Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Racial disparities in major-switching

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John S. Rosenberg writes,

Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, the expert witness for the plaintiffs in SFFA v. Harvard, has shown that at Duke, 62% of entering black freshman expressed an interest in majoring in natural sciences, engineering, or economics (compared to 61% of whites), but less than 30% graduated with a major in those fields (compared to 51% of whites). In his major study of Duke, “What Happens After Enrollment?” Arcidiacono and his co-authors found that “Over 54% of black men who express an initial interest in majoring in the natural sciences, engineering, or economics switch to the humanities or social sciences compared to less than 8% of white men.”

Recruiting under-qualified students and setting them up to fail, or lowering the bar for their success, is called “inclusion.” I’m sorry to have to be so blunt, but that is the way it looks to anyone who has not drunk the social justice movement’s Kool-Aid.

There are women and minorities who can handle STEM majors, and it’s not fair to them to say that it’s the content of the courses that needs to change to accommodate students who can’t handle them.

Concerning intellectual property

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Brink Lindsey and Daniel Takash write,

Eliminate patents for software and business methods. One crucial requirement for any workable system of property rights is the ability to define boundaries. The expansion of patent law in recent decades to include software and business methods runs afoul of this requirement. These patents currently make up a substantial fraction of all patents granted, and instead of serving to encourage innovation they have created a legal minefield that innovators now have to cross.

This proposal sounds sensible, as do the others that they offer.

When I think about this issue, I think in terms of two questions about the originator (who claims intellectual property in our current system) and the follower (who is prevented from using the originator’s work).

1. How much effort did the originator have to go through? In the case of pharmaceuticals, these days the effort required is usually a lot. In the case of new business methods, more of the effort goes into the execution than into the conception.

2. How much effort did the follower not have to undertake because of what the first inventor did? Again, the case of a pharmaceutical, this is a lot. In the case of a new business method (Amazon’s “one-click ordering” is a widely-used example), I would say not so much.

I guess the ideal for me would be if the follower had to compensate the originator according to the answers to these two questions.

A new political taxonomy

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Created by Richard Tafel, using data from Pew Research. He uses two dimensions: left/right; and traditional/modern/postmodern

The group that is least understood in American politics is the Postmodern Right. While postmodernism on the Left focuses on the failure of modernity to address social justice in term of identity politics, the Postmodern Right questions the fundamental economic worldview of the Modern Right. In Pew’s survey, they show up as a new category named “Market Skeptic Republicans.”

These are the folks trying to throw Republican-leaning libertarians under the bus. They were well represented at the National Conservatism conference. They are only 10 percent of “engaged voters,” but as I see it they are punching above their weight in the Trump era.

For “traditional” I read “Christian believers.” On the left, they include African-American Christians whose ethnicity ties them to Democrats, even if their views on social issues do not.

The Modern Left and the Modern Right are those of us who still like capitalism and freedom. But the Modern Left is down to just 13 percent of all engaged voters, compared with 36 percent for the Postmodern left, which now dominates the Democratic Party. The Modern Right is 29 percent of all engaged voters, which means that they dominate the right overall, which is only 45 percent of engaged voters.

This is an interesting taxonomy to work with.

1. I think that if we had a proportional representation system, it is quite possible that parties would emerge along these lines.

2. I think that the rapid decline of the Modern Left and the corresponding rise of the Postmodern Left is the most significant and for me the most frightening development of the past decade or so.

3. My current thinking is that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination, and possibly the election. For Biden to win, the Postmodern Left has to fail to unite behind a candidate. But Warren has a strong base among college-educated women, who are a significant Democratic constituency. I expect that in the early primaries/caucuses she will pull away from Sanders and the rest, so that by Super Tuesday it will be a two-person race. In that game, Biden is playing a losing hand.

4. Under a Parliamentary system, the various parties would have to form coalitions. As it is, we are effectively in a world of minority governments. President Trump has no support anywhere on the left and has disaffected part of the Modern Right. If Senator Warren wins the Presidency, then the Postmodern Left will attempt to govern with almost 2/3 of the country in disagreement with them. But part of the Postmodern Left philosophy is not to compromise with anyone.

Have a nice day.

A thought experiment on living standards

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Russ Roberts’ latest video.

He asks how willing you would be to take your income today back to 1973 and buy the goods and services available back then at those 1973 prices, or whether you would prefer to stay in the present.

That is, suppose you were offered a time machine in which you could take your current income and use it to choose from a 1973 market basket. Would you get into that time machine?

The official statistics used to calculate inflation and “today’s real income in 1973 dollars” would say that it’s obvious you should get into the time machine. You’ll be so much richer, buying a new car for less than $5000 and buying gas for less than 60 cents a gallon.

But a lot of people would think twice about getting into that time machine. No Internet, that 1973 car won’t be roadworthy very long, when you go Israeli dancing you’ll be stuck doing the boring oldies (for some reason, Russ doesn’t mention that last example), etc.

The bottom line is that the official statistics probably vastly over-estimate the satisfaction you would get out of getting into that time machine. Russ argues that this means that the official statistics under-estimate the gains in satisfaction that have taken place from 1973 to today.

Another way to run the thought experiment might be to take 1973 income and apply it to today’s goods and services. Suppose that you are in the 65th percentile in the income distribution today. Go back and find the 65th percentile in 1973, in 1973 dollars. Now, give yourself that amount, which might be $25,000 (I am totally making that up). Would you rather have that income today, or would you jump into the time machine to take it back to 1973?

Suppose that with an income of $25,000 you would jump into the time machine, because today’s rents and cost of other basics make that $25,000 look puny. You’ll do without the Internet, the more durable car, and the more exciting dances, thank you very much.

Now ask, how much more than that $25,000 would you need in order to talk you out of getting into the time machine? Suppose you would be content with $50,000. In that case, your subjective cost of living has gone up 100 percent, because you asked for an additional $25,000. But the official statistics seem to say that the cost of living has gone up 500 percent, implying that you would require $125,000 to talk you out of jumping into the time machine. That is a big difference. The official statistics are probably heavily biased to overstate the rise in the cost of living (which means that they understate the improvement in living standards) by a substantial amount.

I know what you’re thinking: these thought experiments are ridiculous. We can’t really use them to measure living standards. But the official statistics, and the claims people make about stagnation or growth based on those statistics, amount to thought experiments.

Thought experiments are all we have. It’s just that some of them are blessed with “official” status. And they are probably way off.

Some bracing advice

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From Louis M. Profeta, MD.

We need to encourage our kids to slow it down, to take a longer path to college, perhaps. Expose our kids to real education—the kind of education that comes with a W-2, a boss, getting up early and working late and interacting with people who can’t afford a higher education. Make them appreciate the life experiences that come with nailing a 2 x 4, washing dishes, wheeling people to X-ray, picking up garbage, answering telephones. Make them earn their spending money BEFORE college and decide on their own if they’d rather use it on alcohol, weed, a four-block Uber ride, or laundry and food.

I recommend the whole essay.

Affective polarization

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This is a relatively new term, to be distinguished from issue polarization. Affective polarization is loving your side for being your side and hating the other side. Recall that Lilliana Mason’s work shows affective polarization having gone up much more than issue polarization. Now we have a survey paper by Shanto Iyengar and others

What, if anything, can be done to ameliorate affective polarization? While efforts here are at best nascent, several approaches have shown promise. All of them work to reduce the biases generated by partisanship’s division of the world into an in group and an out group. Hence, some work has focused on making partisan identities less salient or making other identities more salient.

(I am quoting from the published version, forwarded by a reader. The link above goes to an ungated version, which may differ.)

A libertarian would say that in a libertarian world, with less at stake in politics, affective polarization could be reduced.

Negative partisanship

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Jonathan Rauch writes,

“negative partisanship.” It’s not so much that we like our own party as that we detest the other. In fact, Eric Groenendyk, of the University of Memphis, finds evidence that people hate the other party partially because they are disappointed in their own party. “[T]hey appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party,” he writes. “In other words, they seem to be engaging in the ‘lesser of two evils’ identity defense.” By protecting their sense of belonging, intense partisan animosity performs what Groenendyk has called emotional rescue. The fevered view of President Obama proffered by people like Dinesh D’Souza may have been absurd, but it did serve the purpose of making every Republican leader look better by comparison. If Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, then you had better support whatever mediocre Democrat is on offer.

In any case, an implication of negative partisanship is that partisans are not so much rallying for a cause or party they believe in as banding together to fight a collective enemy — psychologically and politically a very different kind of proposition, as we see when we look at the literature on what tribalism does to the brain.

He does get around to citing Lilliana Mason. He doesn’t mention my book, but his themes are very similar. Highly recommended.

And try to attend, either in person or by viewing on the web, my conversation with Russ Roberts on these topics tomorrow at noon eastern time.

Leaving Twitter

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If you want to keep up with this blog, you will have to read it or subscribe to it. I will no longer echo the posts to Twitter–assuming that I understand correctly the procedure for stopping the echo.

There are no incidents that cause me to do this. I will keep my account, but I won’t do anything with it. As it is, I never wrote a tweet. I never replied to any tweets. The only thing I ever did on Twitter was echo my blog posts to it.

This is something I have thought about doing for a long time, but I was lazy about it. For me personally, I perceive a trade-off between getting whatever additional following Twitter allows me vs. participating in a project that goes against everything I stand for in intellectual life. Twitter is about rapid reactions to fleeting stories, and I instead believe in trying to “think slow” in Daniel Kahneman’s terminology. Shutting off the echo to Twitter is a small statement of principle.

While I’m at it, let me update my personal “terms of service” on Facebook. I will never react to a political post there. I will not comment on, like, or share such a post. I ignore friend requests from people I do not know personally. I make liberal use of the “unfollow” option. If your posts don’t “spark joy” (a Marie Kondo phrase about de-cluttering), then expect to be unfollowed. Pretty much anything sparks more joy than political posts. I have more tolerance for cat videos.

Populist leaders as father figures

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Mary Eberstadt writes,

In every case, the signature of the new populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off the bullies in any form they appear—illegal immigrants, rapacious elites, menacing foreign nations, and so on.

. . .Nor is Trump alone in functioning as a super-daddy in a world where more and more children and former children grow up without an ordinary father in the home.

I recently read Eberstadt’s new book, Primal Screams, in which she argues that the sexual revolution resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of children growing up in intact families with siblings, creating identity crises for such children, with identity politics stepping in to provide a substitute for the loss of strong family identity. I will re-read her book, which includes interesting reaction essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel (you can think of them as representing the three axes, respectively). But at the moment I would describe her thesis as at best speculative.

I had the same skeptical reaction to the essay on populism. Does the causal analysis hold up under scrutiny? It seems to me that authoritarian “father-figure” leaders have emerged at different times and in disparate countries without being preceded by a sudden increase in broken families. I think that she needs to make a more rigorous attempt to demonstrate the validity of her causal model if she wants to avoid the accusation of practicing right-wing normative sociology.