Three things conservatives wrote this week that made us think
By my lights, Reihan Salam is the conservative at National Review most worthy of liberals’ attention. He combines an almost super-human capacity for consuming oddball studies and theoretical arguments with a knack for coming at liberals sideways, hitting us in ways we wouldn’t expect. His latest target is Noam Scheiber’s big piece in The New Republic, which charges Silicon Valley with an implicit and particularly relentless bias against anyone past their early 30s. I found Scheiber’s account compelling, and the older tech industry hands he chronicled deeply sympathetic, so I was interested to see where Salam would go with this. His post pokes a few modest-but-reasonable holes in Scheiber’s evidence, but the core of Salam’s argument is here…
…This is interesting because it takes a classic left-wing critique — that for historically privileged groups, the sudden arrival of a level playing field can feel like oppression — and uses it to make an ostensibly right-wing point. It depends on whether you actually buy the idea that older Americans can still be considered a privileged group in this segment of the market world. And, admittedly, solid and extensive data on wither side of the argument is hard to come by. By Salam’s argument is a particularly coherent defense of the libertarian-inflected culture of creative destruction that Silicon Valley champions.
