Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Oren Cass vs. me

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Schematically, our exchange went like this:

1 (Cass). Masonomics sucks!

2 (Kling). Here is an outline of Masonomics.

3 (Cass). You have no idea what my article was saying!

4 (Kling). I am afraid that makes two of us.

The first three pieces appeared in print in the Claremont Review of Books, with (1) an article in the fall issue and (2) and (3) appearing in the correspondence section of the winter issue. All are presumably behind a paywall, but the link to (2) -(3) is here.

The full version of (2) is below. Continue reading →

On racism and racial disparities

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1. Glenn Loury writes,

Anti-racism advocates, in effect, are daring you to notice that some groups send their children to elite colleges and universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. They are daring you to declare such excellence to be an admirable achievement. One isn’t born knowing these things. One acquires such intellectual mastery through effort. Why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, “racism”, is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.

Pretty much every paragraph in the essay is as powerful as that.

This essay needs to escape the confines of Quillette and find its way to readers of the NYT and into schools of education.

Or is that hopeless?

2. John McWhorter writes,

Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher. As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of the Third Wave Antiracists’ liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is “How can we can live graciously among them?” We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

Of all the essays I have read about the new anti-racism, McWhorter’s is my current favorite.

The admissions office vs. standards

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The best way for a college to improve its admissions process would be to abolish the admissions office. A simple formula involving high school grades and SAT scores would be best. If many applicants meet the minimum standards for admission, then a lottery can be used to select those to whom to offer admission.

Admissions offices have always worked to undermine standards. In the summer of 1974, when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, Professor Ooms had me work on a project for him to study the undergraduate admissions process. He was disappointed at the caliber of the student body at the time, and he wanted to see what was going on.

We used statistics to uncover the factors that determined admission and the factors that were correlated with getting a good rating on the applicant interview. At the time, every applicant was interviewed, either by the admissions office or by an alumnus.

We found that the interview rating was a very important determinant of admission. We also found that interviewers did not like applicants with spectacularly high SAT scores. The SAT influenced admissions in two ways. Controlling for the interview score, a higher SAT score increased the chances of admission. But when the effect of the SAT on the interview rating was included, the highest SAT scores decreased the chances for admission. If Swarthmore had abolished its admissions office, it would have admitted many more students with higher scores.

Once you have an admissions office, the last thing they will do is try to maintain the role of standards for admission. Their power goes up by including more factors, especially subjective factors. The admissions officers can help promote legacies, athletes, students who are well-rounded (i.e., not Asian), and so on.

Incidentally, I got into Swarthmore in spite of my high SAT scores, because I interviewed with a local alum whose son I had watched wrestle in the state championship. I talked about that match during the interview. When I arrived at Swarthmore, the Dean of Admissions said that the wrestling coach was looking forward to having me on the team. I never went near the coach. After all, I had never won a single wrestling match in high school.

Herd immunity by April?

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Marty Makary writes,

Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Unfortunately, he does not spell out his calculations enough for me to check. But it is likely that he is badly mistaken. Yes, back in March and April, we were not doing very many tests, and a large share of infections went undetected. I doubt that this has been true in recent weeks. I bet that the number of undetected cases in the last two months is less than double the total number of detected cases over that period. If so, then his claim that we will have herd immunity by April is probably unsound.

Number One Pick, who I think is a more credible observer, wrote,

Prediction: 75% chance that there will be a new wave peaking in March or April, with a peak at least half again as high as the preceding trough.
[EDIT: some people link new studies saying the B117 strain is less virulent than previously believed, and the US has been getting much better at vaccination since I checked, probably my prediction above is too high and we should worry less about this]

So it is hard to say what his current prediction is. I am guessing that he would put a low probability on herd immunity by April.

UPDATE: The 7-day average death rate has really plummeted over the past week. So maybe I should be more optimistic.

The masculine/feminine dimension in culture

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The late Geert Hofstede wrote,

Masculinity describes a society in which emotional gender roles are clearly distinct – men are supposed to be assertive, tough and focused on material success, women are supposed to be more modest, tender and concerned with the quality of life – versus Femininity, a society in which emotional gender roles overlap – both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life . . .The Masculinity/Femininity dimension is the only one of the four in which gender affects the scores: women on average score higher in Femininity than men

Lotta Stern pointed me to Hofstede’s work as relevant to my thoughts on emasculated culture. His work seems fascinating, and all of his cultural dimensions appear to be relevant to my distinction between the older culture and the newer culture. Here is his Wikipedia entry. Here is his web site, now maintained by Hofstede the younger.

Stern herself has written,

These differences between men and women in competitiveness, personality, IQ, and preferences are common findings in some parts of sociology and in neighboring fields. All of them are reported as stable results over time and contexts. Yet in sociological studies of labor market differences between men and women, they are ignored.

She points out that one can have a libertarian feminism that supports equal rights and opportunity for women without embracing the view that all inequalities in labor market outcomes between men and women ought to be eliminated.

Number One Pick on polarization

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Scott Alexander writes,

So although polarization is definitely rising in the US, it’s stable in other countries, and falling in still others. There is no consistent trend toward more polarization in the First World! As Klein points out, this is a strong challenge to any story relying on digital media or social media or the changing media landscape.

But also: the average country at the average time is about as polarized as the US is now. This confirms Klein’s thesis that the US isn’t in a historically unprecedented state of hyperpolarization. It’s coming out of a period of unusually low polarization, into a more normal era.

He is reviewing Ezra Klein’s book on polarization. I would have expected Number One Pick to start the way he usually does, by posing a precise question, looking at survey articles and meta-analyses to get the perspective of the highest status academics, and then digging into some of the literature to see how well supported that perspective is. But instead, Scott mostly discusses Klein’s speculations and offers counter-speculations.

A precise question, which he comes close to asking, would be: will polarization, as measured by voting patterns in Congress and opinion polls in the general public, continue to increase, or is it likely to level off?

I am not going to try to locate an academic article, but I remember Jonathan Rauch wrote a useful essay.

We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

. . .In 2017, Pew’s polling found that blacks’ political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites’ since 1994, or women’s from men’s, or college graduates’ from non-college graduates’. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans’ political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

I think that Rauch would answer my question by saying that he is somewhat hopeful that polarization will level off or decline, because there are many people who see our current polarization as a problem and are making attempts to alleviate it.

Overall, I would score this game as Rauch first, Alexander second, Klein third. Alexander usually plays better, so I am not suggesting that you draft Rauch ahead of him, but you should consider these results when you get ready for the FITs draft.

Claire Lehmann vs. me

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She sent out an email:

Facebook has blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news content on their platform. The mass-blocking is in response to new media laws proposed by the Australian Government which would mean that digital giants such as Facebook are required to pay for news content.

in resistance to the proposed laws, Facebook has now blocked Australian news sites, and Quillette has been included in the wide net that has been cast. Our Facebook page has been wiped and our links are blocked on the platform. If you would like to share a Quillette article on Facebook you will be unable to, even if you live outside of Australia.

I replied:

1.  I consider Quillette the best of online magazines, and I link to its content often on my blog. 

2.  I see the Australia-Facebook imbroglio as a reason for hope.  If they can ban content from Australian news sites, then they might someday ban content from all news sites.  Then I could go back to using Facebook.

Academic corruption 3: affirmative action

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Taking the pool of high school graduates as given, it is very hard to give African-Americans the comfort of being fully qualified for admission to a selective college as part of a large cohort of qualified African-American students. They can either be part of a small cohort or part of a large cohort that includes less-qualified students.

Suppose that you are an administrator at a selective college, and that if you admit students based on their apparent qualifications to succeed at your school, African-Americans will be under-represented. If you want to talk candidly to the qualified black applicants, which speech would you rather give?

(a) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that on our campus the proportion of black students is smaller than that proportion in the general population. That is because we compete with other schools for qualified students, and other schools are willing to lower their standards for African-Americans while we are not. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about being one of the relatively few black students here. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.

(b) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that in order to meet our diversity goals we have admitted some other African-American students whose backgrounds are not as strong. As a result, faculty and other students may look at your skin color and presume that you are not as qualified as other students. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about having to fight this presumption. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.

College administrators being what they are, they would never give either speech. But if it were me, I would much rather give speech (a). I think that (a) has a better chance of producing better race relations and maintaining the school’s pride in its intellectual standards.

My preferred policy is not going to be good at finding the “diamond in the rough,” meaning the apparently less qualified student who can be successful at my college. And the rest of society may not like the fact that I am not seeking out the diamond in the rough within the black community. But my view is that college is not the place to try to fix racial inequalities. The attempt to fix these inequalities has to take place much earlier in young people’s lives, so that more black students graduate high school with strong educational backgrounds.

Affirmative action in higher education is supposed to a free lunch. You can reduce social inequality and improve race relations without corrupting our standards. My guess is that you corrupt your standards without reducing social inequality, and you make race relations worse. If I am correct, then the unintended consequences of affirmative action have been severely adverse.