Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Cultural evolution and economics

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Nathan Nunn writes,

There are two primary benefits that culture provides over rationality. First, culture-based decision-making provides a quick and easy way to make decisions. To the extent that rational decision-making (narrowly defined) requires costs due to information acquisition or cognitive processing, then acting on one’s transmitted cultural traditions and values saves on these costs. The second benefit is that relying on culture allows for cumulative learning.

More separate excerpts below.
Continue reading →

Bret Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu, annotated

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A two-hour conversation with Bret Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu. When I listened, I sped it up 25 percent. Although they go on several tangents, the main theme is the high level of political tension that currently threatens the country and Bret’s proposed solution, which is a third-party ticket that would involve power sharing by a liberal and a conservative, each of whom is a cut above most politicians in terms of desire to do what is best for the country and mental flexibility to work toward solutions.

I should say at the outset that while I appreciate most of what Bret Weinstein has to say on this and other podcasts, I discount his proposal, because I think that our problems are intellectual, cultural, anthropological, and psychological more than they are political. Our universities have been deformed, so that they elevate conformist mediocrity over the wisdom that comes from curiosity and open-mindedness. Our culture is too divided and antagonistic. Our individual brains and our collective norms have not adapted successfully to the communication environment that has emerged in the last decade. And the pandemic has exacerbated our individual psychological problems, leading us to be more willing to violate norms of non-violence. Continue reading →

The libertarian personality

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Here are some thoughts in reaction to the many interesting comments on my post on Peter Thiel.

1. Is libertarianism elitist?

I believe so. I think that most people value their own liberty, but they have a hard time extending this value to strangers who they do not entirely trust. It takes a lot of sophistication to appreciate enumerated powers, free speech, and the emergent order of market competition. Instead, I think that Fear Of Others’ Liberty is the norm. I believe that America’s Constitution was designed by elites, and as we gradually extended the franchise to include more FOOLs the Constitutional safeguards have been crushed under the weight of popular opinion.

2. Is libertarianism a white male ideology?

I don’t know whether there are racial differences, but I think I that empathizer-systemizer theory can explain statistical differences in male-female attitudes. To be libertarian, you have to look at the super-Dunbar world from the perspective of a systemizer rather than an empathizer, which means that libertarians are more likely to be found among males than among females.

3. Why are libertarians unwilling to sign up as conservatives or progressives?

Conservatives make concessions to FOOLs in order to get elected. Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions. Even worse, these concessions have for a long time included deficit spending and expansion of state power in the name of providing safety and security. Worst of all, conservatives long ago abandoned the doctrine of enumerated powers.

In practice, conservatives usually do not overturn progressive initiatives. Obamacare is the latest example.

Progressives propose government policies from an empathizer perspective. They will gladly toss away personal liberty in order to “help” people. Lockdowns are the latest example.

4. I think that many (most?) libertarians feel culturally in tune with college-educated progressives. I am an exception to that. I find that you can be smart and nice without a college degree, and you can be intellectually uninteresting and/or personally nasty with one.

My wife and most people in our social circle are not academics. On occasions where I have to spend a lot of time with a group of college professors, I am relieved when the gathering is over. When I was at Freddie Mac, I became bored with other economists, and I eventually gravitated toward people with experience in the mortgage business and/or information systems. When I started my Internet business, after about a year I found a partner who had only a high-school equivalency degree.

In business, I noticed that I did not like meetings attended primarily by males, nor did I like meetings attended primarily by females. At parties, when men congregate in one room and women congregate in another room, I find myself unable to engage in either conversation, and I usually end up talking to someone else who is feeling left out.

The bottom line is that I seem to get along ok with various types of people, without feeling especially sympatico with people in my field or with my level of education. Perhaps that leads me to be less inclined than other libertarians to side with progressives.

Paternalism is a dominance move

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Robin Hanson writes,

Like most animals, humans strive to dominate each other, in order to rise in the local “pecking order”. And control over ourselves and others is widely taken as one of the strongest signs of dominance and non-submission. But unlike other animals, humans have norms against overt dominance and submission, and norms promoting pro-social behavior, that helps others. So we do push to dominate, but we pretend that we are actually just trying to help. And as usual, we are typically not consciously aware of our hypocrisy. In our mind, we are mainly aware of how they are doing the wrong things, and how they would be so much better off if only we could make them do things our way.

I am fond of the dichotomy between prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. You get prestige by being good at something. You get dominance by imposing your will on others. For me, it’s pretty simple. Yay for prestige moves, boo for dominance moves. Actually, it gets complicated because the process for creating norms for prestige can involve dominance moves.

As an aside, a reader points out that Robin Hanson engages in asymmetric insight, which means not taking people at their word. An essential part of Robin’s outlook is his view that people’s true motives differ from what they themselves claim or even believe them to be. I would love to see a debate between Robin and Jeffrey Friedman on this issue. Jeffrey thinks that not taking people at their word is a violation of intellectual charity.

Virus update

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Jeff Harris, who did some research claiming that the NY subway system affected the outbreak there, is still ringing that bell.

That leaves us with the public transportation system, particularly New York City’s public subway system. We continue to stress the word system, because we should think of the subways not as a loose aggregate of individual stations docked in individual neighborhoods, but as a whole, as a mechanism for efficiently pooling millions of individuals into one large mixing basin.

New York City’s unique subway system had the capability in late February and early March to rapidly disperse SARS-CoV-2 throughout the city’s boroughs

Elsewhere, Harris notes that the falling ratio of deaths to reported cases suggests that treatment is getting better. That goes along with my prediction that treatment is more likely than a vaccine to be the solution.

Tyler Cowen notes that testing with rapid results could change the game, also, and he put some grant money where his mouth is. Read the whole post.

Suppose that with current best treatment practices (aided by rapid-results testing?), out of 10,000 otherwise healthy people who get the virus, fewer than 5 suffer adverse long-term consequences. Are we still supposed to structure our lives around fear of the virus?

Of course, health experts cannot or will not give us an estimate of how many out of 10,000 otherwise health people will suffer adverse long-term consequences if they get the virus. Because we are in the dark, every outbreak of cases becomes a justification for allowing our lives to be directed by health experts.

I note that this paper looks at India’s performance with respect to the virus by comparing age-specific case fatality rates across countries. The U.S. is not one of the comparison countries. Probably because we do not have the data broken down that way?

Michael Anton’s Republican Party

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Michael Anton writes,

What’s needed, then, is a Trumpist political party focused squarely on “old economy”—rural, manufacturing, and blue-collar interests. Which means, in most if not all cases, a party actively opposed to the program of the ruling class. If the Republican Party can become that, all to the good. If it can’t, it should go out of business.

To me, that sounds like a party that stands for stagnation. A party with no vision for the future, only nostalgia for the past.

I will grant that the future on offer from the Democratic Party is dystopian. In my view, they want to “reform” what works (the market). They want to double down on what fails (state-run and state-subsidized education, health care, and “green” energy). And they want to cozy up to the religion that persecutes heretics.

The Republican Party that I would prefer would offer a better vision of the future. Let health care and education be reformed by market forces. Do so by reducing subsidies to demand and restrictions on supply. And protect the principles of the first amendment from the religion that persecutes heretics.

Finding the best ideas

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A commenter asks

How does one find the best ideas at present?

I think an important heuristic is to consider a person’s error correction mechanism. The vast majority of people try to create the impression that they are never wrong. That makes them untrustworthy by my heuristic.

One of the reasons that Scott Alexander is (was? will SlateStarCodex come back?) such a useful source of ideas is that he is very diligent, and even systematic, about error correction.

The authoritarian personality

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This was in infamous concept that supposedly characterized the right. But Jordan Moss and Peter J. O’Connor write,

Individuals high in authoritarianism – regardless of whether the hold politically correct or rightwing views – tend to score highly on DT and entitlement. Such individuals therefore are statistically more likely than average to be higher in psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and entitlement. We found both moderate bivariate effects and unique effects (regression coefficients) and conclude that the DT and entitlement have important shared and unique effects in predicting our attitudinal outcomes.

Pointer from Zaid Jilani.

In other words, somebody who likes to act out extreme political views is likely to have the “dark triad” (DT) personality characteristics. But we are in an environment of “the other side does it,” so people are willing to excuse the nuts on their own side, which encourages them.

By the way, I have not seen one defense of President Trump’s executive orders bypassing Congress on the next round of “stimulus” that isn’t of the form “the other side does it.” That means it is not an acceptable defense, in my view.