Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Social class and prep school

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Caitlin Flanagan writes,

The result of Yeung’s research is a website called PolarisList. Looking over the data for Princeton’s classes of 2015 through 2018 is bracing. The list of sending schools is dominated by highly selective magnet schools, public schools in wealthy areas, and famous prep schools: the Lawrenceville School, Exeter, Delbarton, Andover, Deerfield Academy. Among the top 25 feeders to Princeton, only three are public schools where 15 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Read the whole article.

Long ago, when I proposed a voucher system, I wanted a graduated system that gave more money to parents of limited means and/or children with special needs. In addition, I proposed a “luxury tax” on parents sending students to very-high-tuition K-12 schools.

Longer ago, when I arrived as a freshman a Swarthmore College, I came from a wealthy public school, but I felt out of place among the prep school graduates, including my roommate. They pronounced it “Swathmore,” which I never did. Once classes started, I realized that they were not ahead of me in terms of intellectual background. They were ahead of me socially, and in hindsight my friends, even though I had different groups each year, were pretty much all from something other than the elite prep schools.

COVID models still don’t work

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David Wallace-Wells writes,

Looking back, you could find a few lonely voices suggesting winter would be calmer than autumn. But the CDC aggregates and showcases 26 pedigreed models predicting the near-term course of the disease. On January 18, only two of the 26 showed the dramatic case decline the country experienced by February 1 as being within what’s called the 95 percent confidence interval. In other words, 24 of the 26 models said what ended up happening over just the next two weeks was, more or less, statistically impossible. The other two gave it, at best, a sliver of a chance.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The article correctly points out that the only clear differences in outcomes are between Asia and the West. I still wonder whether the two faced the same virus.

Null hypothesis watch

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James J. Heckman and Rasmus Landerso write,

family influence on many child outcomes in Denmark is comparable to that in the U.S. Common forces are at work in both countries that are not easily mitigated by welfare state policies. Denmark achieves lower income inequality and greater intergenerational income mobility primarily through its tax and transfer programs and not by building the skills of children across generations and promoting their human potential more effectively.

Academic intimidation: some data

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Eric Kaufmann writes,

between a fifth and a half of academics would discriminate against the Right in grants, papers, or promotion bids. On a four-person panel, this means that the likelihood of a conservative encountering at least one biased assessor is pushing toward certainty.

The essay is a useful attempt to document the problem. Kaufmann’s solution consisting of more government intervention, strikes me as a bad idea in the current environment. The Democrats will not want to intervene, and the Republicans will only provoke backlash from the institutions if they intervene.

I look at it this way. The intimidators are anti-intellectual, and they deserve low status. Conservative intellectuals deserve higher status. Our best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.

Douthat vs. Macaes

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Ross Douthat writes,

So American virtualism, Maçaes might reasonably argue, has actually done a better job of mastering the coronavirus challenge than European realism. Yes, the American tendency to make war on reality can look ridiculous and embarrassing, it can produce all kinds of weird partisan myths and extreme behaviors … but it’s also connected to greater optimism and wider imaginative horizons, both of which have contributed to America’s unfinished but faster-than-expected escape from the coronavirus era.

I think this is a plausible interpretation of recent events. But that’s as far as I can go with Maçaes, because merely proving that America is less decadent than Europe doesn’t prove that we’re on the cusp of a general American renaissance. In the particular case of the Covid vaccines, yes, our war on reality cashed out in actual real-world solutions to the pandemic. But I don’t see that achievement necessarily being duplicated in other realms where virtualism holds sway. What I see instead, relative to the American past, is a consistent failure to make the leap back to reality, to apply the fantasy to the world as it exists, in a way that succeeds in leaving an undeniable alteration, a fundamental mark.

This probably qualifies as a steel-manning. But the season has not started.

Who gets to restrict speech?

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Anthony Doyle writes,

In the end, we have to consider which is more harmful to society: a minority who would seek to incite violence against their fellow citizens, or a state that has been empowered to set the limits of permissible thought and speech. On balance, I suspect that those of us who know a thing or two about history will settle on the latter.

From an essay excerpted from his new book. This seems to qualify as steel-manning, in that he does make the effort to build the case for the other point of view.

In contrast with Doyle’s steel-manning, Glenn Greenwald writes,

journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

In The Three Languages of Politics, I make a case for treating everyone else as reasonable. If you want to diagnose anyone’s beliefs as irrational or self-serving, do that only to yourself. I admit that I have not always lived up to this ideal.

Another term for steel-manning is “cognitive empathy,” meaning trying to understand what the other person is thinking. Let me try to show cognitive empathy for the journalists Greenwald disapproves of (and make no mistake, I disapprove of them, too). I see them as believing that society will work better if people trust the information that they get from mainstream journalists. Those who undermine that trust threaten society by creating an environment in which falsehoods masquerade as news and in which journalists who try to do their job feel threatened and intimidated. Society needs to fight back against these spoilers of the realm of public knowledge.

Although I can empathize with this point of view, I do not find it compelling. As Greenwald points out, it can be hard to tell the difference these days between writers with and without journalistic credentials. Often, it is the ordinary people breaking stories and providing reliable analysis. Meanwhile, there are credentialed journalists playing the role of spoilers–spreading falsehoods and intimidating those who try to speak the truth.

Postjournalism

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Andrey Mir’s Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers would have made my list of best books of 2020 except that I only recently read it. I recommend the entire book, even though Mir’s writing is repetitive. A few quick thoughts.

When I was growing up, you needed to read the sports section to see all the box scores, you needed the financial pages to look up specific stocks, and you turned to the comics section for entertainment.

Mir points out that advertising is what really supported the newspapers. In fact, although he does not say this, it was classified advertising that really paid the bills.

In a sense, the news and opinion that came bundled with your sports, financial news and comics was included courtesy of the advertisers. Mir points out that the advertisers were better off without angry, negative, divisive news and editorial content. Journalists were free to uphold standards for objectivity, because advertisers did not mind.

Then advertising went away. And you could get your sports and financial information from specialty web sites, and newspaper comics were no longer a compelling form of entertainment. So newspapers lost their readers, and their advertisers.

Staying in business required a different revenue model, which turned out to be donation via subscription. To motivate what Mir calls donscriptions, newspapers had to take strong stands. The survivors–WaPo and NYT–succeeded at this. Their readers look to these publications to validate their world view. Objectivity becomes a luxury that the papers can no longer afford–too much objectivity and readers will cancel their donscriptions.

Mir predicts a big drop in news site activity with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Already that looks like a good call.

Organized resistance

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1. Academic Freedom Alliance. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities.

I clicked on “members” and it seems like a prestigious list. FITS candidates include Cowen, Pinker, Haidt. . .

2. Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Pointer from a commenter. This one looks even better.

Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.

And check out their Board of Advisors. FITS candidates include Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Pinker, Pluckrose. . .

It looks like they are ready to take the fight to the K-12 sector, where I believe it may be most needed. I think this one is worth joining.

Matt Yglesias for B’s?

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Scott Alexander writes,

The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now.

He points to a paywalled substack post by Matt Yglesias which demonstrates thinking in bets. If that post had gone up during the Fantasy Intellectual Teams season, Yglesias would have scored a whole bunch of B’s for his owner.