I discuss them with Sebastian Stodolak. He asked interesting questions, and I sometimes gave interesting answers. A 20-minute podcast.
Author Archives: Arnold Kling
Liberalism, conservatism, and change
Edmund Fawcett’s books on the history of liberalism and conservatism take as their fundamental difference their stances toward social change. In Fawcett’s essay, he wrote,
Liberalism responded to a novel condition of societies, energised by capitalism and shaken by revolution in which populations were growing fast and where, for better or worse, material and ethical change was now ceaseless.
One might say that the liberal disposition is to embrace and manage social change. The conservative disposition is to resist and reverse social change.
In the essay on liberalism, Fawcett wrote,
Four ideas in particular seem to have guided liberals through their history.
The first is that the clash of interests and beliefs in society is inescapable. Social harmony, the nostalgic dream of conservatives and the brotherly hope of socialists, is neither achievable nor desirable – because harmony stifles creativity and blocks initiative. Meanwhile conflict, if tamed and put to use as competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange.
Secondly, human power is not to be trusted. . .
Progress for the better is both possible and desirable. . .
Finally, the framework of public life has to show everyone civic respect, whatever they believe and whoever they are.
Fawcett argues that neither conservatives nor radicals can accept these ideas. Conservatives believe that traditional societies were harmonious in the past. Radicals believe that harmony can be achieved in the future through socialism.
Regarding power, Fawcett says that conservatives urge that we submit to authority, and radicals believe that they must take power, at least until the revolution has created the new utopia.
Conservatives have doubts about progress, and radicals see progress as something that they must direct.
Conservatives have resisted giving equal rights to everyone, and radicals believe that some people’s rights (the privileged) must be reduced in order to give others the rights they deserve.
A few more thoughts:
1. Fawcett’s definition of liberalism is capacious. It can include economic liberty. But it also includes “taming” the market, which seems to be the point of his essay.
2. The difference between merely embracing change and managing change is a major divide between libertarians and others. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress embraces change. The idea of managing change is implicit in the Obama slogan “hope and change,” in Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, and in the Communist idea of a “vanguard” leading the proletariat.
3. In his latest book, on conservatism, Fawcett takes the view that conservatism is stupid and backward. Conservatives are always saying that change will have terrible results, and yet things work out. Conservatives opposed integration and civil rights, and those worked out. They opposed feminism, and that worked out. Etc.
A conservative would say that liberals’ memory is selective. They have forgotten that they once embraced eugenics as a way to achieve social progress. They have forgotten that Prohibition backfired. They have forgotten that they once said of the Soviet Union “I have seen the future and it works.” They have forgotten their support for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They have overlooked the decline of living standards and freedom in Cuba.
Looking ahead, it may be too early to tell about the effects of some changes. The warnings about the adverse effects of affirmative action seem to me to be accurate, but the left wants to double down on it. Same with the decline of religion, the traditional family, and child-bearing. We have not seen the dire consequences of deficit spending yet, but that does not mean that we will escape dire consequences.
Perhaps if you read his books, you will find that when Fawcett gets into specific intellectual histories he is even-handed. But in his overall characterization of the two sides he is not. Instead, he comes very close to defining any positive feature of society as liberal and any bad idea for social arrangements as conservative.
Against the null hypothesis, more research
The revolution is well financed
the heartfelt dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
I think it’s sad that rich people have nothing better to do with their money than to throw it at non-profits, especially political non-profits.
Depopulation and EGOs
In my post on depopulation, many commenters pointed out that the time horizon for significant depopulation is so long that it makes little sense to be concerned about it. Compared to the doubling time of population fifty years ago, the halving time of population going forward is trivial. Those critiques are valid.
But in the near term, we have what Eric Weinstein calls Embedded Growth Obligations. University faculties, law firms, public schools, and other institutions require an ever-expanding consumer base or else they will have to stop hiring new employees and even lay off existing employees. Our pay-as-you-go entitlement programs threaten to collapse as the ratio of beneficiaries to contributors falls. How does Social Security work if we extend life and have fewer workers? Many state and local government pension systems are in at least as much trouble.
Also in the short term, we may see a dramatic shift in the composition of world population. Fewer East Asians and Europeans. More sub-Saharan Africans. That also will pose some adjustment challenges.
Why I oppose populism
In his work of intellectual history, Liberalism, Edmund Fawcett wrote,
To the liberal mind, nobody claiming to intuit the popular will or to speak for “the people” was to be trusted.
You can’t trust the people to trust themselves.
People who trust themselves will
1. Prefer to make their own decisions, rather than have “officials” make decisions for them.
2. Prefer not to make decisions for others.
I see populism as failing to embrace (2). But if you do not embrace (2), then you cannot live by (1). The difference between populists and elitists is about who gets to make decisions for others. For progressive elitists, it is experts, by which they mean people who think like themselves. For populists, it is popular will, by which they mean people who think like themselves.
Genuine expertise is great. We should all consider the advice of experts in making individual decisions and in making voluntary decisions about how to coordinate and collaborate with one another.
But we should not allow experts to sit on a throne and rule over us. This is where libertarianism seems to align with populism. Unfortunately, populists only remove the expert while keeping the throne. On that throne, they would place the “will of the people,” often represented by a demagogue.
I think that many of us make the mistake of thinking that “the people actually agree with me.” This comes from a habit of seeing democracy not as a check against government excess but as an expression of “the will of the people.” We go so far to flatter and venerate “the will of the people” that the notion that one’s ideas are not shared by the majority creates cognitive dissonance: if the majority is right, and I disagree with the majority, then does that mean that I am wrong?
It is tempting for you to resolve this cognitive dissonance by insisting that most people really share your views–it’s just that the system is corrupt. If we just bang on democracy’s door hard enough, our views will make it inside.
For libertarians, this means believing that deep down everybody else is libertarian. But they are not. “Keep your hands off my Medicare” or “shut down hate speech” are more typical attitudes. Many people are, either explicitly, or implicitly, FOOLs (Fear Of Others’ Liberty).
“The people” are not truly libertarian. Perhaps by your definition of the term, I am not truly libertarian either. For me, libertarianism entails resistance to rule by experts. But it also entails resistance to the “will of the people.” You cannot trust the people to trust themselves.
Digital capital and big tech
Erik Brynjolfsson and others write,
Our findings suggest that the higher values the financial markets have assigned to firms with large digital investments in recent years reflect greater digital capital quantities, rather than simply higher prices for existing assets. In other words, they reflect genuine improvements to firms’ productive capacity. In fact, we find that digital capital, if included as a separate factor in firm-level production functions, predicts differences in output and productivity among firms.
. . .One interpretation of our findings is that translating organizational innovations into productive capital requires significant investment in organizational re-engineering and skill development. Therefore, even if firms have the appropriate absorptive capacity, knowledge of how to construct digital assets will not automatically generate productive digital capital any more than access to the blueprints of a competitor’s plant will directly lead to productive capacity.
If I am translating the jargon correctly, this says that the big tech winners got that way by being better at managing software engineers. That is a hypothesis I have raised from time to time here.
Intervening for racial equality
I must address myself to the underlying fundamental developmental deficits that impede the ability of African Americans to compete. If, instead of doing so, I use preferential selection criteria to cover for the consequences of the historical failure to develop African American performance fully, then I will have fake equality. I will have headcount equality. I will have my-ass-is-covered-if-I’m-the-institution equality. But I won’t have real equality.
I recommend the entire interview.
Meanwhile, Lilah Burke reports,
In 2013, the University of Texas at Austin’s computer science department began using a machine-learning system called GRADE to help make decisions about who gets into its Ph.D. program — and who doesn’t. This year, the department abandoned it.
Before the announcement, which the department released in the form of a tweet reply, few had even heard of the program. Now, its critics — concerned about diversity, equity and fairness in admissions — say it should never have been used in the first place.
The article does not describe GRADE well enough for me to say whether or not it was a good system. For me, the key question is how well it predicts student performance in computer science.
I draw the analogy with credit scoring. If a credit scoring system correctly separates borrowers who are likely to repay loans from borrowers who are likely to default, and its predictions for black applicants are accurate, then it is not racially discriminatory, regardless of whether the proportion of good scores among blacks is the same as that among whites or not.
David Arnold and co-authors find that
Estimates from New York City show that a sophisticated machine learning algorithm discriminates against Black defendants, even though defendant race and ethnicity are not included in the training data. The algorithm recommends releasing white defendants before trial at an 8 percentage point (11 percent) higher rate than Black defendants with identical potential for pretrial misconduct, with this unwarranted disparity explaining 77 percent of the observed racial disparity in algorithmic recommendations. We find a similar level of algorithmic discrimination with regression-based recommendations, using a model inspired by a widely used pretrial risk assessment tool.
That does seem like a bad algorithm. On the face of it, the authors believe that they have a better model for predicting pretrial misconduct than that used by the city’s algorithm. The city should be using the authors’ model, not the algorithm that they actually chose.
I take Loury as saying that intervening for racial equality late in life, at the stage where you are filling positions in the work place or on a college campus, is wrong, especially if you are lowering standards in order to do so. Instead, you have to do the harder work of improving the human capital of the black population much earlier in their lives.
It seems to me that Loury’s warning about the harms of affirmative action is being swamped these days by a tsunami of racialist ideology. Consider the way that a major Jewish movement seeks to switch religions.
In order to work toward racial equality through anti-racism, we must become aware of the many facets of racial inequality created by racism in the world around us and learn how to choose to intervene. Join us as we explore:
– How race impacts our own and each others’ experiences of the world
– The choice as bystander to intervene or overlook racist behavior
– How to be an anti-racist upstander
There is more of this dreck at the link.
I foresee considerable damage coming from this. Institutions and professions where I want to see rigor and a culture of excellence are being degraded. Yascha Mounk, who doesn’t think of himself as a right-wing crank, recently wrote Why I’m Losing Trust in the Institutions.
Finally, this seems like as good a post as any to link to an essay from last June by John McWhorter on the statistical evidence concerning police killings.
Vaccine distribution and the Obamacare web site
Tyler Cowen writes about the fiasco that is vaccine distribution,
Virginia runs prisons, schools, maintains roads, has a Medicaid program, and various state-level functions, such as hiring staff for the governor, some of those in conjunction with other levels of government. Maybe those services are not productivity marvels, but they work OK — I’ve lived here for a long time. So why the differences?
It is important to distinguish baseline functions from project management. Baseline functions work reasonably well. Even the DMV has gotten better. But projects, like the Obamacare web site and the fight against the virus, don’t work the same way. In business, a project needs a strong project manager and a project executive who is powerful and involved. The project manager figures out how to solve every problem in getting the project done, and the project executive knocks over everyone who the project manager says is standing in the way.
The project executive should be the governor (it should be the President, but the only project on his mind is overturning the election result, at which he is flailing). The project manager in this case should be somebody with experience in solving a logistical crisis.
I would bet that Ralph Northam, Barack Obama, and many other elected officials have never learned the first thing about project management. They just expected people whose main concern is their baseline function to somehow “handle” vaccine distribution or developing a web site. When it comes to serving as executives, elected officials are mostly bush league. That is why vaccine distribution should have been left to the private sector, as horrifying that is to many people.
Virus update
The question in assessing universal tax rebates is, what about the vast majority of families who are still working, and whose incomes have not declined or whose pension or Social Security benefits have not been affected by Covid-19? For this group, the pandemic has reduced the ability to spend more than the ability to earn.
In other words, we should not be applying conventional macroeconomics right now. Conventional macro sees as all working the same GDP factory, which is producing below capacity because of insufficient demand. Conventional macro says that it does not matter how the government directs spending, because any spending will inject more “aggregate demand.”
Even a conventional macroeconomist like Larry Summers is able to see that this model does not fit the current situation. I happen to think that conventional macroeconomics needs a much broader reassessment.
2. We continue to argue about asymptomatic spreading.
The secondary attack rate for symptomatic index cases was 18.0% (95% CI 14.2%-22.1%), and the rate of asymptomatic and presymptomatic index cases was 0.7% (95% CI 0%-4.9%), “although there were few studies in the latter group.” The asymptomatic/presymptomatic secondary attack rate is not statistically different from zero
Just run a test, for crying out loud.
3. Megan McArdle writes (WaPo),
Looking back over the past nine months, it’s as if the public health community deliberately decided to alienate large groups of Americans, usually in the name of saving someone else.
The World Health Organization told us travel bans don’t work, apparently because they harm tourist economies; then we were told masks don’t work, apparently because experts worried that hoarding them would leave health-care workers without personal protective equipment; the public health community fell suddenly silent about the dangers of large gatherings during the George Floyd protests; a presentation to a government advisory committee actually described thousands of potential additional deaths as “minimal” compared with pursuing racial and economic equity; Anthony S. Fauci admitted he’d been lowballing his estimates of the point at which we’ll reach herd immunity.
The Orwellian public health community notwithstanding, my nominee for villain of the crisis is the FDA, for two reasons.
First, the FDA placed a very high priority on accuracy in deciding whether to approve tests for the virus. For some purposes, such as estimating the prevalence of the virus, accuracy is a good thing. But for controlling the spread of the virus, an accurate test that takes a week to provide results is worthless. The FDA should have prioritized “faster and cheaper” over “reliable.”
Second, the FDA did not use human challenge trials (give one group the vaccine and one group the placebo, and then expose them to the virus). Instead it gave one group the vaccine and one group the placebo, and then waiting until enough people naturally were exposed to the virus to show efficacy. We could have been starting to take the vaccine in June, but instead we had to wait until now.
4. Mr. Biden got into the virus forecasting business a few days ago, saying that the U.S. will have 400,000 deaths by the time he is sworn in as President. According to this site, we had 329,000 as of December 29. To get to 400,000 by inauguration day, we would need to average about 3000 deaths per day. On a 7-day average basis, the highest that it has been is 2680 on December 22. It has been edging down over the past week. But if you are trying to forecast the closest round number, then 400,000 is right.
He rightly criticized the slow process of distributing the vaccine. If it were rationed by price rather than by government authorities, my guess is that there would not be such a large supply of vaccine sitting around waiting for someone to administer it.
5. Miles Kimball joins those of us criticizing peacetime bureaucrats.
Highly accurate tests whose results take many days to arrive are next to useless. But the US government was very slow to approve tests of lower accuracy that could have made a big difference because they gave results within minutes.
Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. He says that the problem is perfectionism. I think it’s blame-avoidance.
If you do something and harm results (e.g., somebody gets a wrong test result), then you can be blamed. If you do nothing (i.e., don’t allow fast but less-accurate tests), then the harm that results is God’s Will. It’s the trolley problem.