Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Social media platforms as utilities

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James D. Miller writes,

imagine electric companies stood up for progressive values by cutting off power to homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Even staunch supporters of free markets would likely object to these restrictions on expression by privately owned enterprises. When we examine why power companies shouldn’t be able to make service contingent on not violating political sensibilities, we see that analogous arguments should stop social media giants from exiling political dissidents.

. . .if an electric utility decided to just exclude a few customers, it would be extremely costly for a competing power company to sell energy to those people and the former customers would likely go unpowered.

Similarly, he argues that if your speech is cut off by Facebook, no competitor is going to jump in and offer you equivalent service. The network effect gives Facebook monopoly power.

My thoughts:

1. What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.

2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better to allow each listener to decide who he or she wants to hear. If I had sufficient control over my Facebook account, I would not see anybody’s political posts. (As it is, the best I can do is unfollow somebody who goes overboard with political posts. I done that.)

3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I would aim toward a subscription model, not an advertising model. This in turn would facilitate another major difference, which is that instead of having what you see determined by a secret algorithm, I would give you tools to set your own priorities.

4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.

Daniel Klein’s perspective on libertarianism and other ideologies

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He writes,

CLs [classical liberals] and libertarians favor smaller government. Government operations, such as schools, rely on taxes or privileges (and sometimes partially user fees). Even apart from the coercive nature of taxation, they don’t like the government’s playing such a large role in social affairs, for its unhealthy moral and cultural effects.

There are some libertarians, however, who have never seen an intervention that meets the burden of proof. They can be categorical in a way that CLs are not, believing in liberty as a sort of moral axiom. Sometimes libertarians ponder a pure-liberty destination. They can seem millenarian, radical, and rationalistic.

Part of a longer post.

Cultural Analysis

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I propose that we drop the term “social science” and replace it with “cultural analysis.”

The basic questions in cultural analysis are:

  • what problems does a cultural trait solve?
  • what problems does a cultural trait create?

The basic paradigm is that cultural traits evolve to solve problems, including problems that are caused by other cultural traits. For example, in warfare, we develop weapons to solve the problems created by other weapons.

Cultural traits are broadly of two types. Informal traits are traits that people follow by imitation and tradition. Formal traits are traits that are codified (often in writing) or embodied in physical tools.

We think of scientific persuasion as consisting of deductive proofs and decisive experiments. Whether or not scientific persuasion actually proceeds this way, cultural analysis does not. Persuasion in cultural analysis requires assembling intuition, historical narrative, formal empirical work, and logic. There is too much causal density to provide definitive answers to the basic questions.

Government with Chinese characteristics?

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Ts’ang Chung-shu and Jennifer Dodgson write,

Under such a system, a leader is the individual who can render the greatest number of people dependent upon the advantages that he can provide, and threats to his power come not from rival offers of protection, but from redistribution networks that escape his control. Thus, the defining quality of statehood is not the monopoly of legitimate violence, but the monopoly of legitimate benevolence.

They claim that this explains how Singapore and China differ from Western governments.

The Western perspective on this comes from North, Weingast, and Wallis. To hold onto power, a government must be able to keep violent competitors at bay. The authors claim that it works differently in the Chinese tradition.

Group (self-) hatred

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Zach Goldberg writes,

white liberals recently became the only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias—meaning that among all the different groups surveyed white liberals were the only one that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own.

You may recall that I witnessed this at my third daughter’s college graduation. The graduation speaker reported recently reading that the U.S. is going to be majority minority by 2050, and the students erupted in whoops and applause. I thought to myself, “They have been indoctrinated to hate white people.” The other night at my talk, I thought that the same thing might be at work in the way that the students applauded particularly strongly for anti-free speech remarks made by African-Americans (although they also applauded similar remarks made by whites).

Goldberg also notes

The years between 2012 and 2016 were a watershed for white liberal racial consciousness. But the seismic attitudinal shifts of those years have implications that go beyond race: They are also tied to a significant decrease in support for Israel and—perhaps more surprisingly—a rise in the number of white liberals who express negative attitudes about the perceived political power of American Jews.

For most of my Jewish friends who are progressive, left-wing antisemitism doesn’t fit their preconceptions. Therefore, for them it doesn’t exist.

Comments on college students and free speech

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1.

Can you describe the points make by the African American speakers that were anti-free-speech? I am curious as to what those positions were?

Both white and black students spoke vehemently against my position on free speech. I cannot remember who said what. As best I remember, the arguments were what one would expect, about hate speech causing harm. One student (white) cited two ultra-racist YouTube channels I had never heard of, which he claimed had millions of viewers, as something that showed that we cannot just accept free speech.

2.

Libertarians will have to choose between a society in which one can speak his mind and express his honest sentiments, or one in which the state allows socially powerful private institutions and the modern mob to enforce the evolving progressive zeitgeist on everyone.

I would choose to keep the state out of it, which means allowing Twitter and/or the mob to convince private actors to de-platform speakers. The First Amendment at most protects us from government infringement on free speech. But I am certainly in favor of naming, shaming, and de-funding institutions like Brandeis that have given into the mob and disinvited speakers.

That is why I put the emphasis on a culture of free speech. If the most articulate and engaged people in the society do not believe in free speech, then we are not really going to enjoy it, even if the First Amendment remains technically in force. And my guess is that if current cultural trends continue, even infringement by government will come to be welcomed, and the First Amendment will be a dead letter.

By the way, I just came across this story.

The city of Takoma Park postponed last week’s screening of the controversial film “The Occupation of the American Mind” while it arranges a post-film discussion.

But the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, which criticized the film as “extremely one-sided and does not present an accurate picture of the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” is hoping [to] ensure the film isn’t screened in the city at all.

Oy. I am absolutely opposed to trying to stop the film. If you’ve seen it, and you think it’s misleading, then put together a polite flyer spelling out the misleading aspects, and hand out the flyer to people going into the film.

I think that propaganda documentaries in general are an awful idea. Whether you are on the side of the film-maker or not, you should only watch such a film with a frame of mind of picking it apart.

Right-wing regimes and exit

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Perhaps the more “right-wing” regimes tolerate different sorts of income inequality. Cuba and the USSR had plenty of inequality, but the main earners, in terms of living standards, are restricted to people within the state apparatus. That means a lot of the talent will want to leave. Many fascist regimes, however, are quite willing to cultivate multi-millionaires and then try to co-opt them into supporting the state. Since you can still earn a lot in the private sector, exit restrictions are less needed.

What would be other hypotheses?

The goal is to explain why right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave, but Communist regimes don’t.

The term “right-wing authoritarian” is poorly chosen. It should be called “natural state” (North, Weingast, and Wallace) or “gangster government.” The goal is to remain in power and extract benefits from being in power. The ruler distributes privileges to those who might otherwise threaten the ruler. As a leader, you do not want to drive people away, but if people are unhappy, you would rather they leave than stick around and cause trouble.

Communist regimes do not operate on the basis of distributing privileges to others. Instead, they seek control through totalitarian methods. Their rule is based on intimidation and creating a climate of fear. But if people know that they can leave freely, why should they fear you? They can foment dissent and, if you turn up the heat, they just emigrate. You can’t really run an effective totalitarian state if you allow people to leave. You need to make sure that dissenters suffer, to set a clear example for other potential dissenters.

College students and free speech

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The Knight Foundation reports,

Students are divided over whether it’s more important to promote an inclusive society that welcomes diverse groups or to protect the extremes of free speech, even if those protections come at the expense of inclusivity. Nearly six in 10 students believe that hate speech ought to be protected under the First Amendment. However, students who belong to historically marginalized groups — African American students, gender nonconforming students, and gay and lesbian students —are far more sensitive to unrestricted free speech, particularly hate speech.

… Roughly one-third (32 percent) of students say that it is always acceptable to engage in protests against speakers who are invited to campus, while six in 10 (60 percent) say this type of activity is sometimes acceptable. Only 8 percent say it is never acceptable.

Pointer from Ethan Cai, who highlights other findings from the survey.

I want to talk about a personal experience I had Tuesday night, speaking to college students brought to DC by The Fund for American Studies. The mission of the organization is to “teach the principles of limited government, free-market economics and honorable leadership.”

If there are 330 students in this year’s program, then I would say at least half of them showed up for my talk. I took about 15 questions, and each student said where they were from. I don’t recall anyone from an institution in the Northeast or the West Coast. Several were from schools in Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, or North Carolina. Only one was from an elite school (Duke).

This was not Berkeley or Swarthmore. These were not the spoiled children of elite parents competitively gaming the admissions system. In terms of ethnic appearance, there were more African-Americans and fewer Asians than you would find in a class of that size on an elite campus. I’m guessing few Jews, if any.

My topic was the three-axes model. By the way, you can pre-order the new edition of the book (only $3.99 on Kindle), which will come out in August.

Given all of this background, I would not have expected to find a hotbed of hostility toward liberty and free speech. I was wrong about that.

Continue reading →

Three problems with capitalism

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I write,

Who receives high status in society? Cultures can vary. We may assign high status to the brave warrior, to the gifted athlete, to the talented artist, to the holy priest, to the martyr, to the politician, to the craftsman, or to the intellectual. Because relative status is a zero-sum game, the more status points we assign to merchants, bankers, and entrepreneurs, the less status points are available for other categories.

There is much more. This essay was stimulated by one of the questions Erik Torenberg sent me to prepare for our podcast.