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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Who in America has the fortitude to say we should cut funding to liberal arts and social studies because China sure as heck isn’t wasting money on those.

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(Proto-) Fascists and other reactionary types? They've been calling for this for decades...

Oh please. Not everyone to the left of a DSA cultural studies major is a “reactionary fascist.” Back in college my buddies (all engineers) mocked our industrial engineering friend for majoring in “imaginary engineering.” You can guess what we said about the underwater basket weaving majors. But we were all democrats (with a few libertarians mixed in).

I mentioned "(Proto-) fascists and other reactionary types" because that's one obvious answer to your question. I'm not implying that everyone who supports cutting liberal arts funding fits within that category.

You made your career in a social studies field.

Law is a high IQ version of a service trade, like being a Disney vacation agent.

OK, but that's orthogonal to whether it's rooted in social studies, math, or English.

Law is a self-contained field that predates and doesn’t rely on any of the fields that contemporary universities call social studies, e.g. https://fas.yale.edu/division-social-science.

In medieval times law was categorized alongside medicine and divinity as one of the three learned professions: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-03199-3_.... It’s not an academic field at all really, much closer to a trade.

Last time I checked --- this is a couple years ago --- the #1 feeder undergrad degree for law was English.

What does that have to do with what the field is rooted in?

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