Author Archives: Arnold Kling

TLP and police

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Consider the phrase “De-fund the police” from a three-axes perspective.

From the oppressor-oppressed perspective, it sounds like a call to take resources away from oppressors and give them to the oppressed.

From a civilization-barbarism perspective, it sounds like a call to undermine civilization and pave the way for barbarism.

From a liberty-coercion perspective, it sounds like a misdirected effort. Excess coercion comes from unnecessary laws and unaccountable enforcement. For libertarians, reform would start with having fewer laws. Those who enforce the laws should be accountable for acting within the law themselves.

As is often the case these days, the libertarian view sounds the most sensible to me, followed by the conservative view. As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.

The NYT purge

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Ross Douthat writes (link goes to the AEI web site),

But part of the anti-racism movement is seeking much more than just changes to policing. It’s interested in spiritual renewal and consciousness raising — something evident from the revivalism of so many protests in the last week — and its capacious definitions of racism imply, in the end, not reform but re-education, not interracial dialogue but strict white deference, not a liberal society groping toward equality but a corrupt society being re-engineered.

. . .it was the liberal New York Times that hired me and supported me, the liberal New York Times that encouraged James Bennet to build a genuinely diverse and fractious Op-Ed page, and it was the successor ideology’s advance inside this paper that incited the controversy that unjustly cost my friend and former boss his job. So now, in whatever struggle looms for the future of this institution, it’s this conservative’s hope that the liberal New York Times will win.

So Douthat’s response to the purge was to submit a column rather than a resignation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had an intense anti-Communist movement bent on discovering and purging every former and suspected Communist sympathizer it could find. The excesses of anti-Communism caused real harm, particularly considering the feebleness of the threat posed by the Communist Party in this country at that time.

In contemporary America, we have an intense anti-racist movement bent on discovering and purging every former and suspected racist sympathizer it can find. The excesses of anti-racism cause real harm, particularly considering the feebleness of the threat posed by racists in this country today.

I go back to what I wrote 18 months ago.

I appreciate living in a society where any widespread movement by colleges or corporations to demonstrate “commitment to Christianity” or to mandate “Jesus training” would be vomited out of the system. That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”

I feel the same way about organizational “position statements” proclaiming their commitment to racial justice. If we had fanatical Christians running around intimidating everybody, then these organizations would be issuing position statements proclaiming their commitment to Jesus.

UPDATE: A reader recommends this Andrew Sullivan essay, which voices similar sentiments.

TLP on BLM

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Matthew Gagnon writes,

Kling talked about the question of police conduct in dealing with African Americans, which spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and how each “tribe” thinks about the problem.

“The progressive framing of the issue emphasizes racism, among police and in society as a whole. Progressives put white police, or white society at large, in the role of oppressors, with African Americans in the role of the oppressed,” he wrote.

“The conservative framing of the issue emphasizes the need for order. Conservatives put criminal suspects and unruly demonstrators in the role of barbarian threats and put police in the role of defenders of civilization.”

“The Libertarian framing of the issue emphasizes the need for citizens to be free of police harassment.”

My sense is that the various tribes are behaving true to form these days.

Self-hating libertarians

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Brink Lindsey joins their ranks.

Government excess, in other words, was not the fundamental problem. On the contrary, a large and activist government was all that stood between us and mass privation and suffering on a mind-boggling scale. Only government can mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic – in the same way it responds to other shocks that lead to other, less drastic slumps – by acting as insurer of last resort, using its taxing, spending, borrowing, and money-creating powers to sustain household spending and keep businesses afloat until resumption of something approaching normal economic activity is possible.

My view is that only entrepreneurial activity can re-organize the economy in response to the pandemic. The eventual post-pandemic economy will contain many new businesses, while others will have disappeared. Government impedes this process by creating friction and favoritism. It won’t help to give the Federal Reserve the powers that in China belong to the Communist Party.

Later, Lindsey writes,

the modern libertarian movement, which has done so much to shape attitudes on the American right about the nature of government and its proper role, is dedicated to the proposition that the contemporary American state is illegitimate and contemptible.

Lindsey plans two more essays in this vein. I hope that in at least one of them he will get beyond vague allegations.
So far, his essay reminds me of the Progressive narrative of the financial crisis of 2008, in which an “atmosphere of deregulation” supposedly unleashed the financial sector, but the specific causal mechanism is never spelled out. That is because the financial deregulation that actually took place were only intended to make that sector more competitive. Meanwhile, risk-based capital regulations were an effort to tighten up safety and soundness regulation. Ironically, it was those regulations that steered the financial sector toward mortgage securities.

Reality necessarily falls short of Progressive utopia. Rather than admit their own failures, Progressives externalize them. That is how they come to believe that libertarian ideology is a powerful and malignant force.

In his future essays, Lindsey should spell out the specific reductions in state capacity that libertarians imposed. In what ways have the powers of the President been limited? How have the un-elected officials of the bureaucracy been curbed? Which areas of economic life has government been kept out of? What government functions have been abolished or crippled for lack of funds? Under which Administration was government spending reduced?

Every day the news brings us stories of Progressives on the march, tramping out of college campuses and into the larger society, bringing their cancel culture and their contempt for capitalism and freedom with them. Meanwhile, Trump-era Republicans reject free trade and fiscal responsibility. Is this the time for libertarians to berate themselves?

Careful self-criticism is welcome. But coming when liberty in America is at the lowest point in my lifetime, reading an essay that merely echoes the Progressives’ anti-libertarian slogans and slanders left me disgusted.

Economic scenarios

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Here is how I think about economic prospects for the next few years.

One driver will be fear of the virus. Fear will be short-lived if the virus goes away this summer and does not come back, or if there is a vaccine, or if a treatment protocol makes it much less lethal in vulnerable populations. But if the virus comes back in the fall and still threatens lives, then fear of the virus will affect activities for a long time.

Another driver will be what we might call business shakeout. Some industries have been ripe for transformation by the Internet since before the virus: brick-and-mortar retail; higher education; high-cost health care. To what extent will the virus accelerate this shakeout?

Put these possibilities into a matrix.

light shakeout heavy shakeout
fear fades Europe’s hope stock market’s hope
fear lasts stagnation unrest

Europe has a low tolerance for shakeouts. Its policies are geared toward that. European governments tend to channel transfer payments through employers. So you have zombie companies paying zombie workers.

The stock market is expecting a lot of shakeout. The tech leaders are worth more now than they were before the virus. But if virus fears persist, economic activity overall will take a long time to recover, and the tech giants will be getting a larger share of a small pie. The stock market must be expecting the fear to fade even as the big shakeout takes place.

I think that there is at least a 25 percent chance that virus fears persist and continue to curtail economic activity. In that case, the European approach, which the U.S. also may attempt, will be to try to freeze the economy in place by subsidizing legacy businesses. The result will be stagnation. But if governments do not have the money or the capability to keep zombie businesses going in a high-fear environment, then the shakeout will destroy the way of life for many households. That is a recipe for a lot of social turmoil.

All hail the null hypothesis

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From a couple of years ago, by Jon Baron of the Arnold Foundation (no relation).

Business: Of 13,000 RCTs conducted by Google and Microsoft to evaluate new products or strategies in recent years, 80 to 90 percent have reportedly found no significant effects.[iv]

Medicine: Reviews in different fields of medicine have found that 50 to 80 percent of positive results in initial clinical studies are overturned in subsequent, more definitive RCTs.[v] Thus, even in cases where initial studies—such as comparison-group designs or small RCTs—show promise, the findings usually do not hold up in more rigorous testing.

Education: Of the 90 educational interventions evaluated in RCTs commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences and reporting findings between 2002 and 2013, close to 90 percent were found to produce weak or no positive effects.[vi]

Employment/training: In Department of Labor-commissioned RCTs that reported findings between 1992 and 2013, about 75 percent of tested interventions were found to have found weak or no positive effects.[vii]

Pointer from Michael Goldstein.

Variation in polling response

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Andrew Gelman and others wrote,

apparent swings in vote intention represent mostly changes in sample composition, not actual swings. These are phantom swings arising from sample selection bias in survey participation. Previous studies have tended to assume that campaign events cause changes in vote intentions, while ignoring the possibility that they may cause changes in survey participation. We will show that in 2012, campaign events more strongly correlated with changes in survey participation than vote intentions.

Cited in Hugo Mercier’s book.

The hypothesis is that when your candidate is perceived as doing poorly, you are less likely to respond to a poll. If pollsters had a consistent panel of responders, they would see that people are not changing their minds. So, if you see Mr. Biden moving up or down in the polls as the campaign goes on, it is likely that the swing is over-estimated. But I wonder if being discouraged about answering a poll is also a predictor of being discouraged about voting on election day.