Author Archives: Arnold Kling

One definition of CRT

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From Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001)

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

This is from the 2016 edition, but it is identical to a paragraph quoted by Max Eden and attributed to the first edition in 2001. The way I see it, the characterization of CRT by its critics today is reasonably close to this definition, which comes from two of its prominent proponents twenty years ago.

Eden quotes another paragraph that is slightly different in the 2016 edition. Here is the more recent version:

Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools. They discuss the rise of biological racism in education theory and practice and urge attention to the resegregation of American schools. Some question the Anglocentric curriculum and charge that many educators apply a “deficit theory” approach to schooling for minority kids.

I will put more quotes from the introduction to the 2016 edition below the fold.

Last week, I had a jarring experience the day after I heard Jonathan Haidt talk to a conference of mostly high school educators. He had some disparaging things to say about CRT.

The next morning, I was supposed to do a workshop on The Three Languages of Politics to a small subset of conference attendees. Innocently, I decided to start with Haidt’s distinction between Discover and Defend, as analogous to my distinction between political rhetoric that is intended to persuade (which we rarely observe nowadays) and rhetoric that is intended to demonize. I said that I might end up repeating a lot of what Professor Haidt had said the previous evening.

“I hope not!” a woman in the audience piped up. It turned out that his talk had angered many in his audience. They pegged him as a straight white male (correct) and as a hard-right ideologue (wrong–at least for now).

Figuring that I was not going to get any traction otherwise, I let the teachers vent. Among their complaints was that CRT was misrepresented by Haidt and by other opponents.

I came away from my close encounter with teachers marinated in CRT thinking that there is no stopping them. They have their excuses ready when CRT is criticized. They claim that their critics are right-wingers out to distort CRT and suppress discussions of race.

I could have refuted these teachers by reading the two paragraphs above, but I did not have them handy. From now on, I will be able to find them doing a quick search of my blog.
Continue reading →

A recommended book

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I review Andrey Mir’s PostJournalism. [link fixed]

But relatively placid stories do not motivate people to pay subscription fees. Today, people can get news for free. They can get sports scores, financial information, and entertainment without going to newspapers. Mir argues that nowadays people pay newspapers to validate their worldviews. Newspapers do this most effectively by highlighting stories about the outrageous actions of their subscribers’ political adversaries.

An excerpt cannot do justice to my review. And the review cannot do justice to the book.

Glenn Loury on black self-making

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He said,

One argument comes from the left. It says history has dealt blacks a bad hand and we have been oppressed and we have been beaten and abused. What can you expect but that you would see pathological behavior? It’s fixed by the historical inheritance. The wealth gap is what it is because we didn’t get the hand down from our parents because they didn’t get the hand down from their parents. What can we do? The crime rate is what it is, the test scores and what they are, et cetera. Fixed by history. Predetermined.

And the genetic argument. It’s in your genes. What can we expect? Do the best you can. We’ll respect you as a human being, but we won’t expect you to be doing calculus and we won’t expect you to be performing at a high level. And if we see that you’re not a good parent or that you break the law frequently or that you’re more often involved in violence, while we regret that, we can’t say that we’re surprised. Because after all your genetic et cetera.

I excerpted half of it, and I am short-changing you if you don’t go read the whole “aria.”

I myself wrote that there are three narratives for racial gaps. As Loury points out, the oppression narrative and the genetic narrative deprive blacks of moral agency and hope. The third narrative, which I prefer, is cultural characteristics that can change. That essay was influenced by listening to and reading Loury. It also was influenced by reading The Mind Club. Recall this blog post.

Noah Smith and Marc Andreessen

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I enjoyed this interview. Marc says,

Substack isn’t a new form of communication; in fact it’s the original form of Internet communication — the written essay, the IETF Request for Comments, the newsgroup posting, the group email, the blog post. But until now you could never get paid for writing online, and now all of a sudden you can. I think it’s hard to imagine how transformational this is going to be.

Substack is causing enormous amounts of new quality writing to come into existence that would never have existed otherwise — raising the level of idea formation and discourse in a world that badly needs it. So much of legacy media, due to the technological limitations of distribution technologies like newspapers and television, makes you stupid. Substack is the profit engine for the stuff that makes you smart.

We may hope.

Later, he says,

My partner Alex Rampell says that competition between an incumbent and a software-driven startup is “a race, where the startup is trying to get distribution before the incumbent gets innovation”. The incumbent starts with a giant advantage, which is the existing customer base, the existing brand. But the software startup also starts with a giant advantage, which is a culture built to create software from the start, with no need to adapt an older culture designed to bend metal, shuffle paper, or answer phones.

As time passes, I am increasingly skeptical that most incumbents can adapt. The culture shift is just too hard. Great software people tend to not want to work at an incumbent where the culture is not optimized to them, where they are not in charge.

I was surprised that Amazon was able to develop a logistics system before Wal-Mart could figure out the web. But Marc’s point is that as software becomes more important, the incumbent firms lose their advantage.

Marc is bullish on crypto, which he says provides

distributed consensus — the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust. This is something the Internet has never had, but now it does, and I think it will take 30 years to work through all of the things we can do as a result. Money is the easiest application of this idea, but think more broadly — we can now, in theory, build Internet native contracts, loans, insurance, title to real world assets, unique digital goods (known as non-fungible tokens or NFTs), online corporate structures (such as digital autonomous organizations or DAOs), and on and on.

Maybe. But I wonder: in the process of moving from existing trust mechanisms to “distributed consensus,” how many Chesterton fences have to be torn down, and how well will that go? When bad guys do their thing, what will the “distributed consensus” do about it? Of course, “it will take 30 years to work through all the things” may make allowances for such problems.

If so-and-so is for it, then I must be against it

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Yascha Mounk calls this 180ism.

For a long time, I have struggled to understand why so many of my old friends and colleagues have embraced the reductionist worldview that is now taking over public discourse, in some cases even turning themselves into enthusiastic enforcers of the new “moral clarity.” The key to the answer, I have come to believe, lies in a phenomenon that, at the suggestion of my colleague Emily Yoffe, I propose to call 180ism: the tendency of many participants in public debate to hear what their perceived enemies have to say and immediately declare themselves diametrically opposed.

Later,

This is the world of 180ism. According to the logic of the moment, you must either think that Dr. Seuss never made a cringe-worthy drawing or that we should cheer when public libraries remove his early books. You must either believe that antifa is a major threat to national security or defend the right of a bunch of extremists to beat up anyone they consider a fascist. You must either cheer when state legislatures tell teachers what they can say in the classroom or celebrate that a growing number of them are telling students to make their racial identity central to their lives.

I recommend the entire essay

Academia: exit or voice?

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Michael Robillard chooses exit, but he urges others to use voice.

It is my hope that this essay will inspire others in academia, students and professors alike, to also begin speaking up loudly and vocally and to continue to speak up against this pernicious woke ideology until we bat it out the door of academia and society at large. Until then, I will continue to sound the alarm for any of those with minds and hearts open enough to hear. Listen to or dismiss these words at your own peril. However, when the woke mob comes to cancel you, when the HR department calls you into their office for mandatory remedial pronoun training, or when the agents of the pink police state come to knock at your door in the middle of the night, don’t say I didn’t warn you. So farewell academia,

I disavow you.

McWhorter on Murray

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John McWhorter speculates,

In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

I think McWhorter is being shockingly uncharitable* to progressives with the sentence that begins “Meanwhile, white leftists. . .” I don’t think anyone wanted to maximize the number of poor black women on welfare. But regardless of intent, one can argue that the consequences of the War on Poverty were that work and marriage were strongly discouraged. I think that to this day, in spite of the (temporary) “end welfare as we know it” turn under President Clinton, the implicit marginal tax rates on the poor of all races are very high. That is because benefits like Medicaid and food stamps fade out as income goes up. For a woman, the financial advantage of a husband who earns about $30,000 a year can be close to nil.

[*UPDATE: I am wrong about this. See Handle’s comment. McWhorter knows what he is talking about, apparently.]

The larger topic of McWhorter’s essay is Charles Murray’s latest book. McWhorter writes,

in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.

I agree with the complaint that Murray is not being forthcoming. In yesterday’s post, I called it “ducking and dancing.”

To repeat my own views, I would like to see us treat people as individuals and not pay attention to group outcomes. That approach may not be perfect, but other approaches strike me was worse.

But suppose you told me that it was unrealistic to ignore group outcomes, and you insisted that I offer suggestions for improving outcomes among blacks. My thoughts would be along these lines:

1. I take the Null Hypothesis seriously. I would not put a lot of my chips on formal education as a solution.

2. I take incentives seriously. So I would get rid of Federal poverty programs and replace them with (a) a small UBI that lowers the heavy marginal tax rate on the working poor; and (b) community programs to identify and support families with special needs.

3. I take cultural forces seriously. Personality traits and social norms differ markedly across groups and over time. We don’t know a great deal about the process by which these factors change. For example, when marriage rates decline, we have great difficulty disentangling the many possible causes and effects. There are many arguments to be had about what is a good cultural trait and what is a bad one. And there is no policy dashboard sitting in front of us with buttons and dials that allow us to steer culture. But culture should be the focus for research and policy experiments.

I note that McWhorter’s ideas about violence in poor black communities fall within this framework.

Differences of opinion

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On the one hand, Nouriel Roubini writes,

For now, loose monetary and fiscal policies will continue to fuel asset and credit bubbles, propelling a slow-motion train wreck. The warning signs are already apparent in today’s high price-to-earnings ratios, low equity risk premia, inflated housing and tech assets, and the irrational exuberance surrounding special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), the crypto sector, high-yield corporate debt, collateralized loan obligations, private equity, meme stocks, and runaway retail day trading. At some point, this boom will culminate in a Minsky moment (a sudden loss of confidence), and tighter monetary policies will trigger a bust and crash.

Have a nice day, in other words.

On the other hand, we have the Institute for Global Management survey of macroeconomists. In response to the question

What is your estimate of the likelihood that five-year five-year forward inflation compensation will exceed 3 percent at the end of the first week of January 2022?

75 percent of the economists surveyed say that the chance of this is less than 40 percent. And it’s not because they think that there will be a recession.

Charles Murray and Glenn Loury

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In this podcast, Glenn Loury applies some gentle pressure to Charles Murray. It is like a boxing match in which Loury has Murray ducking and dancing, but Loury fails to put him away.

As I see it, Loury is more forthright than Murray in spelling out his own views. I come away thinking that Loury believes that average differences in outcomes between blacks and whites are meliorable. It may take a long time, and the policies that take us there will be much closer to conservative policies than progressive policies, but we can approach a state of equality.

Murray will not allow himself to be pinned down on this question. But he holds views that clearly imply that he does not think that differences can be overcome. He believes that genetic differences matter, and he emphasizes that they matter most at the upper tails of distributions. So if group X has a slightly higher mean IQ than group Y, by the time you get to the upper 0.1 percent, you will see an extremely high ratio of group X to group Y (this reminds me a bit of Larry Summers’ notorious explanation for the predominance of males among top mathematicians, although Summers does not even require a difference in means). Murray also mostly believes what I call the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have little or no effect in erasing genetic differences. It seems as though the purpose of his book is to get us to accept that something like the black-white school achievement gap is inevitable, but in the podcast Murray himself at times stops short of such an assertion.

Murray and Loury spend less time on the issue of crime. I think one can be pessimistic that the academic achievement gap between whites and blacks will be closed and still be optimistic that we could sharply reduce the difference between black and white crime rates. I do not think that research supports anything like the Null Hypothesis for interventions in the field of crime reduction. My intuition is that culture matters a great deal, and culture can change.

Returning to achievement outcomes, you cannot, except by being dogmatic, totally dismiss Murray’s pessimistic view that the distributions of genetic factors affecting cognitive ability differ on average between blacks and whites. But researchers have not found the genetic factors that determine cognitive ability, which creates a big hole in the chain of reasoning that you need to go through in order to be fully convinced that Murray is correct.

In the end, my view is that we ought to treat individuals as individuals, and stop paying attention to group outcomes.

Speaking for Grumpy

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A commenter has several questions for John Cochrane. I will try to answer them myself.

1. I can’t take a t-bill and use it to pay for coffee at Starbucks. For that I need money. That’s true for all consumption, and consumption is the biggest part of the economy. So the money supply has to be important–there is a difference between t-bills and money.

2. Mr. Cochrane claimed (as I understand it) that inflation will happen when the public loses faith in the gov’t’s ability to pay its debts. But isn’t that likely to be deflationary?

3. Mr. Cochrane’s wonderful equation is inflation = inflation expectations + pressure. He never comments on the pressure term, but I assume that refers to things like demographics, new technology, changes in consumer sentiment, etc.,

My guess is that if you go to Starbucks, you will see most of the transactions taking place without money. Customers use credit cards. Or ApplePay. Or who knows what?

In today’s economy, it is hard to imagine that the amount of money in circulation determines spending. Instead, I think that wealth, broadly defined, determines spending. I think of private-sector wealth as anchored in reality. Stocks have to pay real dividends. The connection may be loose, but it is there. But government-printed wealth is artificial.

Government artificially creates household wealth when it spends more without raising taxes. It pays for its spending either with t-bills or money, and the private sector can count these as wealth. (You can argue that the private sector should not count these as wealth. Almost fifty years ago, when the “rational expectations” fad was sweeping the economics profession, Robert Barro wrote a famous paper arguing that people do not count government bonds as wealth.) The way I look at it, t-bills and money are both treated as wealth, so I don’t think that the difference between the two is as important as the fact that deficit spending raises perceived wealth, and higher perceived wealth raises spending and inflation.

Regarding (2), if my creditors lose confidence in my ability to repay my debts, they cut me off and my spending goes down. That is deflationary. But if the government’s creditors lose confidence in its ability to repay its debts, the government has an option that I don’t have: print more money. That will be inflationary. If instead the government adopts a “sudden stop,” meaning that it sharply cuts spending and/or raises taxes substantially, then that will indeed be deflationary.

Regarding (3), an important source of pressure is the additional private-sector wealth created by deficit spending. Too much wealth chasing too few goods, as it were.

I think that John would tell the story somewhat differently. Rather than focus on wealth perception, he would say that unsustainable deficit spending raises concern that the government will have to print money. As this concern gets built into expectations, people will take steps to protect themselves from a government default and/or a lot of inflation. Many of those precautions in fact hasten default and trigger inflation.

I don’t have a problem with John’s story. He has government deficits affecting expectations, and I have deficits affecting pressure. It could be both.