Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The Virtue Industries

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Back in the days of Occupy Wall Street, Kenneth Anderson wrote

OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

Pointer from Glenn Reynolds. I recommend the entire essay, but especially like the term “virtue industries.”

Most opioid deaths not from prescriptions

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Jacob Sullum writes,

Although prescription pain medication is commonly blamed for the “opioid epidemic,” such drugs play a small and shrinking role in deaths involving this category of psychoactive substances. A recent study of opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts underlines this crucial point, finding that prescription analgesics were detected without heroin or fentanyl in less than 17 percent of the cases. Furthermore, decedents had prescriptions for the opioids that showed up in toxicology tests just 1.3 percent of the time.

But it’s easier to shake down drug companies than to get at the suppliers of fentanyl. Much, much easier.

On deaths of despair

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Philip N. Cohen writes (pdf download),

This paper uses complete death certificate data from the Mortality Multiple Cause Files with American Community Survey data to examine age-specific mortality rates for married and non-married people from 2007 to 2017. The overall rise in White mortality is limited almost exclusively to those who are not married, for men and women. . . .Analysis by education level shows death rates have risen most for Whites with the lowest education, but have also increased for those with high school or some college.

This is an important finding. I was sent an advance galley of Deaths of Despair, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, due out in March. I wonder if they will want to revisit the causal narrative that they tell, which strongly emphasizes economic factors, based on the link between (low) education and high mortality rates. Cohen writes,

If White mortality increases are concentrated among people with low levels of education, for whom marriage has become rarer, it’s possible the increased White mortality among single people could reflect the greater share of that group with low education. However, Figure 3 suggests this is not the whole story. . .it appears the overall White marriage mortality ratio is driven both by increasing death rates for everyone at the lowest levels of education, and by increasing marriage disparities at higher levels of education.

A cynical view of elites

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Troy Camplin writes,

Politics is the battle between these two views of the elites: the view that external forces are harmful, and the view that internal forces are harmful. The left will tend to blame institutions (which are external creations to help people realize certain goals); the right will tend to blame culture (which is generated internally and affects people internally). Both believe regulations and restrictions will solve the world’s problems. What they do not realize is that the non-elites (bourgeois and proletarians) tend to consider the elites the cause of the world’s problems.

. . .Elites tend to treat everyone else like pawns in their political games, and political games are exclusively the realm of the elites. Voting is an opiate for the masses, as evidenced by the fact that most elected officials are re-elected, while the institutions they are a part of are among the most unpopular (at least, in the U.S.). All governments, though, exist by and for the elites, with the elites throwing a few bones to the thugs in order to ensure their continued rule (the thugs follow whoever is throwing them the most bones, and the elites know it). The rest of the population produce the wealth the elites need so they can play their political games and otherwise participate in the gift economy. The wisest elites are those who understand this and try to ensure the economy continues to produce more and more wealth for them to be able to seize (through taxes) and use. The unwise get tired of waiting for the goose to lay those golden eggs, and instead seize the bird and cut it open to get all the gold at once.

I recommend the entire essay

An essay that agrees with me

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Jonathan Rauch shares my concern with the state of political discourse. He also agrees with Yuval Levin. Rauch writes,

we will get more traction by thinking of them as problems of social incentives and system design. In other words, it’s the institutions, stupid.

Rauch suggests:

1. direct social action, meaning creating organizations specifically devoted to improved political discourse.
2. indirect social action, meaning boosting organizations in civil society, which will have the effect of binding people together across political lines.
3. re-wiring the social network. His ideas there did not inspire me. I will see what other essayists have to say about them.

His concluding paragraph:

I am not claiming that re-socialization strategies will (or will not) work. We’ll see. What I can say is that they are collectively barking up the right tree. After years in which conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all saw society more in terms of individuals and consumers than institutions and communities, social intermediaries are coming back into focus. Just noticing and thinking about them, instead of looking right through them, is a welcome change.

Best of times, worst of times

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A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at the University of Indiana to students and some faculty in a graduate program in public policy. As usual, the best part was the Q&A, and one of the more challenging questions was why this feels like a bad time in terms of the political climate even though it seems to be a good time in terms of economic indicators. Some possible answers:

1. People evaluate the economic results of the political system by asking “What have you done for me lately?” with an emphasis on “me” and “lately.” So Americans don’t feel better because hundreds of millions of people in India and China are climbing out of poverty. And we don’t say that we are really grateful to be living in a world with antibiotics, indoor plumbing, air travel, and the Internet.

2. Yuval Levin would say that we have gained affluence but become unmoored. That is, people derive meaning from their participation in institutions, including marriage, religion, membership in professions, and work in organizations. Institutions give us roles, responsibilities, obligations, and guides to behavior. But nowadays, rather than treating institutions as a set of customs and obligations that we ought to follow, we either exit from institutions or treat them as platforms for promoting our individual “brands.” (Note that this is a very terse and incomplete description of Levin’s thesis in A Time to Build. I continue to strongly recommend the whole book when it becomes available.)

A conversation about political conversation

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At Cato Unbound. I contributed the lead essay.

New analyses of polarization keep appearing, and new signs of the severity our political fault lines keep emerging. As a result, I sense that the latest edition of The Three Languages manages to be both timely and out of date. This essay will sketch some of the book’s key points, and then I will offer my current thinking, particularly concerning cultural forces that I think are behind the surge in polarization, and what we might do to try to counter those forces.

Read the whole essay before commenting. Note that some distinguished folks will be contributing essays in response. You can check out the overview page over this week and next (I’ll probably post reminders).

Law and blame

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Robin Hanson writes,

Law is our main system of official blame; it is how we officially blame people for things. So it is a pretty big deal that, over the last few centuries, changes to law have induced big changes in who officially blames who for most things that go wrong. These changes may be having big bad effects.

He argues that institutions have evolved in a way that creates incentives for people to blame businesses rather than other people when bad things happen. This made me think of the opioid crisis being blamed on manufacturers of legal drugs.

A proposal to move that will go nowhere

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National Review reports,

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) will introduce legislation on Wednesday that would move the majority of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. to economically depressed areas. . .

Under the bill, the Department of Agriculture would be relocated to Hawley’s home state of Missouri while the Department of Education would move to Blackburn’s Tennessee, in order to disperse the economic benefits associated with relatively high-paying government jobs that currently accrue to just a few zip codes.

As I see it, the economic argument for this is sound. It seems like a great way to redistribute wealth from the DC area, which is now one of the wealthiest areas in the country, to poorer areas.

But there really is a Deep State, and there is simply no way that a mere elected official like Hawley is going to get anywhere butting up against it.

Martin Gurri (and Yuval Levin) watch

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The NYT reports,

In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

This is one of the explanations for the declining success rate of mass protests, which is the topic of the article. Martin Gurri would say that today’s public is ready to say what it is against but unable to articulate what it is for.

Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build (alas, not available until next year), says that social media accentuate the decline of formative institutions and the rise of performative behavior. Think of the demonstrations of yesteryear as organized by people who knew what they wanted. Think of today’s demonstrations as drawing people who want to be seen demonstrating. Note that the Hong Kong protest does not have to be old school to have my sympathies.