It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There’s a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life’s work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
You have to read the whole long post to see how he got to that point. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Overall, twin research suggests that, in your alternative life, you might not have gotten divorced, you might have made more money, you might be more extraverted or organized—but you are unlikely to be substantially different in your cognitive ability, education, or mental disease.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Note that the paper is not freely accessible. Another excerpt:
Within European-ancestry samples, however, some polygenic scores now rival the predictive power of traditional variables used in social science research. This was powerfully demonstrated by a GWAS of educational attainment (defined as years of schooling) conducted among 1.1 million people. In an independent sample of European-ancestry participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a polygenic score of education-associated genetic variants was as strongly associated with educational attainment as family income
Possibly related: Andrew Sullivan on Freddy deBoer’s new book.
American Economic Association President Janet Yellen writes,
This annual award will recognize departments and organizations that demonstrate outstanding achievement in diversity and inclusion practices. Focus will be on those applicants that take productive steps to establish new programs and procedures to create an inclusive environment, and to increase the participation of underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The award is open to all U.S. based departments of economics and other organizations employing significant numbers of economists, and there will be up to four winners per year.
…Please also encourage your colleagues to adopt the AEA’s “Best Practices for Economists Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession” and to link to these practices from your departmental websites.
According to Yelp data, permanent closures have reached 97,966, representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening.
This is what they attribute to the coronavirus. I wonder what the “excess deaths” measure would show. That is, even without the virus, some businesses would close.
My guess is that these are mostly excess deaths, and it will take quite a while for new entrepeneurial activity to employ the people whose jobs have been lost in the process.
What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.
For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself. DeBoer believes the smart will do fine under any system, and don’t need to be incentivized — and their disproportionate gains in our increasingly knowledge-based economy can simply be redistributed to everyone else.
Henry George proposed a single tax on land, on the grounds (wink) that land is inelastically supplied. If you believe that intelligence is inherited, and you believe that intelligence is now the most important “factor of production,” then perhaps it follows that intelligence is like land.
The standard view on the left is to treat intelligence as if it were inelastically supplied at the top, so that we can tax the wealthy all we want. And also to treat it as if it were elastically supplied at the bottom, so that we can get more of it at the bottom by investing more in education and other programs.
Of course, there are other personality traits that are “factors of production” (conscientiousness, for example). But you could still focus on intelligence. You need to have a way to assess intelligence that cannot be gamed, just as for a single tax on land you would need a way to assess the value of land.
many of the herd immunity theorists strike back and ask “where are the deaths“? But that is not the right question for testing herd immunity claims. Those claims were about transmission slowing down, and those claims should be true about Covid-19 cases whether or not more people are surviving in the hospital.
Why are cases spiking but deaths not spiking? Here is a set of hypotheses, in my subjective order of likely importance.
1. The strains that are circulating are less deadly.
2. The people who are getting it are less frail. See the discussion of “dry tinder” in Daniel Klein’s essay. And also enough folks finally got the memo about protecting people in nursing homes.
3. The treatments people get now are helpful, whereas six months ago they were ineffective/harmful.
4. Testing protocols are finding more of the milder and asymptomatic cases that they were missing before.
5. The long and variable lag between cases and deaths has become longer and more variable.
And note that the average daily death rate still stands above 700, which is outside of the range for a normal flu, at least on an annual basis.
Our synagogue had a virtual showing of the movie Stay Woke, a documentary made in 2016 about the Black Lives Matter movement. Many in our congregation are much more fervent in their leftism than in their Judaism, and everyone else had only positive things to say afterward about the film and about Black Lives Matter.
The documentary depicted BLM in a very positive light Those who spoke for BLM were very energized by the movement. Critics were depicted as unfair and embedded in Fox News.
In the discussion that we had afterward, I pointed out that the movie did not include even one specific proposal or policy change. I did not mention Martin Gurri, but I was thinking about him.
Other congregants pointed out how sad they were that nothing seemed to have changed between 2016 and 2020. One person typed into the Zoom chat that things had gotten worse.
No one else saw a connection between the absence of policy ideas in the movie and the absence of any change. But it strikes me that is you aren’t behind a program, that makes it unlikely that you will effect change.
Continuing to channel Gurri, I would say that social media is not a tool suited to creating a movement. Instead, it is suited to instigating a mob. A movement requires thought and long-term planning. A mob just requires stimulating rage and the narcissistic satisfaction that comes these days from appearing in viral videos and having one’s tweets widely circulated.
Mobs tend to seek scapegoats, such as Fox News personalities. But another scapegoat in the movie was Reverend Al Sharpton. He was canceled by the younger activists, not for his past anti-Semitism, but because he spoke against rioting.
I can see why so many organizations want to support BLM. People who are sad about the deaths of young black men inspire sympathy. But there is also the more cynical reason that when a mob is coming for scapegoats, it’s natural to try and seek shelter.
Mike Gonzalez sees BLM as organized Marxists. But I think that protests that emerge from social media are more child-like than that. The “leaders” are more like Andy Warhol leaders, enjoying their 15 minutes of fame on Twitter or CNN, but not providing what leaders provide. They do not “speak to the troops,” articulate clear goals, formulate a strategy for achieving those goals, assign tasks, etc.
Recently, I was asked what I thought were the most successful movements of the 21st century. I came up with the gay marriage movement, which preceded the emergence of social media. That movement achieved something tangible. As far as I can tell, BLM has only exacerbated the bad relationships between police and young black men, with adverse consequences. There are potential solutions out there, but BLM is instead part of the problem.
I wanted to note these links for future reference.
1. A classic election-year post of mine from 2008 that a Twitter user chose to highlight recently. An excerpt:
no politician will figure out a way to bring the bottom half of America’s children up to the level where they can benefit from a college education.
2. Alex Mackiel’s unsatisfyingly brief review of the WEIRD Henrich book. And an essay by Robert Henderson that is interesting to read in light of Henrich’s view of the importance of Christian family values in seeding the emergence of liberal society. Henderson writes,
American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods. What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.)
3. Jack A. Goldstone and Peter Turchin claim to have predicted the current political turbulence.
1. Back in late June, I was surprised to receive an email from a White House staffer who was unknown to me asking if I would consider a job as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Adviser. I said yes, although I don’t think I sounded very enthusiastic.
My perception is that the CEA is not a significant body. At least since the Clinton Administration, it seems to me that whatever power over economic policy that is not wielded by the Fed or Treasury is wielded by an Economic Council under the President that is not the CEA.
Even though the CEA job might be meaningless from an influence perspective, it could be an opportunity to meet various people in government and to travel and speak to various groups. But in a COVID world, those benefits are reduced and/or offset by costs. That is what made it hard for me to sound enthusiastic.
Working for the Trump Administration would make me a pariah among some people. I see that as a mark against those people, not against me.
Anyway, I spoke with the staffer on the phone and he said I would be interviewed the following week. That was the last I heard of the matter–no interview ever took place.
Meanwhile, last month I accepted another position, in the child care sector. One of my daughters moved in with her husband and their new baby. They view us as the child care providers least likely to bring the virus into the family. I saw no reason to question their judgment. I really enjoy babies. These days when people ask how I am doing, I say that I am having a good pandemic.
2. Last month, I wrote an essay about economic policy in the current environment and sent it to a think tank. Never did hear back, so I will paste it in here. Continue reading
From the standpoint of the postliberal Right, the liberal view of the state as a keeper of the peace and preserver of individual liberties—the view of most American conservatives before Trump—is not an adequate answer to the present situation. A correction in the direction of the state is needed. . .
The way to view this movement is that a maintenance or increase of state power in the United States is going to continue. The question is simply whether the Right is willing to use power when it has access to it, and use it for the sake of the common good. Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and libertarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises, the loss of U.S. manufacturing, and a completely demoralized society. Yet many conservatives continue to speak as though libertarianism is the solution.
This is in American Affairs. The latest issue includes a long article by a progressive professor/politician who thinks that Jeremy Corbyn and Ilhan Omar have been unfairly vilified for their positions on Jews and Israel. That same issue also includes an article describing Israel as a truly conservative country (meaning that this is a good thing). I would be surprised if the authors of both of these articles would get along very well.
The issue also includes a couple of interesting critiques of neoclassical economics in the age of the Internet. Both articles are from a left-wing perspective, but they echo some of my own views. Meanwhile, the professional mainstream pays little attention to new features of the economy. I am sure that it will continue to increase its focus on the economics of race and gender.