Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

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Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We’d run to the schoolyard, here’s what we did
Pick out the captains, choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self-esteem
Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. . .

“Right Field,” Willy Welch (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary)

I enjoyed this podcast with Joyce Benenson, about her book, Warriers and Worriers. She and Roy Baumeister are the rare social scientists who see that (a) men and women differ on average in their behavioral tendencies and (b) male tendencies are not all bad.

Her book is grounded in observations of young boys and girls. My memories of my boyhood align perfectly with her picture of boys, and with the song lyrics above. We played team sports without supervision, put a lot of effort into setting rules, and competed to demonstrate skill. When we weren’t playing sports, we imagined ourselves fighting the “bad guys,” either in the Old West or in World War II.

One of her ideas is that men have a social strategy that works well in war: organize unrelated males, fight other groups overtly according to rules, then reconcile after battle. Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.

This leads me to speculate on the consequences of adding a lot of women to formerly male domains. Over the past several decades, a number of important institutions that were formerly almost exclusively male now include many women: academia, journalism, politics, and management positions in organizations. These institutions increasingly are discarding the values that sustained them when the female presence was less.

1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.

2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.

3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.

4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.

5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.

6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.

7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.

I think that in each case, the older culture was consistent with male tendencies (what Benenson calls “warriors”); the newer culture is consistent with female tendencies (what she calls “worriers”). Keep in mind that men can have worrier personalities and women can have warrior personalities, but those are not the norm.

Overall, we have made institutions harder for warriors to navigate. College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.

Why did opening up opportunities for women lead to this outcome? One can imagine other outcomes. Perhaps women would have assimilated into the male culture, adopting some male tendencies in the process. Perhaps women and men would have retained their different behavioral tendencies but agreed to accommodate one another.

Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order. Some women scorn male values as tools of oppression, and most men would rather accommodate this view than voice disagreement.

I note that the readership of this blog appears to be overwhelmingly to be male, at least based on those who leave comments. Note also that this is the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.

Academic corruption 1: government money

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In 1975, I heard second-hand about an informal session where Robert Solow spoke with a group of MIT economics grad students. One of the students, apparently feeling guilty about his fellowship from the National Science Foundation, asked, “Why does society pay me to go to graduate school in economics, given all the benefit that I get from having the degree?” Solow, known for his caustic wit, shot back, “Society doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.”

Government money has played a role in the decline of quality in academia. Programs like the GI bill and student loan programs have swelled the ranks of college students. Programs like the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have dumped huge amounts of money into higher education. The net effect has been harmful.

The conventional wisdom, which comes from college professors, is the exact opposite. They argue that we should be putting more young people through higher education than we do. That funding for research produces great positive externalities and we should do more of it. The same with funding for the humanities.

Average returns to higher education have gone up. But some of this has been due to government-engineered regulations that require firms to be bureaucratized for compliance purposes. Both the regulators and the corporate bureaucrats have college degrees.

More important, at the margin, we are sending people to college who do not belong there. This is demonstrated by low graduation rates as well as a significant number of graduates working at jobs that do not use anything they learned in college. Credentialism is out of control. Somebody could learn to be a physical therapist as an apprentice, but instead many states require a Ph.D for new PT’s.

The expansion of higher education increased the demand for professors. In the 1960s and 1970s, graduate schools cranked up the volume of post-graduate degrees. The results were excessive, in two senses. A lot of mediocre intellects acquired advanced degrees. And a lot of people with advanced degrees could not obtain full-time academic positions.

Expansion also lowered the quality of classrooms at all but the very top colleges. Teaching is emotionally rewarding only if your students want to learn. But most of the students that we send to college these days are not highly-motivated learners. Below the top tier in higher education (the best 150 colleges, plus or minus), a typical class has poorly motivated students in a class taught by disappointed professors.

IfW. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola are correct that the U.S. already had the leading research universities before World War II, then the postwar government programs were not necessarily responsible for the growth of research. Instead, it is plausible that government money bureaucratized and homogenized research. Of course, now that government provides so much of the funding for research, professors are loathe to bite the hand that feeds them. I am sure that for every published paper questioning the value of government-funded research you can find at least a thousand lauding its achievements. But we cannot go back and run a controlled experiment to see where research would have headed in the absence of government funding. We can be sure that there would have been less junk research. But the question is what would have happened to quality research. I would speculate that it would not have been any less.

Number One Pick talks about complexity

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Scott Alexander writes,

Recessions are fractally complicated. Not only do they have different causes, but the causes have different causes, and so on to infinity.

Most of the post is about psychiatric conditions, which he argues are even more complex.

Speaking of Scott Alexander, yesterday, the NYT published a piece on him that is totally misleading. If you read it at all, read it here, not at the NYT web site. Don’t feed trolls. Scott blogged a response, but for me the article was self-evidently dreck.

I have to say that Scott is not the first person about whom the NYT published a lie to make the individual sound racist. I wrote to the NYT asking for a correction, but none was forthcoming. One of these days, somebody actually will sue them.

Smug and stupid

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The Biden Administration wants to replace the three major consumer credit reporting agencies with a public agency.

The proposal is still just that—a proposal—and it faces fierce opposition from industry lobbyists. The Consumer Data Industry Association, for example, a trade group that represents the credit bureaus, wrote in a September article that a new credit bureau was “a dangerous idea” and that “a government-owned credit bureau would create a volatile and unstable lending environment, riddled with inconsistent policies, swing back and forth from election to election, leaving consumers with higher prices and limited options for credit” among other criticisms.

That is the least of it. Here are just a few other objections.

1. The credit reporting process works really well. It would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars to set up a government-run system, and then it might be faulty (Obamacare web site rollout? vaccination appointment systems?).

2. The objections of the “consumer credit justice advocates” have more to do with how the credit data is evaluated than with how the data is reported and stored. To get the change that they want, they could have the government develop its own credit scoring system, which would be less risky and much less costly.

3. In fact, those advocates are wrong about credit scoring. Yes, credit scores tend to be lower for disadvantaged populations. But a low credit score is just as predictive of default for a black person as for a white person. You cannot make someone with a low credit score a good risk any more than you can make a person who is under 6 feet tall an NBA superstar.

4. The “consumer credit justice advocates,” if they get there way, will set up more disadvantaged people to fail by taking on too much debt. Then when these loans go bad, these same advocates will blame the banks for “predatory lending.”

5. It’s a darn shame that the money going to these advocacy groups and that is going to pay lobbyists to fend them off could not instead be given to charities that really do help people in need.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

A summary of conservatism

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From Bo Winegard.

the timeless truths and principles at the heart of conservative ideology: (1) Humans are flawed creatures; (2) Reason is powerful but limited and prone to error; (3) Utopian thinking is dangerous, especially when combined with ideologies that promote concentrated political power; (4) Humans should respect tradition and custom; and (5) Intuition is an important guide to social policy.

I did not find his discussion of #5 compelling. But the first four are comparable to the summary of conservatism that you will find in Jerry Muller’s anthology. Libertarians naturally reject (4). When they reject (1) and (2), they also gravitate toward utopianism.

Razib Khan’s book list

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Razib Khan, a likely high-draft-choice FIT, offers a list of 15 books that influenced him. I have read five of them–which is much more than one would expect–but oddly enough, only two of them really stuck with me: Albion’s Seed and The Secret of Our Success. Those books also “left deep grooves in my mind,” to use Razib’s phrase.

FITs stars among the authors listed include Henrich, Steven Pinker (although I go with The Blank Slate), Jerry Muller (The Mind and the Market is so far my favorite of his), and Matt Ridley.

Does Jared Diamond belong on the draft board? Guns, Germs, and Steel is worth reading. But I think the market over-values him, so I am inclined to stay away from him in a FITs contest.

Thomas Sowell is nowhere on Razib’s list. For me, The Vision of the Anointed is the most influential of Sowell’s books, but if you pick another of Sowell’s works I won’t hold it against you. He’ll definitely go in the first round. Check out this recent documentary, narrated by Jason Riley.

Achievements vs. Status

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A commenter pointed to Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

The first group wants to achieve something. The second group is concerned with status, as individuals within the organization and to some degree with the status of the organization itself.

As organizations age, the tendency is for the achievers to lose power and for the status-seekers to gain power.

Along similar lines, Number One Pick writes,

When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

Cowen, Schumpeter, and employment fluctuations

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I take a finance perspective on the output gap. If you are at what others call “full employment,” you can indeed do better, or at least try to do better. Start 300 companies that aim to be the next Stripe, Facebook, SpaceX — whatever. In the short run, you will create jobs, people at jobs will work harder, and so on. Employment, output, and also tax revenue will rise. You can pat yourself on the back and say you were not at full employment.

The thing is, you have accepted a higher level of risk. Many of those companies are likely to fail. And since they were started by humans consuming a broadly common set of cultural and media inputs, those risks will to some extent be correlated as well. Of course it might pay off big time as well.

Schumpeter’s phrase “creative destruction” makes it sound as though those processes are synchronous. A new business is created and destroys an old one.

But the creation cycle and the destruction cycle are out of phase. A new business created today will not destroy an old business for several years. And an old business dying today will release resources that may not be redeployed in new businesses for several years.

We can be in a phase in which new businesses are being created, old businesses are hanging around, and lots of resources are being used Think of the Internet boom of the late 1990s. And Tyler is right that there was a lot of risk-taking going on at that time. Or we can be in a phase, like 2008-2014, where old businesses have died but not enough new businesses are being created. And there was plenty of risk aversion, some of it dictated by financial regulators.

RFC: FITS scoring categories

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I propose four scoring categories for Fantasy Intellectual Teams: bets (B); pairings (P); wins (W); and memes (M)

B: Bets is a measure of “thinks carefully.” Your team member doesn’t have to win a bet to have thought carefully. Merely “thinking in bets” shows that one has considered the possibility that you could be wrong. A point is scored when one of your players states a prediction or an opinion in probabilistic terms.

P: A pairing shows that a player is valued as a teammate.

A pairing is when one of your players has a public dialog with another player, typically in the form of essays or a joint podcast. Twitter does not count. A record of the discussion must be accessible on the Web. Past pairings do not count. Only pairings that take place during the season.

Assume Annie Duke and Tyler Cowen are both on teams (not necessarily the same team). Then if she appears on a Conversation with Tyler, each one gets a point. Or if Russ Roberts and Mike Munger are both on teams and Russ hosts Mike on econtalk, points get scored.

In fact, Russ tells me that of the candidates that appear on the cheat sheet, over 70 have appeared on econtalk! So he would be a good one to draft to pick up points in the P category. Of course, as with all categories, only pairings that take place during the season count. Past pairings don’t.

Suppose Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin are both on teams. Then if they participate in a dialog on Pairagraph points get awarded.

But a given pairing can score only one point per season. Points would be awarded once for Glenn Loury in conversation with John McWhorter. A subsequent discussion between the two does not count.

W: A win shows that a team member does well in debate. You score a win when one of your players debunks an idea of a prominent intellectual (not necessarily on anyone’s team). I will be the final arbiter of what is “prominent” (I will be generous there) and what constitutes debunking (I will be strict there–no “one-chart” or “one-tweet” debunkings. Debunking must include steel-manning.)

M: Memes measure the ability to develop creative ideas that stick. You score a meme point when a catch-phrase or acronym of one of your players gets used in an essay or book that appears during the season. The meme itself might be from years ago. So if an essay (it does not have to be written by a fantasy intellectual) uses WEIRD, Joseph Henrich’s owner scores a point. If an essay uses “black swan,” Nassim Taleb’s owner scores a point. If “state-capacity libertarianism” gets used in 4 different essays, then Tyler’s owner gets 4 points. But if it gets used 4 times in the same essay, that is only worth one point.

Scoring mechanics: The season will run from April 1 through September 30. During the season, when you think one of the intellectuals on your team scores a point in a category, email me and I will decide whether to award the point. So plan to pay attention to your team during the season. You don’t want to miss when they score points!

Note that each category has an equal weight. The way scoring works in fantasy is that your team is ranked in each category relative to other teams. In a ten-owner league, suppose your team finishes first in B, ninth in P, fifth in W, and third in M. The points you get are 10, 2, 6, and 8, respectively, for a total of 26. So you cannot win just by piling up B’s and ignoring the other categories. For those of you who are fans of the Arrow impossibility theorem, this scoring technique totally violates his “Independence from irrelevant alternatives” postulate.

****You do not get to unilaterally select your team. You participate in a draft in which you and other owners take turns picking players. If a player you want gets picked by another owner before it’s your turn, you will have to pick someone else.****

I will schedule a draft before the season starts. You can select a player who is not on the cheat sheet. I will explain the mechanics of the draft in a different post.

At this point, questions and comments about the scoring categories are welcome. But don’t suggest more complicated scoring approaches. Since the burden is on me to oversee the scoring, I am going to keep it simple.

Is it time to serve the nuts?*

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Jonah Goldberg writes,

as a matter of rank political analysis, most Americans are members of the stupid party as [Irving] Kristol described. These people aren’t dumb, and they’re not necessarily Republicans, but they do have strong antibodies against radical excess or excess radicalism.

He argues that Republicans who try to appease hard-core Trump supporters are doing damage to the party and to the country.

Here is the counter-argument: Donald Trump signed an executive order banning government training using Critical Race Theory. Joe Biden reversed that.

The counter-argument amounts to, “The Democrats are serving their nuts. So if we have to serve our nuts to beat them, so be it.”

I don’t find the counter-argument persuasive. I think that we will soon see in the voting public a longing for order. The editors of Quillette write,

there is likely a solid majority of Americans who know that Biden won the election, that biology is real, that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, that COVID-19 isn’t just a seasonal flu, that skin colour doesn’t indicate your moral worth, and that abolishing the police is a bad idea. If Biden can empower that silent majority without gratuitously denigrating the 74 million Americans who voted against him, perhaps he can get America to start coming together

I think that our present period reminds me of the late 1970s, when people longed for order. They were suffering from rampaging inflation, rising crime, high divorce rates, and humiliating defeats overseas in Vietnam and Iran. The relative success of the Reagan Presidency in taming inflation, and in the now-forgotten invasion of Grenada, helped to satisfy that demand. Conservatism and the Republican Party gained in status.

If President Biden restores a sense of order, his party will rise in status. But there are chaotic forces in his party, and his first round of executive orders mostly catered to them. Crime is rising. The stock market is looking like a consensual hallucination. Inflation is looming.

Above all, the pandemic war is still killing people and the economy. If President Biden doesn’t replace the peacetime bureaucrats with a fighting general soon, no amount of fawning PR from the WaPo is going to save him.
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*The title to this post is a line from one of the original Thin Man movies. It is spoken by Nora Charles, played by Myrna Loy as hostess of a dinner party arranged by her husband Nick. But although she is referring to food, the movie audience laughs because of how aptly it refers to their guests.