{"id":12216,"date":"2020-02-26T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=12216"},"modified":"2020-02-25T13:44:35","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T21:44:35","slug":"gray-matter-deficient-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/gray-matter-deficient-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Gray Matter\u2019\u2013Deficient Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Former&nbsp;New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout \u2014 easy, mindless, automatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI could teach anybody,\u201d Bloomberg pontificated, \u201ceven people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the \u201cskill set\u201d of the current \u201cinformation economy\u201d that requires \u201chow to think and analyze.\u201d In this new economy, he said, \u201cyou have to have a lot more gray matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gray matter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the \u201cskill sets\u201d of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers \u2014 much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2020\/02\/gray-matter-deficient-americans\/\">Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Former&nbsp;New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout \u2014 easy, mindless, automatic. \u201cI could teach [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-3b2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12203,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-farming-wit-and-wisdom-of-mike-bloomberg\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":0},"title":"The Farming Wit and Wisdom of Mike Bloomberg","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 20, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Here is what Democratic candidate for president Michael Bloomberg said in 2016 at Oxford, in what he apparently offered up as an ad hoc history of labor, agriculture, and industry, leading up to his own sophisticated era,\u00a0as reported in the\u00a0New York Post: \u201cI could\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12452,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-will-win-if-he-responds-to-righteous-voter-rage\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":1},"title":"Trump Will Win If He Responds to Righteous Voter Rage","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 30, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The 2020 election will be decided in the fall by swing voters in ten or 15 states. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, those voters were leaning to reelect President Trump, largely on the powers of incumbency and a near-record vibrant economy. The Democratic left-wing\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9047,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/in-search-of-fixes-for-a-fossilized-economy\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":2},"title":"In Search of Fixes for a Fossilized Economy","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9930,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dont-sweat-the-big-stuff\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":3},"title":"Don\u2019t Sweat the Big Stuff","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Politicians who cannot cope with the realities of governing should stop fantasizing about utopia. The recent Academy Awards ceremony turned into a monotony of hate. Many of the stars who mounted the stage ranted on cue about the evils of President Donald Trump. Such\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Trump&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12220,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-02-28-20\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":4},"title":"Angry Reader 02-28-20","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: Subject: Gray Matter Your articles are so offensively lacking in context, thoughtfulness, and reflection on history--basically simpleminded attack ads-- that I am going to erase the National Review\u2019s bookmark from my browser. And there is no case for Trump any more than there was a case\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11910,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-economy-father-of-us-all\/","url_meta":{"origin":12216,"position":5},"title":"The Economy, Father of Us All","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 24, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Nationals Review Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news \u201cunexpectedly\u201d and \u201csurprisingly\u201d improves or stays steady \u2014 in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent),\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12217,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12216\/revisions\/12217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}