Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Ouroboros

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It means a snake eating its tail, and Robby Soave, in Panic Attack, uses it to describe the hard left. I was reminded of it when reading this article (not by Soave) on California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum for high school.

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley and vice chair of the caucus, said he supports teaching ethnic studies in schools, but found the draft offensive.

The draft’s glossary defines BDS as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Gabriel, the Democratic assemblyman, called the definition “one-sided propaganda” and said the draft appeared to bend over backwards to include BDS.

The article notes that there is proposed legislation mandating ethnic studies as a graduation requirement.

It also notes that the course is supposed to be about American ethnic studies. But the curriculum is really driven by intersectionality, which is the theory that all forms of oppression are linked, and all must be opposed together.

As Soave points out, this approach fosters ideological purity but alienates some potential supporters. The article illustrates this ouroboros effect.

A commenter criticizes libertarianism

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He writes,

Libertarianism today can accurately be reduced to little more than a paranoia of the ignorant, irrational masses taking matters into their own hands via the ballot box.

Read the whole comment.

For me, the purpose of the ballot box is to enable a peaceful transfer of power and to provide a check against tyranny. It is not to express the will of the people. I suspect that the popular will is not very supportive of the Bill of Rights or individual liberty (surveys largely bear me out).

What libertarians want is that no elite should exercise strong governmental power. This libertarian desire is itself elitist, and it probably cannot survive the broadening of the franchise that took place gradually in the decades following the ratification of the relatively non-democratic Constitution.

Recall that as of 1790 hardly anyone in the U.S. could vote and Senators were elected by state legislatures. The President was to be determined by the electoral college, and some supporters of the Constitution expected that deadlock in the electoral college would be routine, throwing the selection of the President into the House of Representatives.

As things stand, a large chunk of the elite is anti-libertarian. A large chunk of the public is anti-elite, making the populists the enemy of my enemy. But I do not see populists as reliable friends. Libertarians have no reliable friends.

Russ Roberts and Arthur Diamond

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on Diamond’s book, Openness to Creative Destruction.

One point of interest is that Diamond offers a contrarian take on the common story that the Internet came from government and DARPA. He argues that DARPA’s vision was largely to connect mainframe computers at research institutions. The full personal computer revolution and network-of-networks owes more to Bob Taylor, who quit DARPA in frustration to go to Xerox PARC. I am not necessarily ready to give up the conventional story, but I recommend listening. This segment is somewhere in the final third of the podcast.

To explore this point further, I went back and re-read Where Wizards Stay Up Late, a history of the Internet published in 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. The book centers on the development of the first router by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, using a Honeywell computer. It was the size of a refrigerator and weighed 900 pounds. The book becomes uneven after that. Some of the sections are quite interesting, but others cover events and controversies that are long-forgotten, and justifiably so.

In the end, I am not persuaded by Diamond’s take on the Internet. ARPA (the predecessor of DARPA) really was at the heart of developing the long-distance computer network. Once it was up and running, it was transferred to a different defense department agency, which stopped innovating. But then the National Science Foundation started developing a research network, and that evolved into the Internet as we know it, with TCP/IP as created by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. A lot of research and development took place outside of government, but overall I think that government sponsorship deserves the bulk of the credit.

Diamond also has an interesting take on the way that the requirement for clinical trials in medicine constrains and distorts the sort of research that is undertaken.

Has college gotten less rigorous?

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Joe Pinsker writes,

Lately, Ciocca Eller said, schools are being held more accountable for their graduation rates, with some states tying educational funding to certain statistical benchmarks. “Potentially, there’s pressure on faculty to help students, especially underprepared students, to move them through the curriculum in order to keep churning up the graduation rate,” she said.

The optimistic take on this is that colleges are being more attentive to student needs and learning is improving. You would get the impression from reading The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp that colleges do not have to reduce rigor at all in order to improve graduation rates. He makes it sound as if the Null Hypothesis has no bearing at all at the college level, and all colleges have to do to raise the graduation rate is pay more attention to their students’ sense of belonging and self-esteem. I think his “can-do” outlook is a baloney sandwich, but of course I could be wrong.

I think it is much more likely that the chief way to increase college graduation rates is to lower standards, both in terms of the courses required and the degree of rigor in grading. I think that conservative intellectuals should fight particularly hard against this.

Correlation without causation

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April L. Bleske-Rechek writes,
Mayviewed a random sample of poster abstracts that had been accepted for presentation at an annual convention of the premier professional organization in psychology, the Association for Psychological Science. We were disappointed to find that over half of the abstracts that included cause and effect language did so without warrant (i.e., the research was correlational). Of course, poster presentations are held to a less rigorous standard than are formal talks or published journal articles, so in a follow-up study, we reviewed 660 articles from 11 different well-known journals in the discipline. Our findings replicated: over half of the articles with cause and effect language described studies that were actually correlational; in other words, the causal language was not warranted.

In biological families, children resemble their parents in vocabulary and verbal ability; in adoptive families, they do not. The key implication is that Hart and Risley’s finding of a link between parents’ verbal behavior and their children’s verbal ability does not warrant an inference that parents’ verbal behavior influences their children’s verbal ability.

Somebody should put together a YouTube course on “How to be skeptical of statistical studies.” I nominate Russ Roberts.

Audit college courses for intellectual rigor

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Toby Young proposes an intellectual trade union to protect people from the progressive mob.

If a member is targeted for defenestration by an outrage mob, it will be the union that comes to their defense—the organization, not the other members. I don’t mean it will provide the person in the dock with legal representation. To offer legal insurance of that kind would make the membership dues prohibitively high and trade unions that do offer that service usually rely on internal officers to provide support to members involved in legal disputes—not the type of support that would be much help in a complicated case. Rather, the union will provide them with access to an approved list of defamation and employment lawyers, expert guidance on how to crowdfund their legal costs, access to lists of potential donors, PR advice on how to generate favorable media coverage—most importantly—access to a network of sympathetic colleagues, many of whom will have been through a similar ordeal.

I have a more aggressive idea. Set up a private organization to audit college courses for intellectual rigor. Call the organization the Collegiate Humanities and Social Sciences Rigor Audit Bureau, or the Audit Bureau for short. The scope would only include courses in the humanities and social sciences. Foreign languages, art, and music would be out of scope. “____ studies” courses would be in scope.

I am basing this idea on three assumptions and one comparable example.

The first assumption is that many of these courses are being taught to undergraduates, including those at “name-brand” colleges and universities, with extreme ideological bias and wooly-headed thinking.

The second assumption is that this is a serious enough problem for society that it is worth putting in some effort to try to fix it.

The third assumption is that conservative intellectuals are misguided if they frame this as largely a political problem. A better framing would be to focus on intellectual rigor.

The comparable example is the College Board audits of AP courses. You may not know this, but about five years ago the College Board required every high school AP teacher to submit a syllabus and some other materials to demonstrate that the course in fact deserved the “advanced placement” designation. I assume that the College Board did this because they noted that the AP “brand” on a course had become a powerful quality indicator, and they wanted to ensure that the brand’s reputation for quality was deserved and maintained.

The vision is that having a course labeled as rigorous by the Audit Bureau would come to be so desirable that students are better off with degrees from mid-range schools with those courses on their transcripts than with degrees from name-brand schools with courses on their transcripts that are not certified as rigorous. As a result, college professors at all institutions, including name-brand schools, feel pressured to offer courses that meet the standards of rigor.

Institutions could either establish their own standards for rigor or default to model standards created by the Audit Bureau. The standards need not be extremely detailed, but they should be clear enough that an auditor can test whether or not a course meets the standards. For example, Minerva’s standards are certainly clear enough to be audited against. But standards that are far less detailed would suffice.

I would want to see standards that include two elements.

1. Students clearly are exposed to differing points of view. For example, an economics course that is oriented in a very free-market direction also should include on the syllabus readings from Dani Rodrik or some equivalent critic.

2. In order to receive a grade of B or higher, the student has to provide written work (essay questions on exams and/or papers) that demonstrate substantive knowledge, the ability to communicate ideas, and the ability to both formulate arguments and state possible objections.

For comments, I would prefer for now that you spare me your opinion of this idea. Instead, imagine that someone were out to implement it. Which prominent intellectuals should they try to get on board, and why?

George Will on national conservatism

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He writes,

Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes’ behavior. America’s current administration has “national conservatives.” They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social engineer allocating wealth and opportunity. They call themselves conservatives, perhaps because they loathe progressives, although they seem not to remember why.

To hear what he is talking about, listen to this podcast with J.D. Vance. Vance argues that we need industrial policy, because

a) we already have one
b) China is bad
c) we should have neuroscientists working on the cure for Alzheimer’s not in social media

When I think of industrial policy in America, I think of Solyndra and other “green energy” companies backed by the government. Industrial policy is an even worse idea in a democracy than in a dictatorship, because in a democracy you have to serve interest groups.

And it’s not as if the NIH isn’t funding a lot of Alzheimer’s research as it is. My guess is that the marginal return on additional funding is negative, because you probably entrench scientists who are pursuing dead ends.

I think conservative intellectuals should not try to build an ideological scaffolding around the Trump presidency. Just focus on trying to bring rigor back into academia.

Pushback against race-mindedness

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Two opinion pieces from the August 3 WSJ.

First, Joseph Epstein writes,

The power of the word racism—always cocked, aimed and ready to fire—makes it impossible to say anything, outside the most obeisant praise, about black culture, black politicians, black entertainers or black anything. The entire subject is out of bounds to anyone who isn’t black, and many black intellectuals and writers are themselves in peril if they step outside the racial party line. This can’t be healthy, for blacks or for the country at large.

. . .the real racists in this country are those who insist blacks are permanent victims and always will be so in what they claim is an irretrievably, hopelessly racist America. Forgoing easy recourse to the word racism, in a small but not insignificant way, might be a step toward eliminating racism itself.

Second, Anthony Kronman writes,

But diversity, as it is understood today, means something different. It means diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Diversity in this sense is not an academic value. Its origin and aspiration are political. The demand for ever-greater diversity in higher education is a political campaign masquerading as an educational ideal.

. . .Motivated by politics but forced to disguise itself as an academic value, the demand for diversity has steadily weakened the norms of objectivity and truth and substituted for them a culture of grievance and group loyalty. Rather than bringing faculty and students together on the common ground of reason, it has pushed them farther apart into separate silos of guilt and complaint.

I find it striking to contemplate how much easier race relations seem to be in the blue-collar sectors of America. There certainly was a time when many whites did not want to work next to blacks in factories, retail stores, or construction sites. But today racially-mixed work forces seem to operate in those industries with little apparent discord.

Instead, the need for diversity and inclusion programs seems to be concentrated in academia, with some spillover into journalism and other fields that attract recent graduates in humanities and social sciences. Fifty years ago, one would not have predicted that academia would be the industry where race relations would require the most attention.

The bond gamble

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In the WSJ, James Mackintosh writes,

with lower yields, bond prices move more for the same change in the yield, a concept known in the industry as duration. Bonds are riskier than they used to be.

The government of Austria has issued hundred-year bonds, which now yield 1.1 percent. If the interest rate were to fall to 0.55 percent, investors would double their money. If the rate were to rise to 2.2 percent, investors would lose half their money.

As a short-term speculation, maybe bond holders will get lucky. Long term, I would bet against them.

A separate WSJ story captures my sentiment.

“You’re either going to make very poor returns from government bonds going forward or you’re going to make extremely poor returns,” said Tristan Hanson, a fund manager at M&G Investments, who recommends investors buy equities and avoid bonds issued by Group of Seven governments.

Some 13% of the £117.27 million ($141.71 million) that M&G Episode Macro Fund is placed in a short bet against negative-yielding German government debt, Mr. Hanson said. The rationale is that “there is a limit on how far those yields can go even in an adverse economic scenario,” given the European Central Bank has set negative benchmark rates, he said.

Of course, it is superfluous to write stories about investors who are bullish or bearish on any class of securities. At any one instant, half the market sentiment is bullish on a security and half the market sentiment is bearish. If it were otherwise, the excess weight on one side or the other would move the price.

But in the case of bonds, my guess is that there are extreme differences of opinion. The short side of the market feels strongly bearish, and the long side feels strongly bullish. The bullish bond investors look crazy to me. By the same token, I must look crazy to them.

Polarizing ourselves

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My latest essay.

Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree? The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs. If we see others as decent human beings, then we have to consider how they arrived at a point of view that differs from our own, and even consider the possibility that they could be at least partly correct. But instead, if we regard them as driven by evil motives, then we feel no need to give their actual arguments any sort of fair hearing. Demonizing them saves us the hard work of listening and the emotional challenge of self-doubt.

It’s a short essay offering some of the psychological insights included in The Three Languages of Politics.