Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Maybe we *are* in an Atlas Shrugged moment

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Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes,

Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the gatekeepers—the arbiters of what it is and is not O.K. to say, and who is allowed, by virtue of their identity, to say it. As Eric Weinstein, a podcast host and managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment firm, tweeted, “I believe that activism has taken over.” Here was the first great salvo in a new front in the culture wars.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Lewis-Kraus gets many details right, but I think he gets the theme wrong. If you were to buy into his narrative, you would come away thinking that the feud is because Silicon Valley types are very jealous of the status of people in the legacy media. There is some of that, but I think that the opposite is more prevalent.

I think of the conflict in Randian terms, as industrialists vs. moochers. The industrialists (not in the Rand sense of heavy industry, but in the contemporary sense of software eating everything) take pride in having shown an ability to build something. It might be as humble as a section of computer code that gets used. Or it might be as grand as a successful company, or two. The moochers have never built anything, and they are looking for other ways to assuage their egos and fight the zero-sum game of status. The moochers have found that social justice activism is a useful weapon for lowering the status of the industrialists.

Scott Alexander, Less Wrong, and the Intellectual Dark Web occupy a sort of Galt’s Gulch. They see the moochers as intellectually deficient. They are trying to uphold an old-fashioned value of scientific objectivity against the moochers’ assault of oppressor-oppressed framing.

UPDATE: Think of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan in this context. What is loose in the land is a religion that is animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics.

An outlandish prediction vindicated?

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One of Tyler Cowen’s correspondents writes,

I expect that there are a certain set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) pre-dispose you to have a severe case of COVID, another set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) predispose you to have a mild case, and if you’re lucky enough to have the right variants of these you are most likely going to get a mild or asymptomatic case.

. . .It’s now mostly accepted that there are two “strains” of COVID, that the second arose in late January and contains a spike protein variant that wasn’t present in the original ancestral strain, and that this new strain (“D614G”) now represents ~97% of new isolates.

On June 1, I wrote,

We will down-rate the importance of lockdowns or track-and-trace. Instead, we will up-rate genetic differences and lifestyle differences that affect the immune system in general (take this WSJ essay as a portent). The significance of vitamin D will receive more attention. In addition, we may find that someone’s previous exposure to other viruses affects the immune response to this virus, so that the history of other viruses in a population matters. Sunlight and/or temperature may prove to be important factors affecting the severity of the virus. Finally, we may find that some of the regional variation is due to different mixes of virus strains that prevail in different areas.

Where to spend health dollars

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Donald Berwick writes,

Decades of research on the true causes of ill health, a long series of pedigreed reports, and voices of public health advocacy have not changed this underinvestment in actual human well-being. Two possible sources of funds seem logically possible: either (a) raise taxes to allow governments to improve social determinants, or (b) shift some substantial fraction of health expenditures from an overbuilt, high-priced, wasteful, and frankly confiscatory system of hospitals and specialty care toward addressing social determinants instead. Either is logically possible, but neither is politically possible, at least not so far.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

I agree that medical procedures are less important for longevity than other factors. If we spent money effectively on other factors, then that would be more cost-effective at the margin than spending more on medical services.

But the essay overall is a brief for the Progressive agenda, which I doubt will move the longevity needle in the right direction.

Study of the PPP loan program

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Joao Granja and others write,

we do not find evidence that funds flowed to areas more adversely affected by the economic effects of the pandemic, as measured by declines in hours worked or business shutdowns. If anything, funds flowed to areas less hard hit. . . We do not find evidence that the PPP had a substantial effect on local economic outcomes—including declines in hours worked, business shutdowns, initial unemployment insurance claims, and small business revenues—during the first round of the program. Firms appear to use first round funds to build up savings and meet loan and other commitments, which points to possible medium-run impacts.

An unflattering portrayal of social justice activists

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Tyler Cowen writes,

The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word. I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.

I think that this is one of Tyler’s best posts of the year, and I have not excerpted my favorite part. The context is a letter to Harper’s signed by some prominent intellectuals, including many on the left, mildly rebuking cancel culture. I interpret Tyler as saying that the letter indicates how weak our side is relative to what one would hope. Imagine if the same group of signatories published a letter taking a stance with which you disagreed. Would you care? If not, then perhaps one should not be optimistic that this letter will turn the tide.

I wish we had a more scientific profile of social justice activists. My unscientific observations:

1. They tend to be young. Most of the people on my side of the free speech issue are also on my side of 50.

I’ve said before that I suspect that heavy usage of social media makes it more difficult to cope with beliefs you dislike. It makes controversy feel immediate and necessitating a response rather than remote and something one can allow to pass.

2. They tend to be not in the highest status brackets. How many leading scientists want to support #ShutDownSTEM?

If you’re successful in a prestige hierarchy, you don’t resort to dominance moves. Dominance behavior seems to me to be the essence of he social justice activist approach. It feels anti-liberal because it is.

3. They are not in the highest intellectual brackets. For a variety of reasons, institutions of higher education have had to accommodate students, professors, and especially administrators who are not top caliber in analytical ability. Part of the accommodation is to try to disguise the intellectual inferiority of those who are what George Will called lumpen intelligentsia.

They see liberal values and intellectual merit as elements of a dominance hierarchy, and they are wrong about that. They make their own dominance moves in the name of justice, and they are wrong about that, too.

Are real estate agents racist?

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Timothy Taylor writes,

The growing body of audit studies in US housing markets is not a bunch of anecdotes: it’s data showing that racial discrimination which is illegal under existing law is in fact disturbingly pervasive in US housing markets. I would love to see a wave of these audit studies of housing market discrimination carried out around the country, with loud publicity for the results and also with some legal consequences attached. It would be socially useful if rental agents and real estate agents needed to take seriously the possibility that the ways in which they are treating their minority customers could come under public scrutiny.

He cites a study of the Boston rental market as the latest example. Rental agents were less likely to show a particular apartment to a black applicant than to white applicant with identical qualifications.

I would point out that the Boston rental market is peculiar, in that it seems that the prospective renter must use an agent. In other cities, the owner is allowed to advertise the apartment and renters are allowed to respond directly to ads. My guess is that Boston is different because the rental agents were able to lobby for some legal requirements that are not present elsewhere.

When there is no agent in the picture, the incentive of a landlord or a home seller is to rent or sell to the highest bidder. If you exclude customers, based on race or any other factor, you risk leaving money on the table.

But agents have weird incentives. It works out that they want to complete a transaction with as little effort as possible. Maximizing traffic into the property is not the way to go, especially if we are talking about rent-controlled apartments that are scarce.

But why would an agent discriminate on the basis of skin color? The agent may have an instinct that the black person will not “feel comfortable” in a neighborhood, so that it is not worth spending time showing that person the apartment, given the alternative of showing a white person the apartment.

The study shows that renters with housing vouchers were actually more likely to see the apartment of choice if they were black. That might be because the real estate agent is more confident that a transaction will take place in the case of a housing voucher if the prospective renter is black. The agent figures that the black renter will not have as many options.

My hypothesis is that there would be less racial discrimination in housing and rental markets if agents were out of the picture. I suspect that some agents have some preconceptions that are effectively racist, and I doubt that this can be overcome as long as the incentives of agents are what they are.

I am pretty sure that if you don’t have rent control, rental agents won’t gain a foothold, and the rental market will operate without them. Landlords have an incentive not to discriminate, so my hypothesis would be that in markets without rent control an audit study will not show as much discrimination.

What about buying a home/ If you could design the real estate transaction process from scratch, you could make it as easy to buy and sell a home as it is to sell a used car. In doing so, you would reduce the need for real estate agents, and you might reduce racial discrimination.

Many a young techie has salivated over the prospect of solving this problem. But it is not a technology problem. It is a public choice problem. Uber was able to come out pretty well against the lobbyists for the taxicab industry. Airbnb was able to come out ok against the lobbyists for the hotel industry. The real estate lobby is a tougher nut to crack.

More from John Tooby on coalitions

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John Tooby wrote,

ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird. Since coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership (in dominance, status, legitimacy, resources, moral force, etc.), even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group.

.. . .Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.

My thoughts:

Suppose that we can be either politically combative or scientifically neutral. If we are political, our tactics are intended to discredit the other team. If we were scientifically neutral, we would try to give as much credit as possible to all sides.

One might hope that, given a set of issues, over time we would expand the subset that we approach from a scientifically neutral point of view. Instead, we seem to be expanding the subset about which we are politically combative (scientists against science). This seems particularly true in academia, and I agree with Tooby that it is “disastrous.”

Tooby and Leda Cosmides wrote,

Hate is (1) generated by cues that the existence and presence of individuals or groups stably imposes costs substantially greater than the benefits they generate, and (2) is upregulated or downregulated by cues of relative power (formidability), and by cues signaling the degree to which one’s social network is aligned in this valuation. (It is also worth investigating whether, as seems likely, there is a special emotion mode “rage” designed for combat, which orchestrates combat adaptations along with murderous motivational processes.)

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Don’t blame the lockdowns

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Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson write,

While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less busy ones in the same industry.

This is consistent with other findings, as described by Raj Chetty. It also aligns with my intuition.