Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Post-Trump

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I keep thinking of the quote attributed to Sam Phillips prior to the discovery of Elvis Presley, to the effect that he could get rich if he could find a white singer who could provide the Negro sound and the Negro feel.

For the Republican Party in 2024, the challenge is to find someone who has Mr. Trump’s ability to tap into anti-elitism but without coming across as mean-spirited and self-centered. Note that the failure to sound mean-spirited and self-centered may be interpreted as a lack of conviction or a sign that one has been captured by the establishment.

Here are some thoughts about the required message, but without getting at the important aspect of sound and feel:

–praise America’s virtues rather than damn its faults
–equal rights, not affirmative action
–police are better than social workers at dealing with crime
–parents choose better schools than government schools
–don’t send soldiers to try to fix other countries

My guess is that in 2024 we will not see a Republican candidate support free trade or immigration, although I would hope that one can get away with sounding less harsh than Mr. Trump on those issues.

I don’t think we will see a Republican go anywhere with ideas for cutting government spending or getting government out of health care.

Of course, we don’t know what issues will arise in the meantime.

But the key point is that there is a grass roots right that distrusts normal-sounding politicians because the populists distrust what sounds normal.

Academics who are less attached to rigor

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UPDATE: a commenter points out that the survey was not very trustworthy.]

Glenn Geher writes,

Relatively conservative professors valued academic rigor and knowledge advancement more than did relatively liberal professors.

Relatively liberal professors valued social justice and student emotional well-being more so than did relatively conservative professors.

Professors identifying as female also tended to place relative emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being (relative to professors who identified as male).

Business professors placed relative emphasis on knowledge advancement and academic rigor while Education professors placed relative emphasis on social justice and student emotional well-being.

Regardless of these other factors, relatively agreeable professors tend to place higher emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being of students.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen (see the Rolf link). See also Sumantra Maitra.

This relates to what I call the Road to Sociology in economics. The economics profession is rapidly increasing its number of females and also rapidly moving to the left. This is not a coincidence.

Anti-liberal intellectuals on the American right

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In May, C. Bradley Thompson wrote,

Last August, the Claremont Review, long a bastion of pro-American conservative thought, published a review by Michael Anton of a little-known and self-published book titled Bronze Age Mindset (hereafter BAM) by the queerly-named Bronze Age Pervert (hereafter BAP).

The essay takes on the anti-liberal American Right. I should note that the essay was published by The American Mind, which is also a Claremont enterprise. Good for them for publishing something that is highly critical of a subset of the Claremonters, although their intention may have been to put his blood in the water for hostile sharks to locate. For an example of the sharks, see Arthur Bloom.

Then there is this follow-up blog post by Thompson.

I now recognize more clearly than before that the great task for those who still want to defend the founders’ philosophy of Americanism is to answer the challenge posed by the Fight Club Right. We must demonstrate that the classical-liberal tradition of the founders is not a philosophy for perpetual losing, nor is it a Zombie-like philosophy for the walking dead. Instead, we must demonstrate how and why the philosophy of Americanism can actually win the twenty-first century Kulturkampf.

Thanks to a reader for a pointer to Thompson’s blog. I am inclined to think that the illiberal intellectuals on the right have even less impact on our political culture than libertarians. So not quite worth the rhetorical energy that Thompson gives to them.

Also, listen to Thompson’s interview with Dave Rubin. The last 10 minutes or so, they talk about the virus lockdowns as arbitrary edicts that have the potential to provoke people into reviving the spirit of the original American revolution. Don Boudreaux sounds ready for such a revival.

What is the GDP of Jeff Bezos?

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1. A comment on a recent post led me to an article by Mark Muro and others.

Biden’s winning base in 477 counties encompasses fully 70% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy.

Suppose that each candidate had 50 votes. But the 50 voters for Biden produced $70 of output and the 50 voters for Trump produced $30 of output. The per capita output of Biden voters is much higher.

I am not sure how the Commerce Department computes GDP at a county level. Does Seattle produce a lot of output based on the sales revenue of Microsoft and Amazon? If Amazon moved its headquarters out of Seattle, would Seattle’s GDP suddenly plummet? If Jeff Bezos moved to a rural Texas county, would that county’s GDP soar?

The Commerce data show that a lot of GDP is created in the District of Columbia and Fairfax County, Virginia. Do we believe that a lot of “production” is coming from the government workers in this area?

I find it credible that, on average, Biden voters have significantly higher incomes than Trump voters. And if you assume that people’s incomes are highly correlated with the value of what they produce, then it becomes likely that, on average, Biden voters produce output that is more highly valued in today’s economy.

But I think that it is unfortunate that we report a statistic like GDP as if it has a precision of several significant figures, and that we try to decompose trends in its second difference (to get the alleged change in trend productivity growth) or to decompose the location of production down to the county level. The concept of GDP is too crude to support such fine-grained breakdowns.

2. A reader sent me a link to a paper by Gavin Wright that argues that the de-industrialization of the South broke up a biracial political coalition that was dedicated to trade protection of the Southern textile industry. I am not sure about the political analysis, but there is a somewhat valid economic point that taking away trade protection from that industry caused widespread damage to people who had worked in that industry.

But consider the counterfactual: what if we had continued with restrictions on textile imports? Would jobs have been saved, or would automation have been accelerated? Would households have maintained a high level of demand for Southern textiles, or would they have substituted away to other types of clothing or other forms of consumption? How much would income growth been retarded in textile-exporting countries, and what would have been the consequences?

Thoughts on our media environment

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1. Signal vs. noise. What draws our attention? Think of two dimensions: threats vs. positive developments; sudden vs. gradual. We seem to be most attractive to the sudden and to the threat. A hurricane is a great story for the media. The way that our houses have become stronger and more secure is not a great story.

2. As L.M. Sacasas put it, we combine the most stressful aspects of the pre-literate oral village and modern anonymous society.

We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.

The “other” is in our face, but is not fully present.

Malinvestment by the wealthy

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Willis Krumholz writes,

The scale of the funding disparities between trendy arts and envi­ronmental charities, on the one hand, and humanitarian charities, on the other, can be staggering. For instance, one popular nonprofit, the Community Center for the Arts, had $268,158 back in 2000, but its assets grew to $40 million just seven years later—an increase of nearly 15,000 percent. Likewise, environmental charities have also seen stunning growth: in 1997, the Jackson Hole Land Trust had $3.9 million in assets, but by 2014 it had $22.5 million. Meanwhile, the Latino Resource Center, a prominent human services organization, had $355,452 in assets in 2014, a relatively modest increase from the $126,438 it had in 2005—giving it roughly 1 percent of the assets held by some of the more fashionable conservation and arts charities.

This is from a review essay of Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, by Justin Farrell. The book sounds interesting.

The non-profit sector is much over-rated in our society. Non-profits seduce young employees with the intention heuristic–the mission of the organization must be good, since it does not seek profit. But non-profit status is mainly a way to avoid accountability to customers. The only accountability is to donors.

I wish that the only non-profits that we had were those dedicated to helping poor people take care of basic needs and obtain education and training. If I were king, I would get rid of the non-profit status for universities, environmental groups, and other organizations that employ and serve the affluent.

A reproductive fact to ponder

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Alex Gendler writes,

When the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe forty-five thousand years ago as rela­tively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, about three women reproduced for every man. But with the advent of agriculture, this changed drastically. The need to secure territory and a complex division of labor created highly stratified societies in which a relatively small number of men could monopolize the land, resources, and power needed to support and maintain families. By about 6000 BC, the ratio of females reproducing versus males had risen to a staggering seven­teen to one, and in the Middle Ages a single leader like Genghis Khan or Augustus the Strong could father hundreds of children. Indeed, polygamy has long been the norm in many societies around the world, and even where it has been banned by law, the tendency of high-status men to cycle through successive younger wives and mistresses has long meant that it continued in practice. Recent centu­ries have seen a more reasonable reproductive ratio of four to one, but no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that of all the men who have ever lived, the majority of them have left no trace in the human gene pool.

He claims,

in a broader sense, war has functioned as a disposal mechanism for a society’s excess men.

. . .The same logic that keeps women and their sexuality under jealous guard and treats them as a prize to be awarded is also what casts the majority of men into a Hobbesian struggle for that prize—ensuring continued reproduction of a social order gov­erned by a predominantly male elite. Contrary to both traditionalist conservative myth and popular feminist narrative, for most of history patriarchy was not a privilege one benefited from simply by being born male, but a brutal racket in which millions of men destroyed each other and the world around them for the benefit of a fortunate few.

Gendler offers an interesting analysis of the problem of superfluous men, and he offers the usual American Affairs swipe at “neoliberalism,” but he does not really suggest any solutions.

But I wonder if our current social unrest can be ascribed to male childlessness. Is there not also a trend toward female childlessness, and are its implications not at least as serious?

Three endgames for the virus

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1. The treatment endgame. We learn to live with the virus. Deaths are prevented using treatments.

2. The suppression endgame. We keep people from coming into contact with the virus.

3. The immunity endgame. Enough people get the virus and/or a vaccine so that it has few people to infect.

It sounds like (2) works in some countries, using ots of testing, tracing, and quarantining. Many people are angry that the U.S. has not executed this strategy. But (a) a lot of other countries also have not been able to execute it and (b) it seems like a fragile strategy, in that at some point you could experience too many cases to deal with using testing and tracing, and then where are you?

Lockdowns were supposed to be part of (1), the idea being to “flatten the curve” and ensure enough treatment resources. I have speculated on a super-strict short-term lockdown to achieve (2), but that is probably a fantasy. Meanwhile, many people seem to have come to believe mistakenly that the lockdowns that we actually have can achieve (2).

I thought that (1) was more likely to work than (3). But events seem to be moving in the other direction. We see have seen deaths rise pretty dramatically in recent weeks. Not to NY/NJ nursing home levels, but still alarming. So the treatments have not yet reached the point where we can just live with the virus as we can with the flu.

To my knowledge, herd immunity has not emerged anywhere. That leaves the vaccine.

Vaccine trials seem to show efficacy. As you know, I worry that the results might not be reliable, because even in the placebo sample there were not many cases. But my guess is that since mid-November there have been many more cases, and if the results are still strong then that would be pretty convincing.

I suggested the other day that challenge trials could have been used to more efficiently demonstrate efficacy of the vaccine. But there is an argument that there is no way to evaluate safety quickly. If the vaccine is going to have harmful effects, these may take a while to show up. So perhaps we could not have evaluated a vaccine in a matter of weeks, even with challenge trials.

The decentralized religion that persecutes heretics

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Eric Kaufmann writes,

Viewing wokeness as a highly decentered liberal religion helps us understand the movement’s extremism, its witch hunts, and its awakenings. It explains why high-status people and elite institutions mouth its mantras, why its moderates can’t stand up to its fundamentalists, and why it is both the product of, and an engine of, polari­zation.

It is a powerful essay, difficult to excerpt. One of his themes is that liberalism may have once been a set of principles, but it is now a quasi-religious identity. Another theme is that a decentralized religion tends toward radicalism, as extremists “outbid” moderates in the contest for emotional support from those who identify with the religion.

At this point, I am going to call this the best essay I have read this year.

By the way, American Affairs is the publisher of the essay. This journal does publish some real nuggets. But it also publishes a lot of essays that toss around “neoliberal” and “market fundamentalist” as epithets. Also, it has a paywall that kicks in after one article (I think), so you have to choose carefully when to click through to read. Note that I have a couple of forthcoming posts that reference other interesting essays, but I do not recommend those essays as highly as Kaufmann’s.

Our culture war in historical perspective

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Michael Lind writes,

In addition to the “Deep State,” other national institutions that the neo-Jacksonians of the New Deal coalition never conquered in their revolution against Yankeedom include the major nonprofit foundations like Ford and Rockefeller and the Ivy League universities. The culture of what might be called the NGO-academic-spook complex remained deeply rooted in the Social Gospel wing of Northern mainline Protestantism of the early 1900s.

The Social Gospel progressivism these institutions have long embraced is a Janus-faced tradition. One face is technocratic, holding that social and global conflicts, rather than reflecting the tragic nature of human existence, are “problems” which can be “solved” by nonpartisan experts guided by something called “social science.” The other face of Social Gospelism is irrational, and rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology convinced that we are on the verge of a world of peace and prosperity, if only wicked people at home and wicked regimes abroad can be crushed once and for all.

People in this tradition will tell you that the virus would go away if the wicked would only “listen to the scientists.”

Pointer from a commenter. I recommend the entire essay. In fact, I recommend Tablet in general. I have signed up for their newsletter.