Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Progressive vs. Woke

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Marc Novicoff (intern for Matt Yglesias) writes,

Here at Slow Boring, we’ve written on defunding the police a couple times, and I don’t think it’s a good idea. But on top of that, I also don’t think it’s a progressive idea, and the fact that it became one and somehow can’t unbecome one points to the biggest problem in the progressive movement: its extremely recently enshrined, yet unshakeable orthodoxies.

. . .At many times, it feels like the point of the progressive movement in 2021 isn’t to gain power and then enact reforms to ameliorate suffering, but rather to impress each other by saying the most inoffensive words in the most inoffensive order and then if you predictably lose in a landslide, so what, because everybody who didn’t agree with you from the start is racist anyway.

Will anti-Woke progressives be effective? Or do they, like never-Trumpers, represent a small set of intellectuals with no real following?

Final Standings

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The May Fantasy Intellectual Teams wound up.

The winning team had leading scorers in every category. Podcasters Tyler Cowen, Andrew Sullivan, and Yascha Mounk asked many Devil’s Advocate questions of their guests. Cowen, Mounk, and Nate Silver contributed points in the Open Mind category. Silver contributed as expected in the Thinking in Bets category. Cowen and Jonathan Rauch helped in the discussion-starter category.

Should we fear Confucius?

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Lee Edwards writes,

Confucius Institutes avoid discussing China’s widespread human-rights abuses and present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed Chinese territories. As a result, writes Peterson, the institutes “develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country”—and a major adversary. Confucius Institutes are a textbook example of soft power that causes universities in receipt of Chinese largesse to stay silent about controversial subjects like China’s use of forced labor to pick cotton

This is something to keep your eye on.

Recommended reading and listening from FITs stars

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I suggest some essays and podcasts that pertain to liberal values.

The fantasy intellectual who is emerging as Most Valuable Player by leading in several scoring categories is Robert Wright. Listen to what Wright says to Robert Wiblin, especially minutes 28-38, about the way that tribalism and psychological biases are impediments to solving important problems. The rest of the podcast elaborates on these themes.

What I am trying to read

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1. Noise, by Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Olivier Sibony. The first two authors are Fantasy Intellectual Teams selections. As I often do when reading, I skipped ahead to the conclusion. They make the point that algorithms can reduce noise relative to human judgment. Think of mortgage underwriting as an example.

Or think of deciding when a fantasy intellectual has earned a point for stating a Caveat. I think it would be possible to state the criteria in algorithmic terms. Then in theory one could use machine intelligence to assign points. That would be powerful.

2. High Conflict by Amanda Ripley and The Way Out by Peter Coleman. These are both inspired by the problem of political polarization and purport to offer solutions. The authors are familiar with one another’s work.

Ripley is also a FITs selection, and I have listened to some of the many podcasts that she has done on the book, in which she comes across as a careful thinker. She is a journalist, and she likes to convey ideas through specific cases. Some readers claim that she tries to squeeze too much out of a couple of them. I have not gotten far enough into the book to say.

Coleman is an academic, who likes to speak in abstractions. Here is a passage from p. 78 of The Way Out.

However, the bubble principle also suggests that in order to sustain any positive change in our situation resulting from building on what is working, it is paramount that we also seek to actively reduce the attraction of our more (now latent) detrimental tendencies. Therefore, we must also find ways to break down or otherwise diminish the attraction of the more destructive dynamics that are driving us to mitigate the worst inclinations of our system. These practices complicate the need to address these drivers upstream, away from the heat of the conflict, to minimize resistance. In addition, it stresses the importance of leveraging or expanding existing repellers or social taboos for engaging in more destructive political acts.

I am inclined to associate clarity of thought with clarity of writing. Even after reading the entire book, this passage is opaque to me. A couple of chapters of the book are worthwhile. But Coleman’s style is not to my taste.

Speaking of high conflict

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Michael Anton writes,

If and when popular majorities produce outcomes the rulers don’t like, their devotion to “democracy” instantly evaporates. Judges, administrative state agencies, private companies—whichever is most able in the moment to overturn the will of unruly voters—will intervene to restore ruling class diktats. On the other hand, when voters can be counted on to vote the right way, then voting becomes the necessary and sufficient step for sanctifying any political outcome. It doesn’t even matter where the votes (or voters) come from, so long as they vote the right way. The fact that they vote the right way is sufficient to justify and even ennoble their participation in “our democracy.”

Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed: this, and only this, is what “democracy” means today.

Anton endorses secessionist movements, such as the attempt by the Reds of western Maryland to secede from the People’s Republic. My thoughts:

1. If Amanda Ripley’s term “conflict entrepreneur” were to appear in a dictionary, Michael Anton’s picture would be next to it.

2. For nearly 15 years, I have been endorsing secession. See the widely-unread, and ridiculously high-priced Unchecked and Unbalanced.

3. I also have endorsed “virtual” polities, so that I could continue to live in the geographical area of the People’s Republic but choose government services from elsewhere. Balaji Srinivasan’s networked state.

I think that the best scenario for the United States is one in which the Progressive Puritans choose to worship their religion among themselves without trying to impose it on others. But I don’t know how to get from here to there. What happened to the original Puritans that they didn’t end up as hard to live with as today’s version?

Demon Rum

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Matt Yglesias writes,

CDC stats say about 95,000 excess deaths each year can be attributed to alcohol abuse, of which about 10,000 are drunk driving fatalities. So looked at one way, booze is deadlier than guns. Looked at another way, gun murder is a more serious problem than drunk driving. Either way, to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well. Indeed, scholars think that something like 40% of murders involves the use of alcohol, so the issues really are fairly comparable.

It’s a great piece, probably paywalled.

Todd vs. Henrich

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“Policy Tensor writes,”

[IF] Henrich is right, Todd must be wrong about the archaic character of the Western nuclear family. Examination of the evidence shows that Todd is right and Henrich is wrong. The reason is simple — we can rule out the Henrich hypothesis. The alternate hypothesis is that the Church’s war against cousin marriage was directed at the nobles, who did indeed practice it in a manner that isolated them from the dominant family system of their societies. Just as socialism could spread easily over the exogamous communitarian anthropological base and found itself blocked on its boundaries and Islam likewise for the endogamous communitarian base, the Church’s influence may have been greatest in exogamous anthropological terrain. In other words, the alternate hypothesis inverts the causal arrow between family systems and the Church’s influence. The correlation between them is explained by a causal vector pointing in the reverse direction — the exogamous anthropological base explains the extent of medieval Christendom.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This is not lowering by very much my probability that Henrich is right.

Update on the road to sociology

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In September, Jeremy Horpedahl and I wrote,

The topics of gender, race and ethnicity, and inequality are important economic and social issues. In this paper, we analyze how often those topics are addressed in two outlets of the American Economic Association: peer-reviewed papers in the American Economic Review and the conference papers from the AEA’s annual meeting that are published in its Papers and Proceedings. We find that these topics have been increasingly represented in both of these outlets when considered as a group between 1991 and 2020. Published articles and conference papers addressing gender have seen the largest increase, both in absolute numbers and in percent of total papers.

The trend toward obsession with gender and race in economics seems to have accelerated. The recent Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review has 34 sessions, with 13 of them devoted to gender or ethnicity. If it were not for sessions devoted to COVID, the American Economic Association would now be 50 percent focused on race and gender.

UPDATE: See also John Cochrane’s latest.