Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Identity drives opinion

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Michael Macy and others write,

In each experiment, participants were first asked with which party they identify and how strongly. They were then randomly assigned to 10 parallel worlds of uniform size and administered a survey with up to 20 randomly ordered political and cultural statements (see table S2). In 8 of 10 worlds (the influence condition), participants could see which party was more likely to agree with an item, while in the other two worlds (the independence condition), they could not. In the influence condition, the participant’s own agreement was then used, in turn, to update the relative support of each party displayed to the next participant in that same world. Participants only knew about their own world and did not even know that there were other worlds.

Suppose that there is an issue where people can be either pro or con. In one “world,” people come to believe that Democrats are pro. In the experiment, people who identify as Democrats will take the pro side in that world. But suppose that in another “world,” people come to believe that Democrats are con. In that case, people who identify as Democrats will take the con side.

The authors conclude,

Our results suggest that partisan alignments across substantively diverse issues do not necessarily reflect intrinsic preferences but may indicate instead the outcome of cascade dynamics that might have tipped in a different direction due to chance variation in the positions taken by early movers. Public awareness of this counterintuitive possibility has the potential to encourage greater tolerance for alternative opinions.

The first sentence says that people are so purely partisan that their opinions can be socially influenced in almost a random way. That sentence is supported by their experimental results, although as with many experiments of this type there are legitimate reasons to wonder how much the results in the experimental setting carry over to the more complex real world. Also, note that I am very sympathetic to the theory of political psychology held by the authors, because I see it as consistent with my views in The Three Languages of Politics.

Can you think of any real-world examples of opinion cascades, in which Democrats or Republicans who took one side of an issue made a sudden shift to the other side? I sure can.

The second sentence says that perhaps people can be talked out of their partisanship once they realize that the effect of identity on opinion is so strong. That sentence is based on no evidence and is purely speculative. I would bet against it.

As Jeffrey Friedman has pointed out to me, it is obvious that there are differences of opinion on major issues. Yet hardly anyone sees this as evidence to doubt their own opinion. Instead, nearly everyone is sure that their own opinion is unequivocally correct. So I don’t think that pointing out problems of meta-rationality to people is going to get them to change their outlook.

Groupthink in Criminology

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John Paul Wright and Matt De Lisi write,

Unfortunately, criminology has had a long history of suppressing evidence for expressly political reasons. For most of its history, the discipline has overtly censored research, for instance, on biological, genetic, and neurological factors that scientists have shown to be associated with antisocial traits and behavioral problems. Even today, despite lots of hard scientific evidence—such as that 50 percent of the variance in antisocial behavior is attributable to genetic factors, or neuroimaging studies that show systemic structural and functional brain differences between offenders and non-offenders—those who pursue this line of research get branded as racists or even eugenicists. We have personally experienced hostile receptions when presenting our work in these areas at professional conferences and have been excoriated in the anonymous-review process when attempting to publish our papers. The disciplinary animus toward the study of biological factors extends to other individual factors, including intelligence and personality, and to a range of traits, such as callous and unemotional behavior, psychopathy, and self-control.

Read the whole article. Before you cheer for criminal justice reform, you might want to make sure that it isn’t all based on normative sociology.

DNA registration as a crime deterrent

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Anne Sofie Tegner Anker and others write,

We find that DNA registration has a deterrent effect on future crime. Reductions in the probability of conviction for violent, property and weapons-related crime drive this overall decline in recidivism. Both offenders who enter the DNA database for their first ever charge and individuals who have been charged before are deterred from committing subsequent crime, but when compared to their baseline recidivism rates DNA registration has the largest effect on first-time offenders.

Pointer from a commenter, who asks for a three-axes interpretation.

From a policy perspective, I think that only conservatives can like it. Libertarians would worry about the way that DNA registration could enhance government power at the expense of individual liberty. Progressives would worry that criminals come from victim classes and are being further oppressed. Conservatives would instead focus on the deterrence of crime and see DNA registration as a tool for the civilized to fend off barbarians.

I could be missing something, but that would be my three-axes interpretation.

Podcast on Preference Falsification

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Eric Weinstein and Timur Kuran. It’s almost three hours, and I listened to the whole thing. I might listen to parts of it again, because there are lots of little pieces that were interesting.

One interesting piece was Kuran’s recollection of Donald Trump belittling John McCain by saying that being captured did not make McCain a war hero. Kuran’s point was that Trump was violating political norms and his willingness to do so increased his support. As I recall, Kuran used the metaphor of “guardrails” and said that Trump was willing to ignore them.

In the three-axes model, conservatives are very attached to guardrails. Human beings are dangerous drivers on the road of life, and guardrails like religion and traditional values are what keep us from smashing into telephone poles. But in Kuran’s analysis, Trump’s supporters were so fed up with having to pretend to go along with elites that they were happy to see someone who clearly did not care what the conservative establishment thought about him.

I am not happy with the term “preference falsification.” In standard economics, preferences refer to consumer choices, and we say that “choices reveal preferences.” But not many examples that the speakers give to illustrate preference falsification involve consumption. Instead, some of the examples in the podcast refer to signals. So in Turkey when secularism was in power, people signaled that they were secular even if they were religious. Now they have to do the opposite. Also, many examples refer to political beliefs or voting behavior.

I am afraid that if you are not more careful in defining preference falsification, you end up using it as an all-purpose boo-word. The podcast includes some discussion of the suppression of ideas in academia. I’m totally on board that idea suppression is an issue. I am less convinced that applying the term “preference falsification” provides additional insight.

Kronman on universities and excellence

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Anthony Kronman writes,

at their best, our colleges and universities have resisted the demand to make themselves over in the image of the democratic values of the culture as a whole. Even while striving to make the process of admission more open and fair, they have held to the idea that part of the work of our most distinguished institutions of higher learning is to preserve, transmit, and honor an aristocratic tradition of respect for human greatness.

I hope that elsewhere in his book he is a bit more hard-headed and realistic.

Later in the excerpt, he writes,

How can the cultivation of a spirit of aristocratic connoisseurship make our democracy stronger? The answer is by developing the habit of judging people and events from a point of view that is less vulnerable to the moods of the moment; by increasing the self-reliance of those who, because they recognize the distinction between what is excellent and common, have less need to base their standards on what “everyone knows” or “goes without saying”; and by strengthening the ability to subject one’s own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of truth and justice. In all these ways, an aristocratic education promotes the independent-mindedness that is needed to combat the tyranny of majority opinion that, in Tocqueville’s view, is the greatest danger our democracy confronts.

I gather that his book argues that contemporary universities are not performing this task well. I would put this point in the strongest terms: for the purpose of promoting a culture of rigor against a culture of dogma, the universities have not only ceased to be the solution and are instead the crux of the problem.

Giving the left its due

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A commenter asks,

What is the best website for left-wing political commentary?

If I had to pick one, it would be Progressive Policy Institute.

The standard that I hold up to someone on the left is to ask what you do when prominent figures on the left take a stand that is contrary to what you have long believed. Your choices are:

a) support their position, because they are on your team, abandoning your previous beliefs
b) don’t completely abandon your previous beliefs, but don’t come out and criticize the problematic position
c) come out and say that you disagree with the position

The folks at PPI are willing to do (c). So is Bill Galston. So is Alan Blinder. My reading of Paul Krugman is that he will do (a) much more than (c).

I worry that most of the intellectuals on the left who are willing to do (c) are over 60.

I should emphasize that I respect people who change their minds. I just don’t respect those who change their minds in order to support their team.

What about me and the right-wing “team”?

I oppose Republican fiscal policy, which consists of tax cuts without spending cuts. I oppose trade warring. I oppose re-privatizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae–and I know that stance has made me personal non grata to Congressional Republicans.

So I think I have occasionally taken option (c). I hope that I am never guilty of (a).

Vector autoregression

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A commenter asks,

I’m curious what your opinion on Christopher Sims’s econometric work is now.

Sims is another macro-econometrician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for work that I think is of no use.

The problem in macro is causal density–there is a high ratio of plausible causal mechanisms to data. If you have dozens of causal variables and only a relative handful of data points, what do you do?

The conventional approach was for the investigator to impose many constraints on the regression model. This is mathematically equivalent to adding rows of “data” that do not come from the real world but instead are constructed by the investigator to conform exactly to the investigator’s theoretical pet theories. The net result is that you learn what the investigator wanted the data to look like. But other investigators can–and do–produce very different empirical narratives for the same real-world observations.

Sims’ approach was for the investigator to narrow down the number of causal variables, so that the computer can produce a model without the investigator doctoring the data. But that is not a solution to the causal density problem. If there are many important causal variables in the real world, then in a non-experimental setting, restricting yourself to looking at a few variables at a time is pointless.

A plea from under the bus

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John Hood writes,

The hope of the new nationalists is that by stiff-arming the libertarians, with their “market fundamentalism” and “libertinism,” conservative politicians can more than replace their numbers with populist voters by stressing immigration restriction, protectionism, and cultural conservatism. Perhaps, but I tend to doubt it. Donald Trump won the Electoral College not with a broader electoral coalition but with a differently distributed one that took a few swing states by small margins. The GOP has, on the whole, lost electoral ground since then. Basing a long-term political strategy on repeats of 2016 feels like drawing to an inside straight. Yes, there are voters with conservative views on abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and the culture who frequently vote Democratic. But they’ve been voting that way because they favor large-scale income redistribution, government monopolies in education and health insurance, and a generous welfare state — and they tend to prioritize those issues over cultural ones. If the GOP doesn’t deliver the economic policies they want, it won’t win their allegiance. And if it does deliver those policies, what’s the point of having a GOP?

I think that the Trump coalition is stronger electorally than the old fusionist coalition. Too many of us libertarian conservatives live in Democratic strongholds where our votes are meaningless. More of the populist conservatives live in swing states.

Apart from that quibble, I agree pretty much with Hood’s entire essay.

But I am not so concerned with getting libertarian conservatives back on the Republican Party bus. My biggest personal concern is with the demise of higher education, as ideological conformity has come to replace rigor as the overarching value.

Marc Andreessen is a fast talker

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and I really enjoyed listening to his half-hour podcast about the Internet’s past and the outlook for cryptocurrencies.

Essentially everything he says about the Internet explosion in 1993-1995 resonates with me, especially his discussion of how hard it was for an ordinary civilian to get Internet access in 1994.*

When he talks about what it was like trying to persuade legacy financial firms to use the Internet, it also resonates.**

I also agree that the advertising model is the cause of much bad juju on the Internet.

But I hear Marc as saying (and he talks very fast, so I may have this wrong) that cryptocurrencies will enable micropayments, and micropayments will enable content providers to ditch the advertising model. If that is indeed what he is saying, then I disagree. I think that the main barrier to micropayments is not technological. It is psychological–what Clay Shirky dubbed mental transaction costs. I have talked about this several times, for instance in this essay.

*I quit my job at Freddie Mac launched a commercial web site in April of 1994. I did so by going to an Internet publishing start-up called Electric Press, where at their site one of the partners taught me the rudiments of HTML–rudiments being pretty much all there were at that point. He coded up the first pages I wanted for my site, registered the domain name, set up the server, and loaded the pages onto the server.

Then I wanted to be able to access the Internet myself, so that I could edit pages, add new pages, and so on. Previously, I had only accessed it through online services like AOL which did not have web access. There was a service you could use through a library that offered a text-only browser called Lynx, but I had only seen a graphical web browser twice:
once when some of us at Freddie went to visit a General Electric research site and while the higher-ups were having a pow-wow a tech guy took me to the basement to show me Mosaic (developed by Marc) and the second time was when I got my training session at Electric Press.

Electric Press was not in the business of helping individuals get on the Net, so they referred me to an Internet Service Provider, called us.net. They sent me a floppy disk. I could not install that software properly. So I called us.net, and the President of that small start-up (he may have been the sole employee) drove to my office during a torrential downpour helped me load the software on to my PC.

Rather than take this as a clue that the Internet was not for ordinary civilians, I kept at it, waiting for the day when getting on the Internet would be easy. That day arrived in August of 1995, when Microsoft finally released Windows 95 (which they had been promising since 1994) and America Online added the Web to their Internet offerings. That is when the traffic on my web site went from a trickle to a tsunami.

**I convinced a large mortgage banker to put up some pages on my site. They sent me a draft contract which read, in part, “Arnold Kling, who owns a service known as the Internet. . .” If only.

Too banal for Tyler

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Just looking at the Patreon list [of 50 largest grossing recipients], my uneasy conclusion is that, in the culture war between the mundane and the grand, the grand has already lost — and without the battle ever having come much into public view.

If you think that the banality of popular culture is a new phenomenon, I’ve got some episodes of My mother, the car to show you.