Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The opposition is building

Posted on by

A reader points me to this poll.

The first national poll to ask detailed questions of American voters about efforts to impose Critical Race Theory and “social justice” curriculum on K-12 schools found overwhelming opposition to it and strong support for a de-politicized curriculum.

The poll seems to have been commissioned by a parent’ group that opposes CRT in the schools. You can discount the results if you like, based on the theory that when it comes to polls wording is everything, but you cannot discount the fact that there is an organized parents’ opposition group.

Such organizations seem to be sprouting up daily. Here is an organization focused on Jews. I think it is rational for Jews and other ethnic groups to walk away from the Woke left, which has nothing constructive in its agenda.

Why health officials were slow to understand COVID transmission

Posted on by

Zeynep Tufekci writes (NYT),

If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others. We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary. Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing. We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.

If you were reading me back in the early days of the pandemic, you will see that I noticed, without understanding the science, that outdoors was especially safe. I was also a big skeptic of what I called “doorknob effects,” the idea that you could get the virus by touching a surface that someone else had touched.

The point is not that I know virology better than the virologists. I don’t. But I believe in drawing inference from evidence. My biggest complaint with the public health establishment, which I voiced emphatically and often, is that they would not conduct experiments to test hypotheses in a situation where there was considerable uncertainty.

In the early days of the pandemic, we were not following science. We were following bureaucrats, who put way too much emphasis on “computer models,” which anyone with a strong scientific mind could see were garbage. They refused to use evidence-based reasoning, and they never considered conducting experiments.

The problem was much deeper than just the one issue that Tufekci describes.

FITs, week two

Posted on by

I write,

This exercise is also showing that two-person podcasts tend to promote high-quality discourse. I speculate that this is because when you have to focus on another person, you are aware of the need to be reasonable. If one person starts to go off the rails, the other person is there to pull them back. This is in contrast to Twitter, where your focus is on the audience, and where you can be rewarded for intellectual malpractice by people who enjoy seeing another person being attacked without any consideration for fairness.

An adult in the room

Posted on by

Matt Yglesias writes,

it’s sloshing around quite broadly in progressive circles even though I’ve never heard a major writer, scholar, or political leader praise or recommend it. And to put it bluntly, it’s really dumb. . . it is broadly influential enough that if everyone actually agrees with me that it’s bad, we should stop citing it and object when other people do. And alternatively, if there are people who think it’s good, it would be nice to hear them say so, and then we could have a specific argument about that. But while I don’t think this document is exactly typical, I do think it’s emblematic of some broader, unfortunate cultural trends.

He is singling out “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun. She happens to be white, which makes it somewhat safer to pick on her. I have not read the essay, but my fear would be that it is about average for a diversity, equity, and inclusion training seminar.

I have a notion of starting a podcast that I would call “Adults in the room.” When I consider the political/cultural climate these days, it feels like a nightmare in which I am on a highway and all the other cars are being driven by 4-year-olds. Both major parties are intimidated by the worst of their constituencies. There seem to be few adults in the room in politics, universities, or even major corporations.

I disagree with Matt quite a bit. But at least he strikes me as an adult in the room.

Valuing government spending

Posted on by

The Warsaw Enterprise Institute, a Polish think tank, makes the attempt.

Whenever the government acquires goods on behalf of and for its citizens, it acts as an agent in someone else’s cause. A good agent will make a good purchase, a bad agent – a bad one. The concept that was present from the very beginning when preparing the WNI was to apply already existing criteria of effectiveness to public expenditure. In the absence of an independent decision of the consumer, who would decide on the allocation of resources in the economy with his or her own wallet, the evaluation of the government’s decisions must be undertaken by an external body. Therefore, we take into account public expenditures in the WNI not by adding up their values, but according to the qualitative criterion. In other words, the higher the deterrent potential of a country’s armed forces, the greater the value of military spending. The better universities place in international rankings, the more expenditure on higher education is worth. The better the reputation of healthcare in a country, the higher the value of government activity in this regard – and so on.

GDP measures the value of government purchases at cost. It’s as if you cannot get more or less value than what you pay for. This sounds like a creative alternative.

The sky is not falling

Posted on by

Ryan Streeter sees hope.

nearly a third (32 percent) of Americans say they get a “strong sense of community” from their American identity, compared to only 17 percent who feel the same about their race or ethnicity. Even amidst a slight drop in intense patriotism in 2020 amidst a pandemic and racial unrest, YouGov poll results showed robust levels of patriotism among a majority of Americans and even a slight uptick among young adults, Democrats, and Black Americans. You wouldn’t know this from the prevailing media narrative.

He offers other optimistic indicators.

Money printing and manias

Posted on by

Matt Taibbi writes,

In 2021, we’re seeing a surge in con-like corruption cases once again, many involving old-school ripoffs. An economy puffed up by the steroid enhancement of Fed support has led to a great flowering of such creative grifts. Some are not terribly accessible to non-financial audiences at first glance, so to make it a bit easier to keep track of new cases coming in, I’m creating a new feature, “Racket of the Week.”

Charles Kindleberger, in Manias, Panics, and Crashes, pointed out that when there is a lot of new wealth you tend to get a lot of scams.

I would bet that five or ten years from now, people will look back at GameStop, Dogecoin, and Hometown Deli and say it was obvious that monetary policy and regulatory policy were too loose. Future inflation is here–it just hasn’t been evenly distributed.

The thirty-somethings who are driving policy in Washington these days are ignorant. They don’t know history. They don’t know economics. I would not under-estimate the damage they can do.

If you have $200,000 in assets today, it would not surprise me to see that ten years from now inflation and taxes have eroded half of their value. In other words, ten years from now, you will be able to buy what today is $100,000 worth of stuff.

Some assets will hold more of their value. Some will hold less. It is possible that a house could lose even more than half its (inflation-adjusted) value once interest rates go up, because high interest rates make it hard to afford amortizing mortgages. But I expect instead that housing will do well relative to other investments, in part because the Federal government tends to avoid taxing housing wealth as severely as other assets.

The “new” theory of inflation

Posted on by

The WSJ had an article about prices going up for various things, all seemingly caused by market-specific factors.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on April 28 that inflationary pressures resulting from supply-chain problems would likely be temporary and wouldn’t prompt the central bank to change policies aimed to keep borrowing costs down.

With apologies to Milton Friedman, the “new” theory seems to be that inflation is, anywhere and everywhere, a temporary and idiosyncratic phenomenon.

Except that the theory is not new. It is the same theory that prevailed in the early 1970s. Apparently there aren’t any economists left at the Fed who are old enough to remember back that far. And no journalists.