Author Archives: Arnold Kling

A toy to spot your bias on Twitter

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Tyler Cowen writes,

What is the ideological news slant of your Twitter account? (mine was 57% left-wing, 34% right-wing, not too many centrists, at least by their measures, maybe I prefer “the kooks”). I don’t wish to embarrass anyone in particular, but some of the ideological bubbles you can find with this are…just remarkable.

I put in klingblog, and it says I do not interact enough with Twitter to give a reading. Check.

I put in econtalker (Russ Roberts) and it said 48 percent left, 44 percent right.

I put in slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) and it said 71 percent left, 15 percent right.

My thoughts.

1. I think that Twitter overall leans very far to the left. So my guess is that this measure overstates the amount of leftwing news and understates the amount of rightwing news that a person gets in the “real world.”

2. I suspect that if you are active on Twitter and interested in political issues, you have no choice but to interact with a lot of news from the left. For a long time I have believed that those of us on the right know what the leftwing narrative is on news. But people on the left miss some angles on stories and some stories altogether because these analyses never penetrate their bubble.

Another FITs team

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This one calls itself “The Definite Optimists.” They had the next to last pick in the first round of the Fantasy Intellectuals draft. I thought that this was another team that stayed away from mood affiliation.

You can go to this page to see the different Fantasy Intellectuals teams. Just select any team. Comment only on the teams you like.
UPDATE: link fixed, and now the report shows the current standings. Game On!
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Intellectual decadence

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I linked to Ross Douthat’s substack on decadence and the intellectuals the other day, but today I want to comment on its main theme.

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: If you’ve had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to go forward once again.

He thinks that starting in the 1960s, our culture threw away too much that was of value. We will have to rediscover it or else suffer from bad ideas.

I certainly think that this will be the case in economics, which as you know I believe is on the Road to Sociology. This will mean a great forgetting of the ideas of Hayek, Buchanan, and Sowell. Those few students who seek out those ideas will have insights into the horrid policy regimes under which they will have the misfortune to live.

Against vaccine passports

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Mask mandates make more sense to me than vaccine passports.

I would make the case for a mask mandate in a pandemic with no vaccine available. Suppose you and I enter the same store. As I understand it, my mask offers little protection to me. But your mask offers significant protection to me.

With a vaccine, the relative values are reversed. If you and I visit the same store, my vaccination shot gives me lots of protection, while your vaccination shot is much less meaningful to me.

In terms of immediate contact with other people, there is a public-goods argument for a mask mandate in a pandemic without a vaccine. But in terms of immediate contact with other people, vaccines are much more of a private good.

The public-goods argument for vaccines has to do with “crushing the virus” in general, not with making individuals safer to be around. You can argue that if not everyone is vaccinated, the virus will have more hosts and more opportunities to mutate.

I am willing to buy this public-goods argument for giving people an incentive to get vaccinated. But the penalty for not getting a vaccine should not be house arrest. Metaphorically, I would say we should give people a “vaccine discount” at the movies rather than banning unvaccinated people from going to the movies altogether.

Maybe the subsidy for getting a vaccine should be quite high. Maybe the “no-vaccine” tax should be quite high. But depriving someone of their freedom of movement because they refuse to get a COVID vaccine is wrong. I strongly oppose vaccine passports.

An interesting FITs team

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I want to use individual blog posts to single out some of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams that were selected. If the owner wishes to reveal himself, he can do so in the comments. The team calling itself Deep Thought had the last pick in the first round. I think that if any team managed to avoid mood affiliation, it was this one.

You can go to this page to see the different Fantasy Intellectuals teams. Just select any team. Comment only on the teams you like. Continue reading →

Urban income disparities

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Joel Kotkin writes,

Gotham’s one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income. That’s almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country. But such class disparity is becoming the norm; in the tech haven of San Francisco, which has the worst levels of inequality in California, the top 5% of households earn an average of $808,105 annually, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.

Where will immigrants settle? The stereotypical pattern was that hard-working immigrants would come to the major metro areas, live in tenements, and then climb the economic ladder. It seems as though that might be more difficult today.

FITs on clubhouse tonight

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For anyone who wants to discuss Fantasy Intellectual Teams–the scoring rules, controversial picks, how the draft went, what we’re hoping to accomplish, etc. Tonight at 7:30 PM eastern time.

I should mention that I have a few clubhouse invites available, so if you have an iphone and want to join, contact me at arnoldsk at us dot net.

The U.S. already is Denmark

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Phil Gramm and John Early write,

if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

On a pre-tax basis, income inequality has increased. But if their claim is correct, then the U.S. addresses income inequality the same way that Denmark does–with taxes and transfers.