Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Jonathan Haidt on the state of things

Posted on by

Haidt is in a podcast with Bridget Phetasy. He says that things on Twitter are a thousand times smaller than they seem. But people don’t realize that. The whole podcast is recommended (but speed it up).

Also about minute 54, he says that young people tend to be cut off from history. They are very much into the present. I find I have the urge to give history lessons.

Around minute 60 he starts talking about stoics and how to use challenges to make yourself stronger.

Around minute 76 he goes on a rant against unions, noting that his parents were union organizers. Around minute 80 he credits taking LSD for helping to put him on the path to writing The Righteous Mind.

Road to sociology watch

Posted on by

Noah Smith writes,

doing an econ PhD no longer means having to worry (or at least, not having to worry nearly as much) about navigating an entrenched old boys’ club of right-wing bullies. That’s a big plus!

As an aside, it’s as if all the writers that I follow on Substack went to the same training seminar, where they were told to make their prose sound conversational. By using exclamations! All the time! It’s annoying!

But I also object to the substance of Smith’s remarks. There was some bullying at MIT when I was there, but it was equal-opportunity bullying. There, even Chicago-influenced professors, notably Stan Fischer and Rudi Dornbusch, were left of center. The professors who had their egos most assaulted and who departed as a consequence were Fischer Black, a libertarian, and Robert Hall, who was to the right of the departmental mean.

My impression is that there is more bullying than ever in economics. White men are the ones being bullied. And conservative economists are an endangered species.

Personal dissatisfaction, amplified

Posted on by

Noah Smith reposts,

the Shouting Class is a tiny minority of society that dominates much of our political discourse, thanks in part to the bullhorn created by the technology of social media.

…the greater energy, zeal, and time commitment of the Shouting Class, combined with the bullhorn of social media, tips the balance of social media’s emotional effect dramatically toward the negative.

People who are chronically angry and bitter are unpleasant to be around. In the real world, most of us try to avoid such people. But Twitter draws such people like flies. As does combative politics.

For normal people with normal families, Twitter politics is like war. We’re not interested in it. Unfortunately, it is interested in us.

Contingent U

Posted on by

The AAUP reports,

In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on tenure track.

If you are a student, the chances that all of your courses in a semester are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty are close to zero. But you won’t lack for administrators:

From fiscal year 2011–12 to fiscal year 2018–19, the numbers of staff classified as “management” increased 12 percent per FTE student, real average salaries increased 7 percent, and salary outlays per FTE student increased 19 percent, including an extraordinary 24 percent increase in real salary expenditures per FTE student in public colleges and universities.

Principles-based governance

Posted on by

Philip K. Howard writes,

Unlike rigid rules, an open framework of goals and principles leaves room for context-based judgment. This is how law aligns with prevailing norms of what is fair and reasonable. Such a system can be responsive and practical because, as was he case with Australian nursing homes, the people involved are able to use their authority to take responsibility and get things done.

In business, there was a movement in the 1990s to give front-line workers empowerment rather than a constraining set of rules. The idea was to throw out the procedures manual and instead give the worker a goal of pleasing the customer, subject to a few constraints.

I once suggested this sort of approach for regulation. I called it principles-based regulation. Instead of auditing banks against a specific set of rules, audit them against a set of principles for safety and soundness.

Howard is suggesting something like principles-based management of government policy. But there one has to be careful. Part of the idea of throwing out the procedures manual and instead giving someone discretion in how they achieve management’s objective is that the employee takes on accountability for results. Autonomy and accountability go together. That approach would be antithetical to how government works now. In general, no one has accountability. And government workers do not have much autonomy, either.

Liberty and monopoly

Posted on by

Michael Lind writes,

the federal government should license any firm that functions in whole or in part as a search engine or general sales platform—but only in return for the firm’s agreement to obey a single set of industrywide rules and standards set by Congress or an executive agency under congressional, presidential, and judicial oversight.

Lind is arguing that we should deal with private monopoly power by using government power. I think that is a bad trade. A basic libertarian instinct that I have is that we should always be skeptical of the idea of using government power as a “solution” to the problem of power exercised in the private sector.

When the Fed does reverse repo

Posted on by

A commenter asks,

could you comment on Gramm & Savings contention in the 8/2 WSJ that the Fed’s reverse-repos shrink the money supply? It has gotten serious pushback in the letters section of today’s WSJ. But if true, it would seem to explain a lot.

I don’t know. Isn’t that sad? I have a Ph.D in economics, and I spent 6 years working at the Fed, and I don’t really understand the intricacies of how it operates these days.

Back in the 1980s, when I read Marcia Stigum’s Money Market, I thought I understood repos and reverse repos. If the Fed is doing a repo, it is buying a security from a dealer that it will sell back to the dealer on a specified date, perhaps in a day, perhaps in a week. In effect, the Fed is lending to the dealer, using the security as collateral. Repo lending is expansionary. When the Fed wants to tweak short-term interest rates down, it does more repo.

Reverse repos have the Fed playing the role of borrower and the Wall Street firm playing the role of lender. As the name suggests, it is a repo in reverse. That would suggest that, all else equal, the Fed doing reverse repos is contractionary.

But nowadays a lot of “monetary policy” comes in the form of regulation, including capital requirements. I gather that regulatory issues may have driven the increase in reverse repos. So I cannot say for sure that the reverse repos are contractionary, because it could depend on how they interact with capital requirements and other regulations.

In general, I regard the Fed as affecting the allocation of capital rather than overall macroeconomic outcomes. The Fed wants to make sure that the government can finance its deficits. That was the original purpose of central banks, and I still think it’s the one that the Fed will be held to. That is why I do not think that the Fed has either the will or the means to stop inflation in the face of persistent, high deficit spending.

Post-liberal values

Posted on by

Mathis Bitton writes,

Gone is the appreciation for diversity, disagreement, and proceduralism. Enters an insatiable thirst for public morality, purpose, and collective attachment.

What a succinct summary of the contrast between the values the Jonathan Rauch wishes to keep and the values of what Wesley Yang calls the Successor Regime.

Incidentally, if you missed it, Jonathan Rauch had a good conversation with Russ Roberts.

Teachers who refuse vaccination

Posted on by

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

It’s mind boggling that 40% of teachers in NYC schools remain unvaccinated. This is the group charged with ‘educating’ our children? Union can’t allow teachers in classrooms until they’ve been vaccinated, then almost half of them refuse to get vaccinated. We’ve made a huge mistake.

I’m surprised that Trump has so much support among teachers. After all, my friends all assure me that it’s Trump supporters who refuse to get vaccinated.

Sorry. I shouldn’t do snark posts, but this one got away from me.