Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The analogy with cults

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Jonathan Kay writes,

Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.

His main idea is that cults are distinguished by language that sounds meaningful but cannot be effectively translated into other idioms, because it is actually gibberish. But note that if the social justice movement is a cult, it is more decentralized than other cults. An emergent cult?

My way of distinguishing a cult is that people within it are unable to laugh at themselves–and in fact may lose the ability to laugh altogether. Jeffrey Frankel and I noticed that about the cult that surrounded Lyndon LaRouche while Jeff and I were students at Swarthmore in the early 1970s. Then, LaRouche was the head of a Marxist group called the National Caucus of Labor Committees. He subsequently adopted a more right-wing ideology.

But the high-sounding gibberish element was very much there as well.

When I first encountered Amway, my impression was that it was cult, and that impression never really left. That probably won’t help me get a high-level position with the Department of Education these days (not that I would seek one if there were a different education Secretary).

The analogy with religion

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Molly Bridgid McGrath writes,

Sacrificial Politics is a system of roles bestowed upon people by those around them, and these roles carry rights, prerogatives, obligations, expectations, and social statuses. For example, with diversity talk we do not just recognize that some people are “different” in the desired way; we do not just include them; and we don’t treat everyone in the room equally. We confer a status on select people as “diverse” and as having the power to bestow “diversity” on the groups they join. Other people get the status of not “diverse.”

You might think of this system of social constructions as a game with four positions and rules for what each position is supposed to do. (i) The Sacred, who are members of an oppressed category, are supposed to represent their category by believing and advocating certain things. (ii) The Pious are the members of the privileged category (e.g., white, male, straight, or cis) who recognize, honor, protect, and avenge the Sacred. (iii) The Profane are the members of the privileged category who are not pious (“profane” just means “outside the temple”). (iv) The Blasphemers commit acts of desecration against the Sacred (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose) and are marked henceforth as perpetrators of injustice.

It is a long essay on the theme of the religious character of the oppressor-oppressed axis.

Amy Wax follows up with another long essay on how this religion may undermine our legal tradition.

The cult of progressivism dictates that these groups, and any individuals within them, are always victimized by evil attitudes and actions — discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism — on the part of members of favored groups (mainly white males), or to unfair and unjust societal structures. Regardless of facts, logic, or evidence, any disadvantage or detriments they suffer must be attributed to these causes. To the extent these conditions are legally actionable — and the job of progressivism is to ensure that they are — they must be rectified. Those are the central tenets of the legal department of the cult, which must be indulged without exception. Any aspect or result in the law that is inconsistent with these tenets is designated and banished as evil.

Understanding the dire effects of this brand of progressive wokeness rests on recognizing that the proper operation of our legal system depends on objective, impartial, and intelligible limits on the reach of our laws and the instruments of legal redress, and on respecting longstanding discursive, analytical, and adversarial methods for determining those limits.

To me, these read like very unflattering portrayals of the social justice movement. It is hard to believe that they would pass an ideological Turing test. Yet they strike me as valid.

Me vs. the DISC

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1. One of Eric Weinstein’s catch-phrases is the DISC, which I think stands for the Distributed Information Suppression Complex.

2. Recently, I was asked if I want to contribute some sections to a guide for college students of first-year economics. In looking at the guide, I was reminded of my frustrations with mainstream economics. The GDP factory. The failure to appreciate intangible factors. The failure to incorporate the business problems posed by the Internet into mainstream courses. My seemingly hopeless moonshot to overthrow neoclassical economics. My attempt with Specialization and Trade that fell with a thud. etc.

3. One idea that I extracted from Jeffrey Friedman’s turgid prose is that the economics profession probably selects for those who believe in and desire technocratic power. That seems to me what drives the DISC in economics. It leads to things like Raj Chetty’s project.

A central part of Opportunity Insights’ mission is to train the next generation of researchers and policy leaders on methods to study and improve economic opportunity and related social problems. This page provides lecture materials and videos for a course entitled “Using Big Data Solve Economic and Social Problems,” taught by Raj Chetty and Greg Bruich at Harvard University.

Gosh, if you were to just link data from tax returns, credit bureaus, and Google searches, imagine how well “seeing like a state” could work. Ugh.

4. Unfortunately, I am Bill. Let me tell you the story of Bill. In 1990, I was promoted to a low-level management position in charge of five people inside Financial Research at Freddie Mac. One of the staff I inherited was Bill. Bill was a very bright guy, the sort who is called a “computer genius” by people who are intimidated by computers, and even by some who are not intimidated. He was older, in his fifties, with the title of “economist” but doing the work of a glorified research assistant. Bill had bounced around different departments at Freddie Mac, as one supervisor would unload him for his performance issues and another would pick him up for his potential and background.

Bill was very popular with the other staff. When they had a gnarly problem in SAS or with installing new software on a PC (this was a challenge in those days), he would help. Unfortunately, he found these problems so interesting that he would gladly drop whatever assignment you gave him in order to work on the tech issues. So if he was supposed to run a report that I needed for a meeting with top management the next day, I could not count on him to do it. He was very distractable.

One day, he distractedly wandered through the tape library for Freddie Mac’s mainframe computers. I have no idea why. He pulled down a tape and, lo and behold, he found data that had been missing for years. It was data from loans that were originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The data was no longer needed for processing the loans, but it was priceless for research purposes. We could now correlate default rates to data from loan applications, such as the original loan-to-value ratio.

I soon hired another research assistant, Sudha. She was far from brilliant, and her computer skills were weak, but she was meticulous and organized. The other staff, who loved Bill, resented Sudha, especially because Bill always ended up doing the work for Sudha’s memos. But when I left my position, my replacement soon said to me, “Now I understand what you were doing. You needed Sudha in order to get Bill’s projects done.”

So I am Bill. I am distractable. That is who I am. That is where I live. Being distractable perhaps enables me to discover insights. But it also is a weakness. If I were like Bryan Caplan, I would spend several years delving deeply into a topic and come out with a compelling book. Maybe somebody needs to find a Sudha to pair with me.

Why not more women CEOs?

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From a article in the WSJ;

Over the past year, 307 companies in the Russell 3000 Index appointed new CEOs, according to Equilar. Only 26 of those were women—and 17 female CEOs stepped down or were ousted during that time.

We are supposed to believe that the absence of female CEOs indicates the business discriminates against women, or at least is unfair to them. I doubt that this is the case.

1. I have an alternative hypothesis, which is that the CEO job in a large company requires that, among other talents, facility with working with abstract systems. Feel free to re-read my essay on how corporations are managed.

the corporate CEO, operating with a limited information set that arrives indirectly, must use more abstract thinking. We may think of the CEO as trying to navigate in a confusing forest using only little scraps of a map. The CEO operates with a theory of the business and fits those little map scraps into the theory.

This sort of thinking is sometimes called “systemizing.” You find it more often in men than in women. Women tend to be better at empathizing, which is more helpful in small businesses or in functions like human resources. Of course, this does not mean that any given man is better suited to being a CEO than any given woman. But perhaps, just as in chess, you can have unequal gender outcomes at the top that are not the result of discrimination.

2. If women do face discrimination, then there ought to be a profit opportunity in selecting women to be CEOs. Just as the first baseball teams willing to break the color barrier were more successful than the laggards, so companies that shatter the glass ceiling should have an advantage.

I don’t know what the data say about comparative CEO performance. But the fact that almost as many women exited CEO jobs as entered CEO jobs suggests to me that corporations that hire women as CEOs don’t get an automatic windfall.

Concerning Thinkspot

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Popular discussion forums like Twitter and Medium are characterized by:

1. a shortage of reasoned argumentation
2. a surplus of vitriol
3. predominantly far-left participants

It would be nice to see a popular Internet discussion forum that breaks from that mold. In theory, Thinkspot might do that.

Jordan Peterson may not have the right skill set to direct Thinkspot, and he certainly has not had the bandwidth to devote to it. It probably has very little chance of succeeding. Maybe there is no centralized way of doing it at all–I still long for the heyday of the blogosphere. But I believe that it is worth a try.

The essay on the null hypothesis and Charles Murray

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I am posting it below, because so many readers complained about Thinkspot. It is true that Thinkspot is not in a satisfying state as is. Please comment only the essay. I will put up a separate post on the issues with Thinkspot.

1.   If the shared environment explains little of the variance in cognitive repertoires, and
2.   If the only environmental factors that can be affected by outside interventions are part of the shared environment,
3.   Then outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on cognitive repertoires.
–Charles Murray, Human Diversity, Chapter 13.

As an example of an outside intervention, consider reading to pre-school children.   Researchers have observed that pre-school children who have been read to a great deal by their parents subsequently perform better in school than students who have not been read to as much.
 
But this relationship is not necessarily causal.   It could be that the better school performance is due to inherited characteristics that are correlated with how much reading the parents do to their pre-school children.   In order to establish causality, one would have to conduct an experiment in which children are randomly selected into a control group that receives little reading and a treatment group that receives a lot of reading.   
 
If such an experiment were conducted, my prediction is that the effects on the treatment group would be.
 
–small to begin with.
–fade out completely within a few years, meaning that by, say, fourth grade, the treatment group and the control group show no difference.
–to the extent that the effects were non-zero and did not fade out, the results would fail to replicate in a subsequent experiment.
 
I call this prediction The Null Hypothesis, borrowing the statistical term for “no effect of the treatment.”   My reading of the literature on educational treatments is that the null hypothesis essentially always holds.   When a treatment is rigorously tested, using experimental methods, its effects are small, fade-out is complete, and/or the results fail to replicate.
 
Why does the null hypothesis hold for educational treatments (and, incidentally, for other policy treatments, such as the effect of job training programs on subsequent employment or the effect of health insurance on health outcomes)?  Consider four factors that affect human outcomes:.
 
1.   Overall cultural environment.
2.   Genetic inheritance.
3.   Gestational variation.
4.   Specific environmental interventions.
 
I believe that I have presented these in order of importance.  
 
The overall cultural environment, or “milieu” as Murray calls it, clearly matters.   If you could transport one of your children to a different historical period or to a totally different society, then you can be sure that the child’s outcomes will be affected. The Flynn Effect, in which average IQ changes across generations, is indicative of the importance of the cultural environment.   I think it only makes sense to talk about variations of the other three factors within a given environment, such as the affluent countries in the 21st century.
 
The significance of genetic inheritance is what Murray highlights.     The evidence from twin studies is persuasive in that regard.
 
Murray does not discuss gestational variation, but Kevin Mitchell’s Innate highlights its importance.   Mitchell argues that some of the variation between identical twins in cognitive repertoires is due to mutations and other accidents that occur as the fetal brain forms.  
 
In twin studies that account for variation as the sum of genetic variation and variation in the “shared environment,” the innate gestational variation tends to be misleadingly attributed to the “shared environment” component.   I believe that this leads people to be more optimistic about the potential for specific interventions than is warranted.
 
In my view, once we have accounted for the differences created by the overall cultural environment, genetic inheritance, and gestational variation, there is very little room for specific interventions to make a difference.   In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris pointed to evidence that parental behavior makes little difference in children’s outcomes.   If the people who are most heavily involved in raising children make little difference, then what is the likelihood that, say, a particular elementary school teacher or a specific schooling method will make a difference?
 
I know that there are studies that purport to find exceptions to the Null Hypothesis.   Such studies receive wide acclaim.   But these tend to be one-off results that do not replicate.
 
I plan to write subsequently on points where my view differs from Murray’s.   But on the Null Hypothesis, my views are coherent with his.  

Essay on Charles Murray and the Null Hypothesis

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I put it up on Thinkspot, which is sort of like Medium, but without all the lefty drivel. Of course, Thinkspot could easily go under. The essay relates the Null Hypothesis to Charles Murray’s new book.

To gain access to Thinkspot, you have to first go here: https://www.ts.today/ and sign up as a beta user. Let me know how that process goes.

All I know about Thinkspot is that Jordan Peterson was involved in starting it. The revenue model for now appears to be not to charge readers but to charge writers a “pay what you will” amount, initially suggested at $48 a year.

A sub-Dunbar business mindset

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I enjoyed listening to Erik Torenberg interview entrepreneur Zack Kanter. I had a hard time following the software jargon, and I would welcome explanation, because it sounds as if there were some important ideas there. I was interested in the speculation that software applications that are easy to build have been built, and what remains are more challenging applications. I found that hypothesis difficult to evaluate.

But what struck me most is that Kanter thinks he has discovered some great insight that he can run his company without meetings, product plans, or other formalities, and that a few great engineers is better than a lot of good engineers. But he is running a company with a number of workers way under the Dunbar number of 150. If you can build a functioning business with that small a team, then good for you. But some businesses require getting large organizations to cooperate or buy, and that means you need a sales force. Some businesses operate in or near highly regulated industries, so that means you need many lawyers and lobbyists.

Once your business requires more than about 150 people to operate, tell me how well your informal management methods are working.

Catch phrases, intellectuals, and shelf life

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Scholar’s Stage writes,

tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in the aughts has aged well through the 2010s.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who offers some characteristically terse and contrarian suggestions for how a public intellectual might maintain a long shelf life.

I would note the irony of using Twitter to sniff at others’ short shelf lives. My other thoughts:

1. What do we mean by “shelf life?” To me, it means being a focal point for discussion for a long time. I would focus on the shelf life of one’s ideas rather than on one’s personal shelf life. For example, Paul Krugman has had a long personal shelf life, but I can think of only one of his ideas–the liquidity trap–as having a long shelf life, and very little of his personal shelf life depends on that idea.

2. Note that an idea does not have to be accepted universally to have a long shelf life. Many of us do not buy the liquidity trap.

3. Note that an idea does not have to hold up well to have a long shelf life. “The End of History” has enjoyed a long shelf life.

4. Catchy phrases help an idea’s shelf life. Bell Curve, Bowling Alone, The Long Tail. John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were skilled at producing phrases that caught on.

5. The Original Position is another great catch phrase. I think that Rawls has enjoyed a much longer shelf life than he deserved. Perhaps because his book had at least one other great catch phrase, Justice as Fairness.

6. r>g is another compelling catch phrase. Who would have thought?

6. Tyler is good at coming up with phrases that catch on: Great Stagnation, Average is Over. Others who have coined more than one successful catch phrase include Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, and Peter Thiel.

7. Robin Hanson probably has come up with more ideas that deserve a long shelf life than anyone I can think of, but he needs better catch-phrases.

8. I have plenty of ideas with good catch phrases: Null Hypothesis, PSST, Suits vs. Geeks, stimulate demand and restrict supply, three axes, etc. But they don’t get picked up and amplified by other people. Perhaps because I have not followed Tyler’s second rule of advice, which is “Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals.” Maybe that’s really the most important rule of all.

1984 finally has arrived

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Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright say so.

Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence (AI), for example, allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional surveillance. Not only do these digital tools enable authoritarian regimes to cast a wider net than with human-dependent methods; they can do so using far fewer resources: no one has to pay a software program to monitor people’s text messages, read their social media posts, or track their movements. And once citizens learn to assume that all those things are happening, they alter their behavior without the regime having to resort to physical repression.

This in spite of, or in response to, their tally that

between 2000 and 2017, 60 percent of all dictatorships faced at least one antigovernment protest of 50 participants or more.

. . .protests unseated ten autocracies, or 23 percent of the 44 authoritarian regimes that fell during the period. Another 19 authoritarian regimes lost power via elections. . .many of the elections had followed mass protest campaigns.

Recommended.