Author Archives: Arnold Kling

On Mary Eberstadt’s latest book

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In a review of Primal Screams, I wrote,

When a tribe is formed out of families, members feel secure in their status. One’s identity is established as a father, mother, sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent.

In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another. Eberstadt suggests that under such circumstances:

… some people, deprived of recognition in the traditional ways, will regress to a state in which their demand for recognition becomes ever more insistent and childlike. This brings us to one of the most revealing features of identity politics: its infantilized expression and vernacular.

Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment. I can imagine Eberstadt reading the David Brooks essay to which I referred last week and coming out with her own primal scream.

Russ Roberts and Yuval Levin

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They discuss Levin’s A Time to Build in a podcast. Levin says,

I think when reporters complain about Donald Trump–as they rightly do, in a lot of ways–they should think about whether what Trump is doing relative to what the Presidency is supposed to be isn’t very similar to what a lot of political reporters are doing relative to what journalism is supposed to be. They are engaging in a kind of indulgent performative version of the real thing that makes the real thing much harder to do.

There is a lot of interesting material here. I recommend the whole podcast.

Hating on China

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Marco Rubio says,

Losing industries to China was not an “unintended consequence” of liberal trade and financial policies; it was very often the goal. It required an assumption that middle-class American fami­lies would be better off with cheaper imported goods and better financing terms on consumer debt. It required the assumption that the American economy would be better off with financial services as its comparative advantage. The reason these assumptions are wrong is not because the changes they brought weren’t managed properly, or not pursued consistently enough, but because the underlying belief about what makes for a good society is not true.

Re-read that paragraph and substitute for China “Uber” or “Walmart” or “the Internet.”

And when you read about “financing terms” and “financial services” think about what sector is running up debt at an insane pace.

As you can tell, reading the interview got my libertarian hackles up. In my view, Washington does more damage to the American economy than China, by far.

Environmentalism wastes resources

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John Tierney writes,

single-use plastic bags aren’t the worst environmental choice at the supermarket—they’re the best. High-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering and environmental efficiency. They’re cheap, convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but thin and light enough to make and transport using scant energy, water or other resources. Though they’re called single-use, most people reuse them, typically as trash-can liners. When governments ban them, consumers buy thicker substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint.

David Brooks on family structure and community support

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Summarizing a long essay, David Brooks writes,

the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time.

I live in a nuclear-family bubble. Among my friends, divorces are rare, and children out of wedlock are unheard of.

So I imagine that the converse is true. There must be people who hardly know any nuclear families.

Brooks writes,

The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

The friends my age generally have married children, with grandchildren. All of us feel that we have won at life. I don’t think Brooks appreciates that spending time together with your spouse and your grandchildren pretty much takes care of the “need to belong” problems that his “forged families” try to solve.

I think that pretty much every advice column and advice book fails to take account of grandchildren. Certainly not Eli Finkel. True, there is nothing you can do in your youth to guarantee that your life will culminate in a stable marriage that includes grandchildren. But there are paths that you can go down that lead in a different direction, and I recommend trying to stay off of those paths.

Brooks and other social analysts see humans as wanting to care for others and to be cared for by others. If you need to be straightened out when you are messing up, or if you need help, or if you need a shoulder to cry on, it’s good to have people who are there for you.

Your church or your synagogue used to provide that, but nobody is joining any more. I wonder why.

1. Perhaps people are substituting other forms of togetherness, so they can do without church affiliation. But then presumably Brooks wouldn’t have a story to tell about how bad things are nowadays.

2. Perhaps people, or at least many of them, don’t really value togetherness the way we think they ought to. Bowling alone is a revealed preference. The chart that Brooks finds “haunting” shows that there are ten nations with more than 16 percent of households living alone (the U.S. is not one of them), including such supposed havens for happiness as Denmark (the leader in solo households), Finland, Norway, and Switzerland.

3. Conservative sociologists, of whom Yuval Levin is the heir, would in part blame the growth of government, particularly remote government, for usurping some of the roles of churches and synagogues, including providing relief for the poor. This lowers the status of churches, so people feel less inspired to join.

4. Perhaps the causality runs from having a nuclear family to being motivated to seek out community. We need to go back to the issue of the decline of nuclear families.

5. Maybe the bonding rituals at church–prayers, sermonizing–are too time-consuming these days.

Whether Brooks’ ideas about forged communities take off depends on which of these explanations is most important. If your money is on (2), (3), and (4), then attempts at creating community togetherness are fighting the cultural tide.

Differences in suicide concentration

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Scott Alexander writes,

While genetics or culture may matter a little, overall I am just going to end with a blanket recommendation to avoid being part of any small circumpolar ethnic group that has just discovered alcohol.

That is at the end of a long and typically careful analysis of parts of the world that have high suicide rates.

Because suicide is a rare event, it is very difficult to make inferences from data. Scott, as usual, does a good job of being careful. One note that I would add is that Case and Deaton observed that in the U.S., suicide rates are higher in states with low population density. I don’t know if this is just coincidence or in fact there is something protective against suicide about high population density.

The left cannot move center

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1. Eric Kaufmann writes,

That is, left-wing parties cannot move to the vote-rich zone of most electorates where the median voter—typically somewhat conservative on culture and centre-left on economics—resides. Conservatives can do so more easily as they are less beholden to libertarian economic orthodoxy than left-wing parties are to progressive cultural values.

Kaufmann sees libertarianism and social justice religion as unpopular. Conservatives can throw libertarians under the bus, which I see happening. But the left cannot or will not throw the social justice activists under the bus.

2. Bobby Jindal writes,

It has been easier for Republicans to attract new voters, such as moderate Midwesterners, by modifying their traditional economic positions than for Democrats to tone down their social views. The left simply can’t compromise.

I am feeling nostalgic for the days when the libertarian conspiracy supposedly was all-powerful.

Sort of related, I will depart from my usual practice and offer a few remarks on a current event, the rise of Bernie Sanders.

–Chris Matthews’ infamous comparison with the fall of France in 1940 was actually spot on. When the German invasion began, everyone in the West expected fierce French resistance and a protracted struggle. Similarly, everyone expected the Democratic Presidential contest to take a long time to reach resolution. The surprise is that Sanders went so far above what we all thought was his ceiling of about 25 percent of primary voters. He seems to have pierced 35 percent, and if that holds he is unstoppable.

–It seems likely that the 2020 election will take Negative Partisanship to new heights. Some voters who do not like Mr. Trump will vote for him because of how much they oppose Sanders. And while some Democrats may think that Sanders is too radical, they are so heavily committed to the view that Trump is illegitimate that they will stick with Sanders no matter what.

–I have not seen a single Democratic pundit or politician express reservations about a Sanders Presidency. They worry that his candidacy is weak. They are not committed to oppose Sanders the way that #neverTrumpers were committed to opposing Donald Trump.

–If the election were held today, I would give Sanders more than a 50 percent chance of winning. Mr. Trump “drew to an inside straight” to take the states that he needed.

–But between now and November, I expect Sanders to slide. I don’t think he is as intelligent as Mr. Trump, and that is not because I think Mr. Trump sets a high bar. Sanders strikes me as having little or no intellectual flexibility. There is a good chance that he will make some excruciating mistakes. But there will be no repeat of Nixon-McGovern, because Negative Partisanship will put a high floor under Sanders. In my opinion, he is a heavy favorite to win the popular vote.

Thoughts on social epistemology

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Quentin Skinner wrote,

The golden rule is that, however bizarre the beliefs we are studying may seem to be, we must begin by trying to make the agents who accepted them appear as rational as possible.

Skinner’s golden rule of interpretive charity is cited by Jeffrey Friedman in Power Without Knowledge, a book that I am still not recommending.

I could phrase Skinner’s golden rule as, “Explain the beliefs of others the way that you would explain your own beliefs.” Because introspection leads me to find that my own beliefs are not based on a moral or mental defect, then I should not attribute your differing beliefs to a mental or moral defect.

So how to deal with disagreement? For example, I believe it is ok to eat meat, but other people disagree. I believe that what the Fed can control does not have much effect on the economy, but other people disagree.

My explanation for disagreement that is golden-rule compatible is that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We probably start out by trusting our parents. We proceed to trust teachers. At some point, we develop a set of friends and peers that we trust. We develop trust in certain authors. We may trust celebrities, including business and political celebrities. Often, we distinguish domains–I trust my doctor’s opinion on upper respiratory infections, but not on health care reform.

From people we trust, we learn both what to think and how to think. When I don’t want to go to the trouble of working something out for myself, I let other people tell me what to think. I let my dentist tell me that I have a cavity and what I should have him do about it. But when I want to work out something for myself, I am using what I learned from other people about how to think.

Some implications of this hypothesis:

1. You and I have different beliefs in large part because over the course of our lives we have encountered different people who influenced what and how we think. Somewhere along the way, some thoughts were seeded into your brain that lead you to hold a point of view that I am convinced is wrong.

2, When you express a point of view that differs from mine, unless you change my mind, my trust in you is going to fall. If you contradict a view that I hold strongly, then my trust in you will fall really far. I think that this may explain the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning.” When you show me a study that supports my beliefs, I do not have to worry about whether I trust the methods used in the study. But when you show me a study that contradicts my beliefs, I have to either change my mind or find something wrong with the study. So I look more closely at the methods, probing for flaws. If I do find flaws, my trust in the study’s authors falls by a lot.

3, To change someone’s mind, you have to earn their trust. It seems that we rarely do this, and in fact we rarely try to do this.

4. What sorts of people earn our trust? In my case, I believe that my father set the tone with his First Iron Law of Social Science, “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” All of my life, I have been inclined to trust people who look at multiple sides of an issue and who are able to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. But many others seem to prefer to trust those who display high confidence. Like Harry Truman, many people long for the the one-handed economist.

Did you two visit the same future?

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Ross Douthat writes,

the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

Today is the publication date for Douthat’s The Decadent Society. So by the time you read this, I should have read some the book.

Also sharing Douthat’s viewpoint is the blogger It’s Only Chemo. Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who we know is of a similar persuasion.

Earlier in the month, there appeared The Future is Faster than you Think by Peter S. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which takes the opposite position. They talk about what has almost arrived with excitement, not with irony. They sound to me like venture capitalists who believe every pitch they’ve ever heard.

I fall somewhere in between, but I lean more toward Diamandis and Kotler.

Sizing up the current scene

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Start with a bunch of excerpts.

1. Spencer Klavan writes,

The rise of woke politics, and the urgent need to defeat it, has made strange bedfellows of all of us in the new conservative coalition.

2. James Hankins writes,

A strategy of seeking total victory over cultural Marxism, in any case, gives it too much credit. It overlooks how intellectually feeble it already is. Cultural Marxism is able to flourish today precisely because of hyperpartisanship. It appears strong only because it is a weapon clasped in the fist of ideological tyranny. In a more pluralist culture, it would have to defend itself against critics who do not share its premises, and it would soon find itself at a serious disadvantage. Cultural Marxists are good at policing their own ranks for unorthodoxy and exposing the hidden power-relations that sustain (as they wrongly think) all non-Marxist structures of thought. They are not good at finding common premises with non-Marxists, and therefore at constructing arguments with universal validity. But in politics, constructing arguments with universal validity is what we call seeking the common good.

3. William A. Galston writes,

it isn’t hard to understand why only 15% of those under 30 think the U.S. is the greatest nation on earth, why nearly half believe hard work is no guarantor of success, or why so many of them support a single national health-care program—and Bernie Sanders for president.

4. Reacting to the recent European National Conservatism Conference, Titus Techera writes,

From this political point of view, intellectuals are supposed to fulfill a negative, defensive role: To protect reasonable politics from the attacks of elite institutions, especially in Brussels, but it’s not obvious whether intellectuals who want to discredit the EU as such and transform Europe could retain the necessary enthusiasm and urgency playing for what might seem like low stakes. They certainly don’t seem to have a future in government, where, Orbán stressed, the economy comes first.

(Jim Hoft gives a more complete, matter-of-fact report on the conference.)

My comments on these:

1. I agree with Klavan that those of us who oppose the religious/cult version of contemporary leftism should focus on that issue. For now, we ought to sweep under the rug our differences about free-market economics, Donald Trump, and the social issues that Klavan discusses.

2. Although Hankins’ essay overall is the best of the bunch, the quoted excerpt is the one with which I am least in agreement. The religious/cult version of contemporary leftism may look feeble intellectually, but its political power on college campuses is formidable. The administrative apparatus set up to enforce it is going to be around for a long time. Not so the professors who would stand for reason rather than religion, most of whom will retire over the next 15 years. I think that intellectual detente is possible between those of us on the right and those who are on the non-religious left. But we do have to inflict a long-lasting defeat on the religion/cult.

3. Galston is an interesting figure to watch. Earlier this year, he fretted over Sanders’ potential to drive away voters in November. I see this more recent column as the mirror image of a conservative writing “Donald Trump would not be my choice, but I understand where his supporters are coming from.” In any case, his analysis of polling data showing Sanders’ strong support among young people is quite sobering. Can we speculate on how a Sanders victory in November might affect the religious cult? It would give the cult a more sympathetic figure in the White House, and that seems dangerous. But it might dissipate some of the cult’s energy. In particular, in the absence of the Trump bogeyman, the non-religious left might be tempted to assert itself.

4. Techera speculates on the proper role for conservative intellectuals. He suggests that it is “negative, defensive,” and this may not be very motivating. Progressive ideology offers the intellectual a higher-status part to play, that of helping rulers enact and implement activist policies. And the religious cult offers intellectuals a role that is even higher status yet, that of stamping out heresy and punishing sinners.

I would suggest that conservative intellectuals worry a bit less about politics and a bit more about the hold of the religious cult on campus. To me, the situation at the major institutions of higher education looks hopeless. We need some alternative prestige hierarchy in which reason is given a higher value than religion.