Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Yoram Hazony watch

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I still have not read the book. But here is the most informative review I have seen. Brad Littlejohn writes,

Using the model of a family and a business as contrasting types, Hazony highlights the extent to which modern political philosophy has come to treat the relations of political order as fundamentally like those of a business: “governed primarily on the basis of the individual’s assessments as to what will enhance his physical welfare and protect and increase his property, and by his ongoing consent to the terms of an agreement with others for the joint attainment of these purposes” (83).

In fact, however, a closer look at both the historical foundations of most political orders, as well as the conditions that enable states to continue to flourish, reveals relations more like those of a family: bonds of mutual loyalty anchored, indeed, by an initial act of mutual consent, but sustained through thick and thin by a sense of mutual belonging, mutual indebtedness, and mutual duty to “pass on to another generation an inheritance that has been bequeathed to us by our parents and their ancestors” (85). Whereas the former model encourages us to ask at every moment whether the arrangement is serving our interests, and to cut loose if it ceases to, the latter model encourages us “to stand true in the face of adversity, to refuse the urge to start everything anew” (88).

Read the whole thing. I only picked this excerpt because it reminded me of the distinction between sub-Dunbar and super-Dunbar. Hazony is saying that a nation-state, which is super-Dunbar in terms of population size, holds together because people feel the sort of attachment to one another that they feel in a sub-Dunbar setting. There is an obvious tension here, and Littlejohn dwells on Hazony’s attempts to deal with it.

Much later, Littlejohn writes,

Should America become a majority-minority nation, or—more decisively—should it lose its confidence in the culture and traditions that have actually sustained our political order over two and a half centuries, our abstract ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy would quickly cease to have motivating force to maintain a viable political identity or set of mutual loyalties. Which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like a diagnosis of our present condition.

Thoughts on hippie culture

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Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my perspective on youth culture now vs. the 1960s. To me, campus culture today seems idiotic. I think that the hippie culture of my youth also was idiotic, but it was not as aggressive. If you weren’t a hippie, the hippies didn’t try to shut you up or get you fired.

What was idiotic about hippie culture? Drugs and communes come to mind.

In my opinion, the “higher consciousness” that drugs supposedly fostered is Baloney Sandwich. I know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback, and I read Pollan’s book, and I still think it’s Baloney Sandwich.

As for communes, I see them as a reversion to small-scale society, with the governing principle “we care for one another.” In large-scale society, you have specialization governed by markets. You have social relationships grounded in families. Sooner or later, a commune is going to run into friction over the inefficiency of not having specialized economic roles, and also over relationships that are not grounded in traditional families.

Robin Hanson on libertarian thought

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He writes,

I care more about having good feedback/learning/innovation processes. The main reason that I tend to be wary of government intervention is that it more often creates processes with low levels of adaptation and innovation regarding technology and individual preferences.

That is my view, also. Hanson concludes,

So when I try to design better social institutions, and to support the proposals of others, I’m less focused than many on assuring zero government invention, or on minimizing “coercion” however conceived, and more concerned to ensure healthy competition overall.

Think of all the ways that the American Founders tried to instill competition in American government: regular elections; Federalism; different branches of government.

But nobody likes to face competition. Over many decades, our government institutions have become less competitive and more concentrated. I made that point in the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced, and I made suggestions for making government more competitive again.

You teach, we’ll grade

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Steven Hayward writes (WSJ),

Mr. Benson’s model is spreading in variations at other universities. A few similar programs already existed, such as the James Madison Program at Princeton and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2016 I have been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley—an unimaginable prospect if not for my time at Boulder.

Hayward praises the reign of Bruce Benson as head of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The question of what to do about higher education is top of mind for many conservatives these days, and it should be. Also from the WSJ, Allen C. Guelzo reviews a book by Richard Vedder.

some of the reforms Mr. Vedder puts forward—converting federal loan programs to vouchers and allowing students to assemble self-tailored programs across a variety of institutions; making a national Collegiate Learning Assessment the real credential for a degree rather than the mix of vacuous classes and inflated grading that now suffices; upping campus facility use to year-round schedules that will permit the completion of a degree program in three years rather than four.

I like the idea of using someone other than the professor to grade students. That was the way the Honors program worked at Swarthmore when I was there. The professor sent the syllabus to an examiner from another college or the world of work, and the examiner made up an exam and graded it.

The student cannot be certain that the examiner will bring the same prejudices as the professor. So students have to think about the material, not just aim to please their own professor. If there is a chance that the outside examiner has a conservative point of view, this might force professors and students to take conservative viewpoints seriously during the course.

Think about how this would change how students rate professors. If the professor is not doing the grading, then the students are not going to reward the professors who are easy graders.

I’m all for outside examiners.

Going you-know-where in a handbasket

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if you ask Lyman Stone.

A country that was once typified by a sense that anyone could be or do anything is now hidebound by an increasingly heavy weight of rules and regulations. While this trend toward more regulation and greater constraints on regular life can be seen across all walks of life, this report focuses on five main areas:
• Increasing stringency of land use regulations such as zoning,
• Greater prevalence of restrictions on work such as occupational licensing,
• Unusually high incarceration rates given currently low crime rates,
• An education system that forces people to spend more years in school for a higher cost and less value, and
• Growing debt and other financial burdens among households and at all levels of government.

On the debt issue, Timothy Taylor writes,

Interest payments are already 9% of federal spending. Before just brushing past that number too quickly, it’s worth noting that net interest is 1.8% of GDP–call it about $360 billion that the government is spending because of past borrowing, and thus doesn’t have available for current spending, tax cuts, or deficit reduction. On the current path, interest spending will be 20% of all federal spending by 2049.

…This is a “current law” projection. It has become standard practice for the federal budget to play games by forecasting that certain spending programs will be cut and certain taxes will rise in the future. But when the actual date of such changes approaches, they are then pushed back a few more years. The CBO also constructs an “alternative fiscal scenario” which doesn’t assume that these spending cuts and tax increases scheduled for the future will actually happen. In that scenario, the rise in deficits, health care spending, interest payments, and debt is much larger.

Have a nice day.

Michael Strong on Evolutionary Mismatch

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He writes,

If our existing schooling system is unnecessarily exacerbating mental health issues, then parents, teens, educators, and policy-makers should re-evaluate the premises of our existing schooling system. If schooling-as-we-know-it is excessively different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then how should we rethink schooling in order to create healthier adolescent populations in the future?

It is a long essay, which covers a lot of research on the problems of contemporary adolescents. As I read it, I applied my rule of thumb, which is to focus on technology as a cause. Also, I came across the essay concurrently with my reading of Panic Attack by Robby Soave.

For example, Strong lists five characteristics of adolescent tribal life that are not shared by today’s youth. I will put them in a table.

tribal life modern life
(1) small tribal community of a few dozen to a few hundred with few interactions with other tribal groups. exposed to hundreds or thousands of age peers directly in addition to thousands of adults and thousands of electronic representations of diverse human beings (both social media and entertainment media).
(2) shared one language, one belief system, one set of norms, one morality, and more generally a social and cultural homogeneity that is unimaginable for us today. exposed to many languages, belief systems, norms, moralities, and social and cultural diversity.
(3) immersed in a community with a full range of ages present, from child to elder. largely isolated with a very narrow range of age peers through schooling.
(4) engaged in the work of the community, typically hunting and gathering, with full adult responsibilities typically being associated with puberty. Have little or no opportunities for meaningful work in their community and no adult responsibilities until 18 or even into their 20s.
(5) mating and status competitions would have mostly been within their tribe or occasionally with nearby groups, most of which would have been highly similar to themselves. are competing for mates and status with hundreds or thousands directly and with many thousands via electronic representations (both social media and entertainment media).

Of these five contrasts, (3) and (4) are linked to our schooling process. (1), (2), and (5) are much exacerbated in the world of smart phones and the Internet. I speak of it as the world of our new species, Homo Appiens.

The mental health problems of Homo Appiens have been emphasized by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Robby Soave on speech-critical youth

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In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,

it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.

I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.

Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.

I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.

But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.

At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.

Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.

Contemporary dating culture

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From the NYT:

for some singles, sex has become the getting-to-know you phase of courtship. In a study conducted for Match.com, Dr. Fisher found that among a representative sample, 34 percent of singles had sex with somebody before the first date. She calls it “the sex interview.”

I find the idea of deciding whether to begin dating someone by first having sex with the person to be. . .counterintuitive.

Of course, stories like this tend to be sensationalized, so one takes them with a grain of salt. Yet I think that there is a genuine generational difference. It used to be that your first impression of someone came from an in-person encounter. For young people today, it often comes from an app.

Lately, the thought has occurred to me that we are evolving a new species, that I might call Home Appiens, to distinguish it from Homo Sapiens. Technology is changing us in ways that we have not begun to grasp. Smart phones and the Internet are giving us new experiences and taking away old ones. People are developing new skills and new patterns of behavior. The factors that influence social dynamics are changing.

Will Wilkinson on urban-rural polarization

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He writes,

Republicans don’t need this firewall to win; they need it to win as the party of pastoral supremacy in a city-powered republic James Madison could never have foreseen. But this Republican Party, defined by seething hostility to the urban multicultural majority, is teetering on the brink of irrelevance. Continued urbanizing migration, both domestic and international, is likely to push it over, sooner or later, which helps explain the vehemence of the GOP’s current opposition to basic norms of fair democratic representation.

We should dearly wish for the demise of the current dispensation to come sooner rather than later. When it comes at last, and the GOP can no longer clinch national elections as the minority party of pastoral supremacy, it will be forced, as a matter of political survival, to tamp down rather than inflame ethnocentric impulses, broaden its coalition, and begin hunting for nonwhite and higher-education votes inside the outer suburbs. This should set in motion a healing process of depolarization and moderating partisan
realignment. New legislation establishing robust voting rights and structural electoral reform would kickstart this process and help shift American democracy into a healthier political equilibrium in which effective governance in the public interest is once again possible. If there’s anything we can do to neutralize the toxicity of the density divide, it’s this.

As a quibble, I would point out that others see the divide differently. Colin Woodard uses his nine nations model. And there is the divide between college-educated women and non-college-educated men. Of course, these various descriptive models overlap.

As a second quibble, I just came back from a vacation that included seeing Normandy, and it is likely that this visit affected my mood when I returned and read Wilkinson’s article. Now is not a good time to presume that I would choose to side with contemporary urban hipsters in their cultural conflict with the descendants of the men who fought on those beaches.

As a more serious disagreement, I do not share Wilkinson’s view of the bias in our political system. His phrase “basic norms of fair democratic representation” is a claim that the structure of our political system is unfair to the urban majority. What he calls “effective governance in the public interest” sounds like the continuation of the project to overthrow the Constitution and replace it with the administrative state.

But I would point out that the government office buildings in our nation’s capital house technocrats who almost all share an urban progressive outlook. Inside those agencies, the urban majority is closer to tyranny than to impotence.

The philosophy Wilkinson expresses in favor of empowering the urban majority is the exact opposite of that articulated by George Will in The Conservative Sensibility. That book argues for giving priority to the Constitutional protection of liberty, even when–especially when–this goes against majority opinion.

Wilkinson, once with the libertarian Cato Institute, now comes across as a full-fledged partisan Progressive Democrat. In theory, he could argue for his new views from a perspective that respects the ideas he no longer finds congenial. Instead, he has adopted a Krugman-esque approach of painting non-Progressives as cartoon villains. I don’t begrudge him his ideological evolution. But I do fault the manner in which he expresses it.

TLP watch

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Yascha Mounk writes,

the “Perception Gap” study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear one another: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.

The study to which he refers finds that partisans over-estimate the extremism of the other side. This study was put together by the same people who produced the suspect “Hidden Tribes” report, but it seems to me that what they are doing in this study is more straightforward and less likely to produce manufactured results.

In any case, is there any doubt that highly-educated partisans tend to think that the other side are all extremists?

I think that the psychology, familiar to readers of my book, would explain it. If you believe that the other side holds reasonable views, then you cannot dismiss them as nuts. But that creates cognitive dissonance, because it raises the possibility that you are wrong. It’s much easier to go about life dismissing people with different points of view as hopeless extremists, so you don’t have to engage with them.

UPDATE: Nicholas Grossman thinks this is another methodologically flawed study, or interpretation thereof.