Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Post-pandemic WFH

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1. Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis write,

Our survey evidence says that 22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before. We provide evidence on five mechanisms behind this persistent shift to working from home: diminished stigma, better-than-expected experiences working from home, investments in physical and human capital enabling working from home, reluctance to return to pre-pandemic activities, and innovation supporting working from home. We also examine some implications of a persistent shift in working arrangements: First, high-income workers, especially, will enjoy the perks of working from home. Second, we forecast that the postpandemic shift to working from home will lower worker spending in major city centers by 5 to 10 percent. Third, many workers report being more productive at home than on business premises, so post-pandemic work from home plans offer the potential to raise productivity as much as 2.4 percent.

I would not be optimistic regarding the last point. But I do think that this will really accentuate the class divide. The people who work from home will be able to engage more with their children. They will have more flexibility in general for dealing with everything from medical issues to laundry.

2. I talk with Richard Reinsch about macroeconomics in the age of the virus. I offer the PSST perspective.

on net 10 million people not working. That’s an entrepreneurial opportunity to find something useful for them to do. But that means you have to encourage entrepreneurship. And under the Obama administration, you had discouraging entrepreneurship because they kept piling on regulation. And one of the quiet things that the Trump administration has done is to loosen those regulations so that entrepreneurs could work more quickly. But the current situation is so extreme in terms of the reconfigurations that are needed, that you need just an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity, and it’s going to take a long time for entrepreneurs to figure out how to use these extra 10 million or so people.

Who needs the HEEs?

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A reader pointed me to this from Charles Murray.

I’ve written a thought experiment for ongoing work. What happens if everyone with IQs below 110 disappears? Civilization collapses. If everyone with IQs of 110+ disappears except some engineers? Some deterioration here and there, but civilization continues.

There is a lot of cultural knowledge stored in the minds of farmers, construction workers, and others who work with things. There is also some cultural knowledge that is stored in the minds of the highly-educated elites. Murray suggests, perhaps correctly, that the cultural knowledge of the HEEs is in some sense less valuable than that of those who work with things. Why do HEEs take such a large share of income? Some possibilities.

1. The marginal revolution, which solved the diamonds-water paradox, solves this one.

2. The HEEs control the allocation of resources. For example, in a recent stimulus proposal,

Under the GOP plan, businesses could receive a second PPP loan, and schools and colleges would be granted more than $100 billion in aid, while $31 billion would go toward vaccine development and distribution.

These “needy” educational institutions are still throwing lots of money at “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” One local school district paid Ibrahim X. Kendi $20,000 to give a talk. Another advertised for an “anti-racism” consultant to be paid by big bucks. And to my knowledge, the elite colleges have not let go of a single administrator.

If we had only a profit-seeking sector, a lot of HEEs might not have such high-paying jobs.

Re-litigating the Vietnam War

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I can’t believe I’m doing this.

The conservative claims that:

1. The Communist side was really evil.

2. And we beat them. Or we could have.

My comeback is: And then what?

Look at Afghanistan or Iraq.

Were the Taliban evil? Yes. Did we beat them? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

Was Saddam Hussein evil? Yes. Did we beat him? Yes. Did we bring the war to a successful conclusion? No.

To successfully conclude an overseas war, you need to be able to establish a government that can pacify the country. After World War II, we could do that in Japan. We could do that in Germany.

We could not do it in South Vietnam.

The people who were correct about Vietnam were the people who understood the difficulty of trying to establish a successful non-Communist government in South Vietnam. That stubborn feature of reality eluded conservative war hawks at the time. It eludes them today.

And please, don’t make me re-litigate the Diem regime. It had a stronger grip on Washington than on its own country.

How my thinking evolved–a few loose ends

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Related to yesterday’s long post.

1. As I think about it, I find it hard to see how I could have been anywhere but on the left when I was growing up. Conservatives in those days were wrong on race and wrong on how to fight Communism. If there is someone here who identified as conservative in 1964 and was in favor of racial integration and against the Vietnam War, I would love to hear about it. You were the only one.

Note that in those days, there were Republicans who were for Civil Rights, and the most stalwart segregationists were Southern Democrats. So for this purpose conservative does not equal Republican.

2. Some people asked what I think about using data in economics. I think that one should judge theories in social science by looking at as many different types of evidence as possible. But not “this one chart” or “this one significance test.” It is good to take a statistics class to learn the formal theory of inference, so that you know how to use data to make an argument. But then you have to unlearn formal statistics to some degree, so that you don’t end up deceiving yourself and others. There are many abuses of data, and the academic publication process does not do enough to incent better methods. Recall my recommendation to give a Nobel Prize to Ed Leamer.

3. Some people asked me to talk about intellectual influences in terms of specific people and ideas. I will get to that in about ten days or so.

Rhymes of history

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Paul Matzko’s The Radio Right describes a short-lived period in the history of radio. From about 1957 to the end of the 1960s, a set of now-forgotten political/religious AM radio broadcasters attained a listening audience that approached 20 million, at a time when our population was about half of what it is today. I recommend listening to the Matzko interview with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus.

Some ways in which this rhymes with the present:

1. This grass-roots right was much, much bigger than the intellectual right. National Review had less than 20 thousand subscribers around 1960. Then, as now, conservative intellectuals were leaders without a following.

2. The grass-roots right was strongly attached to conspiracy stories. Back then both Communism and racial integration were part of a conspiracy. Of course, the right has no monopoly on conspiracy-mongering–look at the left’s theory that Trump-Russia collusion defeated Hillary in 2016. I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. I predict that four years from now at least two-thirds of Republican voters will believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Assuming Mr. Trump is not the nominee in 2024, my prediction is that the actual nominee will be unable to completely distance himself or herself from the stolen-election narrative.

3. The left treats censorship of the right as perfectly legitimate. Matzko’s main story is how President Kennedy undertook to use the IRS and the FCC to shut down the Radio Right, and by the end of the 1960s this effort had succeeded. I think it will be harder to stamp out the grass-roots right today, but the effort is surely being made. And of course, when someone is trying to shut you down, this serves to increase your openness to conspiracy theories, as Ross Douthat points out. (Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I had written most of this post before Sunday, when Tyler linked to the Douthat piece.)

When there is no science to follow

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The question of whether you can get sick from someone with the virus who is asymptomatic is still not close to being settled, as far as I can see. I think it is safe to say that settling this question would make for much better-informed decisions by individuals and policy makers.

[UPDATE: Consider this study (pointer from a reader) vs. this study (pointer from a commenter).] One says that asymptomatics have as much viral load as symptomatics. The other says that there were no cases of asymptomatic transmission in their sample.]

The question could be settled by running experiments. You could find people who test positive for the virus and are asymptomatic. You could find volunteers willing to expose themselves to these asymptomatic folks under various conditions. Then you could evaluate the results.

I have been saying since the early days of March and April that we need this sort of science. But epidemiologists and public health “experts” do not think the way I do. As far as I am concerned, the call to “follow the science” is baloney sandwich. There is no science to follow.

From the comments, on the Trump Presidency

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Handle writes,

Trump’s not-normal sound concealed a lot of normalcy beneath. There was a lot of show on the surface about a willingness to buck the establishment, but under the surface, no real stomach to actually do one tenth of what was necessary to buck it.

I would say that it was more of a lack of resources than a lack of stomach. Mr. Trump came to office without a set of acolytes who could make him an effective executive. Instead, he cycled through people in key staff positions. The general pattern was to go from bad to worse (Secretary of State Pompeo was an exception).

His economic advisers were mediocrities. You want more Casey Mulligan, less Peter Navarro.

It was Mr. Trump who elevated Dr. Fauci on the virus. I wrote Fire the Peacetime Bureaucrats on March 19, and unfortunately I feel vindicated.

Mr. Trump arguably survived the Deep State (at least while he was in office), but the Deep State definitely survived Mr. Trump. That which does not kill the arrogant, insular national security establishment only makes it stronger.

Considering what he was working with, it is remarkable that Mr. Trump did as well as he did with judicial appointments, some business deregulation, and a foreign policy that was more constructive than than of his predecessors.

But my overall verdict is close to Handle’s. Because of Mr. Trump’s inability to find effective personnel, as an executive he spoke loudly and carried a weak stick.

Common humanity or common enemy?

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Jonathan Haidt has drawn this distinction. Eric Vieth transcribed part of a podcast in which Haidt spoke with Joe Rogan.

You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups. Let’s divide people by race, you know, straight versus everyone else. Men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else. So you look at the straight white men. They’re the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man. That’s one of the core ideas of “intersectionality.” What we say in the book is that this leads to eternal conflict.

Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.

Unfortunately, I think that people like Haidt or Bret Weinstein or Coleman Hughes or Glenn Loury or James Lindsay are confined to an intellectual ghetto, aka the IDW. Only a few of us on the right know that they exist. We also know about Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But people on the left know only about the latter.

When I go to YouTube, it recommends mostly my side, but some of the other side. I suspect that when people on the left go to YouTube, they never see recommendations from the ghetto.