce day-to-day mixing, can we still assume the same outcome?

This DeepDive essay aims to explore that question by surveying the best theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between immigration, diversity, and social trust. The research shows that high-trust societies can remain resilient, but only if their institutions function well and integration is actively managed. Canada’s unprecedented immigration levels make those conditions harder to sustain...

The highest-trust societies are typically in Northern Europe. In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, for instance, more than 60 percent of respondents say that most people can be trusted. At the other end of the spectrum, in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines, the share can be as low as 5 percent. The United States falls somewhere in the middle, with roughly a third of respondents expressing generalized trust.

Canada consistently ranks as a high-trust country. Roughly 40 percent of Canadians tell survey researchers that most people can be trusted—though the number has been falling in recent years. According to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey, for instance, the share of Canadians who believe that most people can be trusted has fallen from 46.8 percent in Q2 2022 to 43.5 percent in Q4 2024 (see figure 1).

The downward drift in Canadian trust levels may seem small, but longitudinal research shows that even modest declines can signal important shifts...

High levels of social trust are rightly seen as a civic and engagement advantage. Scholars have shown that trust acts as a source of social capital that lowers transaction costs, facilitates cooperation, and enables societies to organize at scale. High-trust societies can build dynamic economies and robust democracies. Low-trust societies often rely on family ties, informal networks, or heavy state coercion.

Studies estimate that differences in trust can explain up to one-fifth of the variance in economic growth across advanced countries. Trust lowers the cost of credit, increases investment horizons, and reduces reliance on costly monitoring. In low-trust societies, firms tend to remain family-owned and small; in high-trust ones, large corporations can emerge because strangers are more willing to collaborate...

In high-trust contexts, people are able to cooperate beyond kinship networks, which in turn enables the rise of large-scale firms, vibrant civic associations, and credible political institutions. In low-trust societies, by contrast, confidence rarely extends beyond the family, constraining organizational scale and leaving more functions to the state. For Fukuyama, generalized trust is a cultural inheritance that’s transmitted across generations and rooted in historical experience...

[In] E Pluribus Unum, Putnam addressed the role of diversity more directly. His large-N empirical work showed that more ethnically diverse communities often reported lower levels of trust—not only between groups, but even within them. He described this response as people “hunkering down.” Yet Putnam was careful to stress that this outcome wasn’t inevitable. In his view, the long-term trajectory could still be one of rising trust if institutions fostered integration and common identities. The critical variables were the scale and speed of demographic change, and the strength of institutions tasked with absorbing it. 

Political scientist Eric Uslaner advanced the debate by shifting attention from observable networks to moral orientation in his 2002 book, The Moral Foundations of Trust. For Uslaner, generalized trust isn’t simply a reflection of civic participation or rational calculation, but an ingrained belief that society is fair and the future is hopeful. In this sense, trust functions almost like an ethical disposition: it’s passed down across generations and thus proves remarkably “sticky.”

Yet, once eroded, it’s extraordinarily difficult to rebuild...

Trust also underpins democratic resilience. Research shows that when citizens lose confidence in one another and in institutions, they become more susceptible to populist appeals, conspiracy theories, and polarization. In this sense, Canada’s high-trust inheritance has acted as a shock absorber against global currents of populism...

Canadian scholars note that our immigration and settlement policies have served as institutional buffers. Yet these studies often drew on periods when annual immigration was in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. Today’s levels are several times higher, and the evidence base for what happens at this unprecedented scale is thin.

Canada has long been a case study in successful immigration. Research has found that while ethnic diversity can reduce neighborhood-level trust, strong national institutions and redistributive policies mitigate the effect. Other Canadian studies likewise find that the diversity–trust effect is strongest at the micro level (e.g., neighbourhoods) but tends to dissipate at larger scales where institutions and national identity buffer it...

Immigration levels today are unprecedented. In some metropolitan areas, more than half of residents are foreign-born. In 2021, nearly 47 percent of Toronto’s CMA residents were foreign-born, and several GTA municipalities—Markham, Richmond Hill, Mississauga, Brampton—are now majority-immigrant. Vancouver is at about 42 percent. Rising housing costs, long health-care wait times, and crowded transit raise the risk that institutions may no longer deliver the same integrative outcomes. There is, in short, less margin for error...

Europe, especially Scandinavia, has been a laboratory for studying trust under immigration pressure. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are historically the highest-trust societies in the world.

Yet research shows immigration has modestly lowered generalized trust, particularly where migrants cluster in segregated neighbourhoods. Swedish studies find that negatives tend to weigh more heavily than positives in diverse neighbourhoods, and the effects are strongest when segregation and socio-economic disadvantage overlap. Germany’s experience with Turkish “guest workers” illustrates how weak integration policies can entrench bonding trust within enclaves, which in turn slows convergence.

In Scandinavia, where trust has historically exceeded 60 percent, even small declines are taken seriously. Danish and Swedish policymakers debate immigration in explicitly trust-related terms, reflecting an awareness that their high-trust inheritance is both precious and fragile.

Cross-country studies add nuance. A 2020 meta-analysis found that while ethnic diversity often correlates with lower trust, effect sizes are small to moderate and heavily context-dependent. Where institutions are strong, education is high, and integration policies are robust, trust recovers. Where those conditions are absent, the negative effects are more persistent...

The empirical literature suggests three takeaways. First, immigration can lower trust in the short run, especially at the neighbourhood level. Second, over time and across generations, convergence is possible, but it’s not automatic. Repeated, structured contact across groups—through schools, public services, or civic programs—consistently improves outcomes. The policy lever isn’t diversity itself but how it is managed in daily life. Third, scale and speed matter. Smaller, gradual inflows are easier to integrate; rapid, large-scale inflows can overwhelm institutions and delay trust-building...

In earlier decades, immigration was significant but gradual, which gave time for convergence in trust, culture, and civic identity. Today’s scale compresses those timelines and strains the capacity of institutions to mediate the process.

It’s also far more highly geographically concentrated than historic patterns. More than 90 percent of newcomers settle in just four provinces—Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta—and within them, overwhelmingly in a handful of large metropolitan areas. In Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, the scale of immigration is transforming the cities’ demography and putting pressure on housing, infrastructure, and social services.

Housing is the best-known example. A supply-constrained housing market is absorbing record demand from newcomers, which in turn has pushed affordability to historic lows. But growing evidence from other parts of civic life is notable too.

The Hub recently published an analysis, for instance, that showed in some of the country’s largest school districts, a third or more of students spoke neither English nor French. The school system is a bellwether. When more than 30 percent of students speak another language at home, the classroom becomes a primary site of integration. If schools succeed, they can generate bridging trust. Yet if they struggle, they risk entrenching divides.

These bottlenecks matter for trust because effective institutions are the mechanisms through which integration takes place. When institutions falter, both newcomers and existing citizens may lose confidence in them—and, by extension, in each other.

Spatial segregation compounds the problem. Rising housing costs have pushed newcomers into concentrated enclaves. The 2021 Census showed that 46.6 percent of residents in the Greater Toronto Area were immigrants, and municipalities like Markham (58.6 percent), Richmond Hill (58.2 percent), Mississauga (53.2 percent), and Brampton (52.9 percent) are now among the most immigrant-concentrated in Canada. Over time, the clustering trend has accelerated: in the early 2000s, visible minority shares in Mississauga rose from 40.3 percent (2001) to 53.7 percent (2011), and in Brampton from 40.2 percent to 66.4 percent, which points to intensifying ethnic concentration in suburban areas.

Economists note that segregation can produce “tipping points”: once a neighbourhood crosses a certain threshold of linguistic or cultural concentration, the likelihood of further out-migration by majority residents increases. That dynamic, documented in U.S. and European cities, may already be unfolding in parts of the GTA and Metro Vancouver.

This matters because segregation slows the development of bridging trust and increases reliance on bonding trust within communities. The long-run risk is that instead of convergence toward Canadian norms, we see the persistence of parallel yet separate societies."

Links - 9th November 2026 (Gender Differences)

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization - "Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, aging, and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, our understanding of sex differences in human functional brain organization and their behavioral consequences has been hindered by inconsistent findings and a lack of replication. Here, we address these challenges using a spatiotemporal deep neural network (stDNN) model to uncover latent functional brain dynamics that distinguish male and female brains. Our stDNN model accurately differentiated male and female brains, demonstrating consistently high cross-validation accuracy (>90%), replicability, and generalizability across multisession data from the same individuals and three independent cohorts (N ~ 1,500 young adults aged 20 to 35). Explainable AI (XAI) analysis revealed that brain features associated with the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network consistently exhibited significant sex differences (effect sizes > 1.5) across sessions and independent cohorts. Furthermore, XAI-derived brain features accurately predicted sex-specific cognitive profiles, a finding that was also independently replicated. Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization. Our findings underscore the crucial role of sex as a biological determinant in human brain organization, have significant implications for developing personalized sex-specific biomarkers in psychiatric and neurological disorders, and provide innovative AI-based computational tools for future research."
Damn neurosexism! AI algorithms just amplify human bias, so they need to be trained to prevent "harm" by pretending that men and women are identical

Young teens at play: Girls are egalitarian, boys are generous - "Using the decisions of 2500 girls and boys in three mini dictator games, this paper investigates how the social preferences of five cohorts of students (aged 12 to 16) evolve throughout adolescence. We find that at early ages (12 years old, 7th grade), girls tend to be egalitarian, boys are more generous, and <10 % exhibit spiteful behavior - with equal representation of girls and boys. The gender gap in both strong egalitarianism (with girls showing more egalitarianism) and weak generosity (with boys being more generous) doesn't seem to fade as they grow older."

Thread by @SpencrGreenberg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Important but often overlooked: when groups differ a small amount in their means, they may differ *dramatically* in their tails.  For instance, in a personality study, we found males to have a little bit lower average compassion score than females (1.4 vs. 2)  [tails thread] 🧵 Small differences like this in averages are typically not noticeable or important. Most people are not in the tails.  If you knew only someone's compassion level and had to guess their sex from it, you'd be wrong more than one-third of the time (predicting optimally)! However, small differences in means can lead to much bigger differences in the tails.  Among just the most compassionate people in our study, there were about 2x more females than males (right side of the chart).  Moreover, the least compassionate people were almost all males! Similarly, on average, females usually test only a bit higher than males on peacefulness and forgiveness.  But, if we look at the tails of behavior, we see extreme differences. Males accounted for 96% of U.S. mass shootings and 90% of homicide convictions. I suspect that one reason so many people believe that groups differ much more, on average, than they really do (and engage in dichotomizing and stereotyping) is that tail behavior is sometimes much more visible than typical behavior. When you meet most people, you don't really think about whether their compassion level is slightly above average or slightly below average (and then correlate it with sex). You just wouldn't even notice one way or the other. But when you see that the vast majority of serial killers are male, that stands out.  Most males are not very low in compassion. But most people who are very low in compassion are males!  For instance, ~4x more males than females have psychopathy/sociopathy."

Meme - Diana S. Fleischman @sentientist: "This woman weighs 47 kilos, meaning there are almost no grown men in her weight class. But she might be able to beat up the average 13 year old boy."
🚨 Katherine Brodsky @mysteriouskat: "The number of unfit, unskilled men claiming they can "take her" merely based on the fact that they are men...  Yes, men are on average stronger. But take an unfit man in a somewhat similar weight class and she's winning."

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "14 and 15 year-old boys track and field records beat the world records set by adult women."
"100m 200m 400m 800m 1000m 1500m Mile 5000m 400m Hurdles
High Jump Pole Vault Long Jump Triple Jump Shot Put Discus Hammer Throw Javelin"

Keeping it Casual - "men and women’s sexual behavior since the 1960s actually fits better with the evolutionary psychologists’ narrative than with its sociocultural rival. The pill removes one of the main risks of casual sex for women: the risk of getting pregnant and having to raise an unplanned child without the help of the father. Despite this, more than a half century after it first appeared, women are still less willing than men to engage in casual sex. This doesn’t prove that the Nurture Only theory is false; it’s no doubt possible to come up with a non-evolutionary explanation for the tenacity of the sex difference. But the tenacity of the sex difference isn’t what we would have predicted on the basis of the Nurture Only theory. That should make us wary of any post hoc explanation for the persistence of the casual sex gender gap.  Other evidence presents a similar challenge to the Nurture Only view. Consider, for instance, the sexual behavior of lesbians. Unlike straight women, lesbians don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or about being alone with a more physically powerful partner. If these worries were all that kept women from jumping into bed with every good-looking stranger, then lesbians would have more sexual partners than their straight female counterparts. As various studies have demonstrated, however, they don’t; they have fewer partners... the social pressures don’t all point in the direction presupposed by the Nurture Only theory. Research has generally failed to demonstrate a consistent or pervasive sexual double standard in the modern Western world. Although the belief in the sexual double standard is still widespread, the double standard itself is much less so. Indeed, some people these days hold a reverse double standard, such that they judge men who sleep around more harshly than they judge women. Certainly, “slut” is an insulting term. But so is “prude,” and women who don’t engage in casual sex are sometimes called that – by men who want to sleep with them, for a start. And while “slut” is usually reserved for women, there are plenty of pejorative terms for men who sleep around: womanizer, dirty old man, letch, sleaze, “worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing, womanizing asshole” – and so on... the difference persists even when society pushes against it. As Donald Symons points out, men’s stronger interest in casual sex and sexual novelty has survived society’s best efforts to eradicate it... Arguably, though, the most persuasive argument against the Nurture Only view is that sex differences in sexual inclinations and choosiness can be found in many individuals who have no gender norms, no socialization, and little in the way of culture: that rather sizeable group, so often overlooked by psychologists, known as other animals. The differences aren’t found in all other species, but they are found in many, including most birds, mammals, and reptiles. And when we find the differences in other animals, evolution is the only reasonable explanation. Why should humans be different?... what the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe is that, in our lineage and ours alone, natural selection eliminated the normal sex differences, despite the fact that the selection pressure that initially created them was still operative. Why would it do that? It’s particularly perplexing given that, when we look around the world, we still find the sex differences that selection supposedly eliminated. Thus, the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis."
As usual, the nurture squad believes in nurture only, while the "nature squad" believes both are important, and the nurture squad pretend that just because culture influences things means that nature cannot play a role at all
Patriarchy is so powerful it affects animals, once again

Paulo F. on X - "Why are there > men in leadership positions? Because it is men who have the most to gain from these positions. They guarantee more income, status & above all more sex. As for sex, it is men who, in reproductive terms, gain the most from it the more they practice it. That's all"
Dryborer on X - "Men are more interested in the status symbols of leadership and less vulnerable to the costs. Some men will neglect their wife and kids to get status. Very few women think it's worth it."

Bachman on X - "A weird result of 60 years of sexual egalitarian whitewashing is that every adult learns about gender differences via a series of private relationship crises--more or less excruciating--rather than that knowledge being embodied in institutions, ritual, and prejudice"

Four-foot-tall dwarf beats female pornstar in MMA fight before sparking brawl - "A four-foot-tall dwarf defeated two female MMA fighters including a pornstar during the latest instalment of Epic Fighting Championship.  Majit Suleymanov, who is a blogger and social media influencer, was fighting on the Russian label's latest bizarre MMA card. He was facing pornstar Alexandra Piskun who has previously fought with the promotion against a reality-TV star."

Meme - "The well-known sex difference in brain size is not explained by men being taller than women."

ZUBY: on X - "The social media fuelled 'gender war' is stupid. But it's also interesting.  I think an overlooked reason for it is despite all the "men and women are the same" claptrap, men think and talk like men, and women think and talk like women. And online, these styles constantly clash.  In real life, men typically soften our speech and manner when women are present. It happens instantaneously and perhaps unconsciously in most cases.  But on the internet, detached from being able to physically SEE (let alone cater to) every potential viewer or listener, this calibration is less likely to occur.  Online, men default to speaking as if their audience is other men (it predominantly is). Women hear or see this and think the tone is too 'harsh', broad, and 'insensitive'. And it often is. But that's how men speak when you're not around.  For the first time in human history, we have billions of men and women of all different backgrounds, all communicating and cross-pollinating ideas and communication styles.  People are privvy to more conversations than ever, and don't always like it because their particularly sensitivities are not catered to. They are often outright ignored.  Very few men actually hate women. But we aren't women and technology has its limitations.  Real world conversations are superior because there is more empathy and humanity. And fewer algorithms :)"
Feminists claim that treating men and women differently is sexist. But they can't walk the walk and get upset when men treat women like they treat men (see also: treating women like you'd treat Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - they'd be upset at that too)

Girls' under-10s football team lost every game last season beats boys to claim league trophy - "A girl’s under-10 football team which lost every single game last season has now triumphed in a league of all-boys squads to win a cup trophy.  The team from Woodlanders FC won the Huddersfield Junior Football League Vase trophy by beating rivals Howden Clough FC 3-2... The girls had a difficult start last season as an all-girl team in a league of boys’ teams and lost every game."
Clearly, this shows that women are equally physically capable as men, because puberty isn't a thing

Steve Stewart-Williams on X - "Sex differences in suicide rates by age (UK; 2017)
Note that a lot of sex differences follow a similar trajectory: They start growing in adolescence then shrink in later life. This applies, for instance, to fireworks-related hospitalizations, alcohol consumption, road deaths, and homicide rates."

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "I still haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for the finding that men are much stronger than women even when they're equally muscular."
Damn socialisation!

This Mixed-Gender Wrestling Match Ended In Tears… 🤼‍♂️
Instagram - Mens Media: "Bro ain't playing no games"
High school (?) girl wrestles guy from "BTWC" and epically loses and cries, with her hairband down over her mouthBTWC" and epically loses and cries, with her hairband down over her mouth

mark normand on X - "Me: Are women as horny as men?
Lady Friend: Definitely.
Me: Well I’d have sex with you, would you have sex with me?
LF: No way.
Me: Well there ya go.
LF: But I’m not attracted to you.
Me: Yeah, I’m not attracted to you either."
Left wing logic: if person A says he's starving and he will eat anything and person B says he's staving but refuses to eat most things you give him but loves burgers, person A and person B are equally hungrystaving but refuses to eat most things you give him but loves burgers, person A and person B are equally hungry

Defiant L’s on X - "Democrat Lindsey Williams: "Female bodies are just as strong and fast and capable as male bodies.""

︎ ︎venom on X - "YouTuber Jesse James West held a competition to see who’s stronger between tall, strong bodybuilder women and strong dwarf men.
> Dwarf men easily crushed them
> Women were very egoistic, serious, and competitive
> While men were just having fun
Why is gender equality forced when the difference in ability is pretty clear?"
Damn structural sexism and misogyny!

Gender stereotypes are often accurate but vary in magnitude depending on the criterion - "Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that while gender stereotypes are often viewed as misleading, they are surprisingly accurate. People correctly guess whether men or women are higher on a given trait about 85% of the time... People tended to underestimate gender differences in areas such as cognitive abilities, occupational distributions, and academic performance (e.g., GPA in different college majors). In contrast, they overestimated differences in personality traits, behaviors, and social attitudes.  The sensitivity correlations further supported the conclusion that gender stereotypes are largely accurate. When averaging across all participants in a given study, the mean consensual sensitivity correlation was .77, indicating a strong relationship between stereotypical beliefs and actual gender differences."
Most stereotypes are true

Rob Henderson on X - "Interesting: women carry a large reproductive cost (pregnancy). But men carry 20% more active metabolic tissue to aid in reproductive efforts (boosts competitiveness, attractiveness, and ability to provide) and is ultimately just as costly as pregnancy."

Evolution and Social Cognition: Contrast Effects as a Function of Sex, Dominance, and Physical Attractiveness - "Previous research indicates that males, compared with females, evaluate their relationships less favorably after exposure to physically attractive members of the other sex. An evolutionary model predicts a converse effect after exposure to opposite-sex individuals high in dominance, which should lead females to evaluate their current relationships less favorably than males. Women and men rated their current relationships after being exposed to opposite-sex targets varying in both dominance and physical attractiveness. Consistent with earlier research, males exposed to physically attractive, as compared with average, targets rated their current relationships less favorably. Males' relationship evaluations were not directly influenced by the targets' dominance, although the effect of physical attractiveness was significant only for men exposed to women low in dominance. However; females' evaluations of their relationships were unaffected by exposure to physically attractive males but were lower after exposure to targets high in dominance. These data support predictions derived from an evolutionary model and suggest that such models can be used to generate testable hypotheses about ongoing social cognition."

John Rain on X - "Men consistently score higher than women on measures of political knowledge. A 2018 study found that this difference cannot be explained by stereotype threat. (More generally, men tend to have broader general knowledge than women on average.)"
Time to demonize men and their politics because deferring to stances supported by people with greater knowledge is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda

Covfefe Anon on X - "Women having significantly less general knowledge than men is a real phenomenon and shows up in multiple areas - in this case a female PhD student in the field doesn't know basic underlying facts about the field - this is only surprising in that you can't predict where her knowledge will be lacking  Part of the reason our society is destroying itself is that it's decided upon a religious dogma of group equality across all domains which it then enforces by making it taboo to look at and think about the implications of the fact that groups are *not* all equally capable  How many people know about the general knowledge gap between men and women?  Few  How many studies are there on it?  Few - no one wants to try to publish a paper that has a "controversial" result when the result contradicts progressive religious dogma  Millions and millions of "little" things like this add up and only disagreeable, knowledgeable people can actually fit it all into a coherent framework"
Men are better at trivia than women

Covfefe Anon on X - "The general knowledge gap between men and women is huge and replicates across many studies"
Bryan Caplan on X - "I found that being male changes beliefs about economics by roughly 16% as much as a PhD in economics."

Rob Henderson on X - ""social scientists are more likely than civilians to chalk up sex differences to nurture rather than nature...even extends to differences between hens and roosters...this one area where laypeople have a firmer grasp on reality than many alleged experts""
Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن on X - "There are many such areas because "experts" are usually educated academics, and academic fields are highly susceptible to ideologies.   Once an academic in field A has been captured by an ideological lens, it is not only possible, but common, that all his judgments in his own area of expertise are distorted to the point that laypeople make sounder judgments.  Not because they know more, but because their ability to see the realities on the ground are not systematically distorted or corrupted by extraneous ideological incentives.   Hence the key conclusion here "Academia seems to impair people's understanding of the world rather than improving it.""
Trust the Experts! Even when they are wrong

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒕 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒉 on X - "When selling to a woman, show her that other women have it. Because women want what other women have. Explains their dating lifestyle - why they are attracted to players and married men
• Women value preselection
When selling to a man, show him that no other man has it. Because men want what what other men don't have. Explains their dating lifestyle - why they are more likely to commit to virgins
• Men value exclusivity"

Sex Differences in Mathematics and Reading Achievement Are Inversely Related: Within- and Across-Nation Assessment of 10 Years of PISA Data - "We analyzed one decade of data collected by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including the mathematics and reading performance of nearly 1.5 million 15 year olds in 75 countries. Across nations, boys scored higher than girls in mathematics, but lower than girls in reading. The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics. There was considerable variation in the extent of the sex differences between nations. There are countries without a sex difference in mathematics performance, and in some countries girls scored higher than boys. Boys scored lower in reading in all nations in all four PISA assessments (2000, 2003, 2006, 2009). Contrary to several previous studies, we found no evidence that the sex differences were related to nations’ gender equality indicators. Further, paradoxically, sex differences in mathematics were consistently and strongly inversely correlated with sex differences in reading: Countries with a smaller sex difference in mathematics had a larger sex difference in reading and vice versa. We demonstrate that this was not merely a between-nation, but also a within-nation effect. This effect is related to relative changes in these sex differences across the performance continuum: We did not find a sex difference in mathematics among the lowest performing students, but this is where the sex difference in reading was largest. In contrast, the sex difference in mathematics was largest among the higher performing students, and this is where the sex difference in reading was smallest. The implication is that if policy makers decide that changes in these sex differences are desired, different approaches will be needed to achieve this for reading and mathematics. Interventions that focus on high-achieving girls in mathematics and on low achieving boys in reading are likely to yield the strongest educational benefits."
Time to do more about "patriarchy"
It seems that countries which are more feminist boost girls and/or suppress boys in maths, and feminism also generally demonises males, so that would increase the sex differences in reading

Boys behave differently to girls within hours of birth, Cambridge study finds - "Girls and boys exhibit sex differences within a few hours of birth, a University of Cambridge study has found.  For decades, biologists and sociologists have noticed that boys and girls show different behaviours and preferences growing up, but have been unsure whether nature or nurture was responsible.  Cambridge scientists have shown that, on average, infant girls show a natural preference for looking at faces within a few hours of birth, while boys would rather gaze at objects... There are major differences between boys and girls during childhood. Girls typically develop language earlier, speak in longer sentences and often have larger vocabularies than boys growing up.  Girls are also better at picking up non-verbal signals, such as facial expressions and tone of voice, and have fine motor coordination and more self-control.  In contrast, boys display higher levels of physical activity and are more adept at large motor movements such as running, jumping and climbing.  When playing, girls tend to lean towards co-operative, verbal and fantasy play, sometimes focusing on domestic make-believe scenarios, while boys gravitate towards sports, outdoor activities, construction sets and toy vehicles... For the study, 130 infants were presented with side-by-side videos containing either a social stimulus – a human face with natural movement – or a non-social object, in this case a popular desk toy or a set of swinging metallic balls known as a Newton’s cradle.  Researchers who analysed the videos of the babies eyes were unaware of their sex or what video a child was looking at, which ensured that they could not bias the results.  The team found that, regardless of sex, newborn infants generally preferred to look at the social stimulus.  But on average, female infants spent a greater proportion of the time looking at the social stimulus compared with male infants, while male infants spent a greater proportion of time looking at the non-social stimulus compared with female infants. Since the differences could be seen within hours of birth, it was likely that prenatal biological factors such as hormone levels and genetics contributed to the observed on-average sex differences, the researchers concluded... The team is interested in finding out whether these early sex differences contribute to later differences in children’s minds, brains and behaviour.  To test this requires a longitudinal study design, which is under way. The researchers hope that by understanding the origins of the earliest sex differences, scientists can better understand neurodiversity and conditions such as autism, which is diagnosed about twice as often in boys than in girls."
This shows the power of patriarchy - it's capable of socialising infants within hours of birth! If you disagree, that's neurosexism because male and female brains are almost the same

Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable - "We identify a profound and consistent gender gap in people’s core life goals. Across nine studies using diverse sample populations (executives in high-power positions, recent graduates of a top MBA program, undergraduate students, and online panels of working adults) and over 4,000 participants, we find that, compared to men, women have a higher number of life goals, place less importance on power-related goals, associate more negative outcomes (e.g., time constraints and tradeoffs) with high-power positions, perceive power as less desirable, and are less likely to take advantage of opportunities for professional advancement. Women view high-level positions as equally attainable as men do, but less desirable. Our findings advance the science of gender, goals, organizational behavior, and decision making."
The gender wage gap is proof that women are discriminated against

Paul Graham on X - "In England, students choose just a few subjects (usually 3) to study in the last 2 years of high school, so gender differences in their interests become more visible than in the US."
John Papola on X - "Read another way, this is a smooth sliding scale from rigorous reality-based studies to complete groupthink bullshit. Men and women need each other. Women help us be kind. We help them be rational. It’s grand pop wisdom and it’s reflect in every clear revealed preference."

Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age - "The stereotype that women are much more talkative than men is pervasive across many cultures, but a widely reported study by University of Arizona researchers in 2007 refuted the claim, finding that men and women speak roughly the same number of words per day – around 16,000.   A new, larger follow-up to that study paints a more nuanced picture, suggesting that women may be the chattier gender, but only during a certain period of life.   "There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men," said co-lead study author Colin Tidwell, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the U of A. "We wanted to see  whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested." Researchers found that women between the ages of 25 and 64 – the life stages of early and middle adulthood – spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study's other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up).   The researchers also discovered that people in general might be becoming less talkative, a finding they suspect is linked to an increasing reliance on digital communication."
Women talk more than men after all. This is more robust than Mehl's previous study of college students finding they talked the same, too
Amusingly, a September 2026 Psychology Today article written by a PhD and reviewed by someone else misrepresented the study and dismissed its findings. Anything to protect the narrative