Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The urgency of racial disparities

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Kenneth L. Marcus writes,

The new antiracism is not, as its etymology suggests, opposition to racial discrimination. Ibram X. Kendi demonstrates this in his 2019 bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist.” He defines “racism” as a combination of policies and ideas that “produces and normalizes racial inequities.” This racism has nothing to do with individual discrimination. Rather, it is support for institutions that yield disparities. Lest there be confusion, Mr. Kendi emphasizes that “focusing on ‘racial discrimination’ takes our eyes off” the policy goals he and other self-proclaimed antiracists support.

How urgent is it that we alter institutions in order to remove racial disparities?

Institutions are rules and practices, such as laws against using drugs or the practice of requiring SAT tests for college admissions. Racial disparities are outcomes that are on average worse for African-Americans, such as under-representation among the very wealthy or over-representation in the prison population.

Consider two extreme views:

a) We should get rid of any institution that might cause such disparities until the disparities disappear.

b) Unless an institution explicitly uses race or skin color as a criterion for discriminating against African-Americans, that institution should be preserved, assuming that it serves a good purpose.

My guess is that a lot of people nowadays would position themselves somewhere between (a) and (b). I would hold up my hand for (b), with no in-between.

For example, consider the use of credit scoring to screen loan applicants. I believe that credit scoring is non-discriminatory with disparate impact. That is, a black borrower and a white borrower who each have a credit score of 650 will have the same probability of defaulting on the loan. But if you set 650 as a cutoff for approving loans, then the proportion of loan approvals that are for blacks will be less than their share in the population.

Someone committed to (a) would want to remedy the disparate impact. Either explicitly or implicitly, they would lower the cutoff for black applicants until they receive a proportionate share of loans. As someone committed to (b), I would advocate using the same cutoff for blacks as for whites.

Some further thoughts:

1. This would get me accused by the religion that persecutes heretics of being a white supremacist. But by most people’s standards, I am not.

2. There are plenty of institutions that might not qualify as “assuming that it serves a good purpose.” For example, drug laws may not serve a good purpose, but not because of any disparate racial impact. I am inclined to get rid of the college admissions process and replace it with open admissions rationed by a lottery system. Again, that is not because of any disparate racial impact. [UPDATE: See the essay on college admissions by Jeffrey Selingo. It appears to me that the main purpose of college admissions office is to perpetuate itself.]

Marcus concludes,

To defeat racism, we must turn away from the new antiracism.

Socialism as a yay word

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Timothy Taylor writes,

If someone chooses to take all their hopes for a better and more just society and bundle it up in the name of “socialism,” [then] any criticism of “socialism” will be viewed as an attack on their dreams and desires. Conversely, pretty much no one ever has said that “capitalism is the name of my desire.” The arguments for capitalism are typically made in terms of machine-like functionality, emphasizing what works and doesn’t work under capitalism. And of course, the arguments for capitalism emphasize how it has actually raised the standard of living for average people over recent decades and centuries, not how it summarizes one’s dreams for the future.

Why I lean libertarian

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These days, the air is thick with straw-man criticisms of libertarians. If you want to attack my version of libertarianism, this is what you should go after:

Regarding the performance of social arrangements, I focus on dynamics. I do not assume that the best production systems and social arrangements are known. Instead, I believe that better ways of doing things are always being discovered.
My concern is with what facilitates discovery and retention of better ideas. Which systems are conductive to improvement, as opposed to stagnation or regression?

I dislike economic analysis that ignores dynamics. For too many economists, comparative statics are everything. That is, you compare two static outcomes (e.g., with or without some regulation), and advocate for policies that in theory lead to the superior outcome. Use of the term “market failure” almost always indicates comparative-statics thinking. I have two major objections, based on dynamic thinking. One objection is that static analysis fails to anticipate the dynamic response to policy–people figure out how to game the system. The other objection is that static analysis fails to account for entrepreneurial efforts to overcome market failure. In a dynamic sense, markets are the solution to market failure.

My emphasis on dynamics and institutions owes a great deal to Douglass North. Note how many of the titles of his works included the word “change.” Note that his definition of institutions is broad, and I often substitute the term “culture” instead.

North would judge an institution (or cultural practice) by what it rewards. If it rewards prosocial behavior, things will get better. If it rewards predation, we are likely to see less progress.

Markets tend to reward prosocial behavior. Not all markets at all times, but most markets at most times.

Governments tend to reward predatory behavior. Not all governments at all times, but often enough that we should take this into account when we advocate for government to “do something.” Government power is a prize for which elites will compete. The competition for government power tends toward predation rather than prosocial behavior. Under monarchy or autocratic regimes, you get assassinations and wars of succession, which are very destructive.

The great virtue of democracy is that it creates a norm of peaceful transfer of power. The great vice of democracy is that it exalts the “will of the people.” In practice, this creates a bias toward greater government intervention. Ideally, I would like to see the peaceful transfer of power without the democratic impetus for expanded government control.

An optimistic view of democracy is that parties compete for power by trying to outdo one another in the enactment of pro-social policies. If this were the case, then bigger government would be better government. But I don’t take the optimistic view. In practice, I think that big government is what North, Weingast, and Wallis call a “limited-access order.” Powerful and important members of the governing coalition capture rewards, at the expense of everyone else.

Furthermore, I believe that even if government officials were free of special-interest influence and wanted to be pro-social, they would fail. They under-estimate their own ignorance, and in choosing leaders the political process selects for a lack of humility. Officials are prone to blunders, and the error-correction mechanisms are much weaker in the public sector than in the private sector. Markets tend to correct their failures. Governments tend not to.

A few more thoughts on Cynical Theories

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Following up on this post.

1. Various academics are rushing to judge PL harshly because they “get ____ wrong,” where ____ is some set of philosophers. Yet I would say that as a model to explain and predict the rhetoric and behavior of the social justice movement, PL works well. Consider these out-of-sample events:

–the attacks on statues. PL had written,

The drives to decolonize everything from hair to English literature curricula, to tear down paintings and smash statues. . .

–the Smithsonian whiteness chart.

–the new book In Defense of Looting.

How do we reconcile the explanatory power of the model with the view that they get ____ wrong?

a) Perhaps PL did not get ____ so wrong after all.

b) Perhaps although PL get ____ wrong, subsequent academic developments in what PL call “applied post-Modernism” and “reified post-Modernism” followed that same path.

c) Perhaps PL also get the subsequent academic history wrong, but the ideas that filtered down to college administrators, public school curriculum writers, and others in high-leverage positions (including the people responsible for the three events noted above) followed the path that PL describe.

2. Another line of criticism is to suggest other factors that might account for the rise of Social Justice ideology among these bureaucrats. There is Jonathan Haidt’s psychoanalysis. Haidt’s view of social media’s psychological effects might suggest that the bureaucrats are responding to what young constituents want. The role of the demand side is also stressed by commenter John Alcorn. But I don’t think that the explanation for the appearance of Social Justice curricula in public schools is that the children and parents are clamoring for it. And I suspect that even at colleges there is much more energy on the supply side than on the demand side.

I am also receptive to the view that the Social Justice movement helps satisfy a human need for religious belonging.
But attempts at psychoanalysis do not provide us with cognitive empathy. That is, we need to take people’s ideas as ideas, and to try to explore how those ideas might make sense to the people who hold them.

I think that PL succeed in offering a perspective on Social Justice that helps us achieve cognitive empathy. If PL’s critics can come up with a perspective that provides even better cognitive empathy, more power to them.

3. I am talking about cognitive empathy with the movers and shakers in the movement, not with the most esteemed academics. I think that any time you want to connect a popular movement to a philosophical idea, you have to deal with the fact that hardly anyone reads philosophers. How many of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge had read John Locke? How many of Lenin’s Bolsheviks had read Karl Marx? In a sense, the ideas that matter are the ones in the heads of ordinary people that never get written down.

In the case of Social Justice, the ideas in the heads of college administrators, public school curriculum writers, corporate HR departments and so on probably do get expressed in written form. Perhaps sometimes they cite academic works. It might be fruitful to collect some of this material and analyze it. Not having done so, my guess is that such material would tend to conform to PL’s characterization (or caricature) of post-Modernism as it has evolved.

I doubt that the Social Justice adherents in influential positions could describe the twists and turns in post-Modernism of the last several decades. They themselves could not tell you the links, if any, between the policies that they promulgate and the philosophy of Derrida or Foucault. But that does not negate the PL project.

You might say that the Social Justice adherents are to academic philosophy what Milton Friedman’s billiard player is to physics. They are acting “as if” they had followed the intellectual path described by PL, and that is why the model in their book is so useful.

How the media woke up

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Zach Goldberg writes,

In 2011, the terms racist/racists/racism accounted for 0.0027% and 0.0029% of all words in The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively. What we see over the past decade is a continual dramatic increase in usages of “racism” and its variations. Moreover, the graph shows that this increase occurred a half decade before the arrival of Donald Trump. By 2019, they would constitute 0.02% and just under 0.03% of all words published in the Times and Post—an increase of over 700% and just under 1,000%, respectively, from 2011.

…In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

The gist of Cynical Theories

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I think that there is a natural tendency for professional philosophers to look at the book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay from the standpoint of how well it captures a philosophical position that the reviewer has studied extensively. That is not how I evaluate the book. I want the book to help me understand what you might call the “folk beliefs” that non-philosophers distilled from the academics.

By analogy, suppose somebody were to attempt a history of Keynesian economics with a goal of understanding how Keynesian economic policy came to be conducted. It is not so important to get “what Keynes really meant” (in fact, that is an endlessly debatable topic) or to provide a definitive account of the various Keynesian models that appeared in academic journals. Instead, what is important is to explain how the “folk Keynesianism” of journalists and political leaders developed and evolved.

I take the view that it is unlikely that the arcane academics have much direct cultural influence. So arguing with Pluckrose and Lindsay (PL) about their analysis of the arcane academics is beside the point.

The people who are in a position to directly influence the culture are those who hold high-leverage positions in our society. They include college administrators who write policies and implement training programs, public school curriculum writers, corporate human resource departments, journalists, and career officials in government. I believe that one can be confident that PL are accurately characterizing the “folk ideology” of these influential bureaucrats. That “folk ideology” seems plausibly derived from some of the academic philosophy that PL discuss, even if there is room to quibble with the treatment of academic philosophy in PL–and there is always room to quibble with someone’s treatment of any school of philosophy.

For me, Cynical Theories does not stand or fall on the quality of it scholarly interpretations of Foucault, Derrida, or subsequent philosophers. It stands or falls on its ability to explain and predict the rhetoric, modes of argument, and behavior of the bureaucrats who employ what PL refer to as Theory with a capital T.

Here is what I see as the gist of PL’s claims:

1. Liberalism and Theory are incommensurate. Liberalism presumes that we should pursue truth objectively, using logical deductions and empirical observations. From the liberal perspective, some of the propositions held by Theorists, concerning sex for example, are false and even ridiculous. Theory presumes that truths are contingent on identity, so that a white male may hold to a different “truth” than a black female. From the Theory perspective, liberal concepts of logic and empiricism are primarily tools used to perpetuate the privileged in a power structure. They are not necessary or sufficient for the pursuit of truth.

2. Theory developed in three phases. I think of these as razing a village, designing a new housing development, and building a new housing development.

3. The first phase was post-modernism. According to PL, post-modernism developed two principles, a knowledge principle of radical skepticism that objective knowledge or truth is attainable, because knowledge is culturally constructed; and a political principle that society can be viewed in terms of power and hierarchies, and these culturally construct knowledge.

4. The second phase PL call “applied post-modernism.” This looked into specific topics, including colonialism, race, and gender, and looked at how the language and cultural practices in these areas could be interpreted as reflecting and protecting power structures.

5. The third phase PL call “reified post-modernism.” That means taking the ideas into the real world and trying to do something about the power structures. That is what all of the bureaucrats are doing. But one irony that the book emphasizes is that the first phase declared that there was no certainty in knowledge, but the final phase treats the analysis of power based on identity groups as if it were absolute Truth. In terms of my metaphor, when the original village was razed, it was with the view that nothing could stand up. But the new housing development discards that extreme skepticism (although it still does not think that the old village has any legitimacy).

Let me reiterate my first point. The rhetorical defenses of Theory are impregnable to the attempts by liberalism to appeal to what it considers to be reason. To put it starkly, the Theorists refuse to be reasoned with. They would say that someone like me is merely trying to uphold privilege, either consciously or otherwise.

Liberalism seeks to deal with dissent by listening to it, debating it, and co-opting it. But Theory does not have those mechanisms. Silencing dissent is its modus operandi, one might even say its mission. Regular readers know that I describe it as the religion that persecutes heretics. Left-leaning liberals have a hard time processing the threat that this represents. They would much rather focus on the threat that they perceive comes from Donald Trump.

Liberalism vs. Theory

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I am reading Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories. I would describe it as a solid critique of the social justice movement and a stalwart defense of liberalism.

An excerpt:

Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachments to methods it calls “critical.”

If I could recommend one book to a student about to enter the indoctrination center known as a contemporary university, this would be it. In fact, I will be recommending it to a wide range of people, including readers of this blog.

My main takeaway is that the threat to conservatism on college campuses may not be as significant as the threat to liberalism. Liberalism’s natural reaction to dissent is to co-opt it. Liberalism accepts what it can of a dissenting point of view without losing liberalism itself. But the new ideology is so antithetical to liberalism that it cannot be co-opted.

Misperceptions of virus risk

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Sonal Desai writes,

The discrepancy with the actual mortality data is staggering: for people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34 it is 90 times higher.

I am not so happy with the metric here.

Let A = someone is worried about health consequences of the virus.

Let B = someone dies of the virus

Let C = someone is 18-24.

The claim that young people have a distorted view of their risk would be that p(A/C) is way too high relative to P(B/C). But the data that they are presenting seems to me to compare P(A/C) relative to P(B and C)

But let us stipulate that in fact young people now tend to greatly over-estimate the risk. Why would this be?

1. Tyler Cowen predicted this with one of his very first posts on the virus–that we would under-estimate the risk early and then over-estimate the risk. More recently, he speaks of phantom risk, or the “stigma” of cases.

2. Desai cites partisanship and media hype. I agree that this is a hypothesis, and perhaps when President Biden takes office the mainstream media will decide that it’s time to say that it’s safe for people to go back to work and school. But I think that the virus fears are too deep in our collective psyche for the media to undo them.

3. Respect for authority is still a thing, and the authorities are saying that schools cannot open, etc. So people infer that the risk must be pretty great.

4. I don’t think we can say that fear of the virus is completely irrational. As of a week ago, the average daily death figures continued to hover at around 1000, and if you extrapolate that to an annual rate of 365,000 it is frighteningly high. And young people know that even if they do not suffer adverse consequences, they may come into contact with friends or relatives who are older and more vulnerable.

Should they be called Marxists?

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Yoram Hazony says so.

recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.

I recommend the whole essay. There is no way to give it justice by quoting excerpts. But here are a couple:

what if it turned out that liberalism has a tendency to give way and transfer power to Marxists within a few decades? Far from being the opposite of Marxism, liberalism would merely be a gateway to Marxism.

. . .The Marxists who have seized control of the means of producing and disseminating ideas in America cannot, without betraying their cause, confer legitimacy on any conservative government. And they cannot grant legitimacy to any form of liberalism that is not supine before them. This means that whatever President Trump’s electoral fortunes, the “resistance” is not going to end. It is just beginning.

His conclusion:

Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.

But the essay does not appear where liberals will read it.

The Boomer and the Millenial

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A Millenial couple (no relation to me), about age 30, recently summarized their finances. They have about $100K saved for a down payment on a house. Unfortunately, they have $250K in student loans, so the way I see it they are $150K in the hole.

In 1983, when we were their age, my wife and I had about $25K in savings, but no debts. That was enough for a 20 percent down payment on a $125K house.

In the last 37 years, the price of our house went up by a factor of 4 or 5, while inflation only went up by a factor of about 3.3. As a result, our housing costs have effectively been zero–it’s like we lived rent-free all this time.

I think that this is true for a lot of Boomers. They bought houses that subsequently went up in price enough that the capital gains have exceeded what they paid in principal and interest. And they did no start out in the hole to the tune of $150K (or $45K in 1983 dollars).

Wesley Yang has emphasized the difference in circumstances between the Boomers and Millenials. The Boomers have a very high share of wealth, even adjusted for age. The Millenials have a very low share of wealth, even adjusted for age. The Boomers are also slow to exit the stage in politics, academia, and other fields.

So one way to think of the Woke movement is not as a racial fight but a generational one. For Millenials, the moral issues are a way to get back at the Boomers.