Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Democrats + Big Business = ?

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Peter Zeihan writes,

eight years of Obamaesque inaction, four years of Trumpian irregularity, and a never-ending parade of preening, feckless wankers in Congress has prompted American businesses to take a far more active role in topics we all until recently thought of as the exclusive province of government. Civic planning. The environment. Immigration. Education. Income inequality. Racial inequality. Boardrooms across all sectors now regularly bear witness to discussions of all. The social chasm between business and the Democrats isn’t nearly as wide as it once was.

He describes a scenario in which the business community aligns with the Democrats. I would say that such an alliance would reduce the probability that the U.S. goes down the path of Lenin’s Russia, but it will strongly increase the probability that the U.S. goes down the path of Mussolini’s Italy.

A simple theory of elasticity assumptions

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Do you right now favor both a lot of stimulus and a big minimum wage hike? What are your assumptions about elasticities?

Start from a policy preference to subsidize demand and restrict supply. You want to say that subsidizing demand will increase output and that restricting supply will not decrease output. Your elasticity assumptions have to be consistent with those policy preferences, not with one another.

Ideology as identity

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Michael Huemer writes,

do you basically have the personality traits that people with your political orientation usually have? If so, you’ve probably done the awful thing that I’ve been complaining about. On the other hand, if not, then you might be among the few objective people.

He suggests that people select an ideology based on personality traits and a desire to affiliate, rather than on an objective basis. I put much more emphasis on the affiliation factor. I know plenty of people with conservative personality traits who are very comfortable reciting progressive talking points.

The Trump Presidency

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In a classic sports photo from the 1960s, Cassius Clay (soon to change his name to Muhammad Ali) stands over his defeated opponent, Sonny Liston. Clay still has his fist cocked menacingly, and his eyes glare down with contempt. The referee had to shove Clay to his corner in order to be able to begin to count Liston out.

I see this as a metaphor for the contest between Donald Trump and the deep state, with Mr. Trump the one who is prostrate on the canvas. Maybe you think that Trump deserved this fate (some boxing aficionados felt that way about Sonny Liston). I am sad for him.

If Mr. Trump was less than honorable in refusing to acknowledge defeat, his opponents are less than satisfied with mere electoral victory. The current impeachment is reminiscent of the beheading of Oliver Cromwell, which took place two years after his death.

The social media bans remind me of the lobotomy Nurse Ratched orders for Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

If you are having a hard time figuring out whether I am pro-Trump or anti-Trump, that is not deliberate obfuscation on my part. I am on of one of the few people in the world who feels ambivalently about him. I am inclined to be more up on him when is down, and vice-versa.

You may recall that I wrote in Paul Ryan’s name on my 2016 ballot. I prefer the Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse types, even though they lack charisma.

While Mr. Trump’s temperament in office was a constant source of irritation for many people, I only was deeply disturbed twice, and in both instances Mr. Trump had a hard time recognizing that a supporter of his could be obnoxious.

Once was during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. A statesman would have attended a Black church near Charlottesville in order to clearly distance himself from the white racists.

The second time was the aftermath of the 2020 election. My first words were “Biden won. Get over it, people.” A statesman would have conceded and then called for a bipartisan commission to recommend procedures to ensure in the future that we have orderly elections with prompt, reliable results.

When I look at the foreign policy establishment, the public health establishment, and the economic policy establishment, I wish that Mr. Trump could have done more to overcome them. As I have said before, I fault Mr. Trump for being unable to find and keep the sort of personnel who might have helped him do that. I would have preferred to see the deep state with its back on the canvas.

Mr. Trump’s legacy includes upwards of 20 million voters who believe that the 2020 election was stolen. That belief is a dangerous tumor in the body politic. It reminds me of the belief of Germans that they did not really lose the first World War. It reminds me of the belief that Michael Brown and George Floyd died because of their race. Bad things happen when leaders use cancerous lies as springboards.

The power elite?

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David Samuels writes,

the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.

He goes on to have a fascinating back-and-forth with Angelo Codevilla, with a lot of discussion of the American intelligence community.

From the Tablet, which is competing with Quillette for my vote for favorite magazine.

MLK Day

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If you want to feel depressed, read this.

An elementary school in Cupertino, California—a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million—recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

California wants ethnic studies to be a required case for every public school student. The curriculum for this course is being designed by adherents of Critical Race Theory (is there anyone under 40 in the field of education who is not an adherent of CRT?). Jews objected to the way that Jews are depicted in the curriculum. Some cosmetic changes are being made, but CRT remains embedded in the curriculum and, more importantly, in the minds of the teachers who will be delivering it.

If you want to feel better, I recommend watching Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.

A proposal for tech regulation

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Michael Lind writes,

Define online opinion and video platforms as regular publishers, subject to traditional publishing regulations that seek to deter dissemination of libels, profanity, obscenity, intellectual property theft and so on. And define all the other big tech firms either as common carriers or public accommodations that are clothed in a public interest.

It sounds like an interesting idea, but it needs to be spelled out. I am not sure that I really understand what Lind means. And I am not sure that I would agree with him if I did.

I interpret Lind as saying that Amazon Web Services and Apple are common carriers, so that they cannot exclude Parler. But Parler is a regular publisher, so it is subject to all of the laws that apply to magazines.

I first learned about the Internet in terms of Ed Krol’s “pony express” metaphor. You put your content into an envelope, and the Internet delivers it to the recipient the way that the Pony Express used to deliver mail. In this metaphor, all of the responsibility for the content is on the sender, and all of the responsibility for what gets done with the content is on the recipient. The Pony Express riders who are in the middle are not responsible. That means that the companies that manufacture the routers are not responsible. The Internet backbone providers are not responsible. The Internet access providers are not responsible. They are all common carriers, if I understand Lind’s use of that term. Common carriers can plausibly deny responsibility for what the user sees.

Suppose we went with Lind’s system as I interpret it. If I were running YouTube, I would want to classify it as a common carrier, so that it is not allowed to exclude any content. I would push the responsibility for complying with publishing laws out to those who post content on YouTube. But that means I would have to stop creating “feeds” that offer suggestions of what to watch. The job of creating feeds is a publishing job, and YouTube would have to outsource that if it wants to avoid the burdens of being a publisher.

But what about, say, Gmail? Does the spam filter make Gmail a publisher?

Martin Gurri watch

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1. He points me to Andrey Mir.

To those lucky few, the commodification of Trump appeared to be a game-changer. Historically, there have been no such political events quite so beneficial to the media, except for revolutions and wars. The value of this occurrence is particularly poignant because it is taking place amid the closing scenes of the media industry tragedy.

Difficult to excerpt. Read the whole thing.

2. Michael Lind writes,

The leaders of both parties have weaponized anarchic mobs against their rivals—the Democrats, by tacitly encouraging and bailing out foundation-funded NGO staffers with secret identities and superhero-style Antifa outfits during the tolerated anti-Trump riots of Summer 2020, and now the squalid, defeated demagogue Donald Trump, unleashing his own costumed followers on the U.S. Capitol itself.

Many people referred to the U.S. Capitol riot as a Martin Gurri moment.

In terms of betting about how much coverage Mr. Trump receives a year from now, I am taking the “over.” The NYT and the WaPo have thrived in the market for Trump-phobia, and neither they nor their readers will be able to put that behind them.

Another random prediction: the most concrete result of the demoralizing end of the Trump Presidency will be the restoration of the SALT deduction.

The vaccine, the market, and government

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John Cochrane writes,

In a free market, vaccines would be sold to the highest bidder. The government could buy too, but you wouldn’t be forbidden from buying them yourself, and companies and schools would not be forbidden from buying them for their employees. Businesses would likely pay top dollar to vaccinate crucial employees who are off the job due to the pandemic. And only businesses know just which employees are crucial to the economy, and which can wait.

Government rationing gives power to public officials. It does not necessarily lead to superior moral outcomes. So far, the main accomplishment has been to slow the rollout.

Experiments vs. tampering

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Alex Tabarrok wrote,

the experiment forces people to reckon with the idea that even experts don’t know what the right thing to do is and that confession of ignorance bothers people.

Recently linked by Tyler Cowen.

W. Edwards Deming distinguished experiments from tampering. With an experiment, you change a process and explicitly compare the results to a baseline. With tampering, you change the process without rigorously examining the results.

For example, in education, most curriculum changes involve tampering. Schools rarely test to see whether a curriculum works.

I once sat next to a high official in the Department of Education, and he was horrified when I suggested experiments in education. “Would you want your child to be part of an experiment?” he asked, incredulously. “The schools do it all the time,” I responded. “They just don’t bother checking to see whether their experiments work.”

Another example is the pandemic. When I complain about the unwillingness of health officials to conduct experiments to see what factors affect the spread of the disease, few people agree with me (readers of this blog are an exception). They quickly invoke Joseph Mengele.

But nobody invokes Joseph Mengele when it comes to lockdowns, which are simply experiments whose results are not rigorously evaluated by those who conduct them.

It is very hard to make a moral case against experiments that is not also an even stronger case against tampering. But we have a much higher tolerance for tampering than for experiments. I am inclined to fall back on Alex’s answer. Saying that you are conducting experiment implies that you are uncertain. Tampering implies that you know what you are doing. Sadly, people have a higher tolerance for tampering.