Author Archives: Arnold Kling

My critique of Case and Deaton

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Mercatus titled it Death and Politics.

Their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, includes both an actuarial analysis of disturbing patterns of mortality in the United States and a political statement calling for government action to overhaul pharmaceutical regulation, take control of the health care system, and shift the balance of power in the economy away from capital and toward labor. It seems evident to the authors that their political statement follows from their actuarial analysis, but the connection between the two struck this reader as tenuous.

If there were a Nobel Prize for scapegoating. . .

Yuval Levin watch

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1. My review of A Time to Build.

Levin sees today’s elites as unwilling to abide by institutional constraints. Some abuse their power within an institution. Levin terms this “insiderism”. Others only use institutional prestige to enhance their personal ambitions but eschew any obligations to bolster the institutions that support them or to conform to institutional norms. Levin calls this “outsiderism” or “platforming,” meaning using the institution as a platform from which to expand one’s personal recognition.

2. A very comprehensive interview of Yuval Levin by Richard Reinsch . Hard to excerpt, but here is a slice:

meritocracy contributes to that problem because it leaves our elites now thinking that their positions are earned, that their authority is legitimate by default because they’ve been selected into elite institutions of higher education in particular. . . an elite that doesn’t think it needs to be constrained is a very bad fit for a democratic society.

It invites the kind of resistance, frustration, and ultimately populism that we’ve seen, and I think it deserves that response. Our elites in fact don’t think enough about how to constrain themselves in ways that could make it clear to the larger society that they’re playing a legitimate and valuable role. And I think institutions have an enormous role to play in that because our elite institutions can constrain our elites in ways that put them to use for the larger society. That’s what the professions do. That’s what political and cultural institutions do when they’re functioning well.

But if we understand our institutions as performative, as just platforms for people to stand and shine on, then they don’t really function to constrain our elites. They just display our elites and increase the frustration of the larger society with them. I think part of the solution to this part of the problem our country confronts is an idea of institutionalism that requires much more constraint and formation, that requires people to understand themselves as needing to prove that they operate by some standard of integrity and public service and that would require a real cultural change in a lot of our elite institutions.

As I read political theory

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For some reason, a lot of the books that I’ve delved into recently have dealt with political theory. These include:

–10% Less Democracy, by Garett Jones

–American Secession, by F.H. Buckley

–Power Without Knowledge, by Jeffrey Friedman

I am unhappy with the writing style that I am finding. Although I learned enough from Jones that I recommend his book highly, for my taste his style is too folksy. Buckley also strikes me that way, although less so.

I suppose if you were talking political theory to someone with an average college freshman level of background and interest (and I have low expectations for both), then informal language and cultural allusions might help. But the average college freshman is not going to pick up a book on political theory.

On the other hand, Friedman’s prose is laden with academic jargon. If you are a graduate student trying to signal to your professors that you have been listening to their lectures, then that may be a good strategy. In fact, the technical terms may appeal to the typical reader of a book in political theory. But not me.

As to substance, the authors avoid the mistake of acting as though the problem for political theorists is to get the political system to reflect the will of the people. But so far I do not come away from these books, either individually or collectively, with a clear sense of the problem that political theory is supposed to solve. What are the goals that we want to achieve, and what are the constraints under which we operate? If and when I write on political theory, I will want to try to be as clear as possible on those questions.

Russ Roberts on middle-class progress

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He says,

In the 1980s, the two best basketball players were Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. They made a lot of money and a lot more money than the people in the stands watching them. Now let’s come to the present, when LeBron James and Kevin Durant make a lot more money than the people in the stands. The gap between the best basketball players’ salaries and the average fan salary is bigger than it used to be, because basketball is more popular today than it was 30–40 years ago. But note that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson didn’t get those gains. Basketball players have gotten richer over time relative to their fans, but also relative to past basketball players. The bottom half is not static over time, and the 1 percent is not static over time. So when we use the snapshot model and say, “The top 1 percent has gotten all the gains”—they’re not the same people!

There is much more in the interview.

Tyler Cowen on Charles Murray

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Cowen writes,

“8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.”

Here I have what I think is a major disagreement with Murray. If he means the term “shared environment” in the narrow sense used by say twin studies, he is probably correct. But in the more literal, Webster-derived conception of “shared environment” I very much disagree. Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify.

Now that I have taken a first pass through the book, I believe that this criticism is unfair and should be retracted. Murray uses the term “milieu” to cover what Tyler means by “culture,” and Murray says everything about “milieu” that Tyler would want him to say about culture.

What Murray means by “shared environment” is just about anything that can vary within a (cultural) milieu. Parenting, schooling, government taxes and transfers, etc. All of it runs up against a broader version of the Null Hypothesis. But Murray says very clearly and emphatically that the milieu matters a great deal.

I wish that Murray had written Human Diversity under a pseudonym. Perhaps “Thomas Piketty” or “John Rawls.” It deserves the sort of study and discussion that was afforded Capital in the 21st Century or A Theory of Justice.

A religion that persecutes non-believers

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John Cochrane writes

I’m interested here in the politicization of our institutions. It is interesting that not everyone is on board this project, even in the UC system. There are still Jerry Coynes and Abigail Thompsons at major universities. Much of the project is to force political conformity and silence their dissent within the institution.

I recommend the whole post, which covers the controversy over the requirement of the UC system for faculty to submit “diversity statements.”

One more excerpt:

The game is no longer to advance candidates who are themselves “diverse.” The game is to stock the faculty with people of a certified ideological stripe, who are committed to advancing this cause. Tom Sowell need not apply. In case the litmus test is not perfectly clear:

Sowell, of course, is a distinguished economic conservative who happens to be black.

If you don’t say the right things in your diversity statement, you can be denied a promotion, a raise, or even a job. I think it is fair to say that this is a religion that persecutes non-believers.

How is this going to play out? For 250 years, Americans resisted religious persecution. It seems to me that either universities have to change, or America has to change. Which will it be?

Large countries and bad government

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F.H. Buckley writes,

We’re overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It sounds like I should read his new book, American Secession.

I originally wrote this post before his article appeared. I started with a list of the countries with at least 100 million in population.

1 China 1,384,689,024
2 India 1,296,834,048
3 United States 329,256,480
4 Indonesia 262,787,408
5 Brazil 208,846,896
6 Pakistan 207,862,512
7 Nigeria 203,452,512
8 Bangladesh 159,453,008
9 Russia 142,122,784
10 Japan 126,168,160
11 Mexico 125,959,208
12 Ethiopia 108,386,392
13 Philippines 105,893,384

Note that the governments of all of them, with the exception of the U.S. and Japan, are either very authoritarian, incompetent, or both.

I’ve made this point before in different ways. But the U.S. is not comparable to Denmark or Singapore. The peer group for the U.S. is the countries on the list above. And from that perspective, we should really be grateful for what we have.

Scale is seriously under-rated as a challenge in human society.

Polygenic scores

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Charles Murray is bullish on them.

I think the application of genomic data to social science questions is roughly where aviation was in 1908. The world’s best plane, the Wright Flyer, was little more than a toy. Yet within a decade, thousands of acrobatically maneuverable aircraft were flying high and fast over the battlefields of Europe.

I will read his latest book, but I have already staked out a more skeptical position.

Plomin is optimistic that with larger sample sizes better polygenic scores will be found, but I am skeptical. Unless there are unexplored areas in the existing data sets, such as non-linearities or interaction effects, my guess is that there are diminishing returns to enlarging the sample size.

That refers to Robert Plomin and his book Blueprint, not to be confused with another recent book of the same title by a different author.

Martin Gurri (and Garett Jones) watch

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Theodore Dalrymple writes,

I do not, however, think that so large a proportion of the French public supports the strikers because it is unaware of the underlying realities of the situation. I think they support the strikers because of a general dissatisfaction with life, when anything that discomfits those in authority is welcomed, even if it is even more inconvenient for themselves.

The elite view, which Dalrymple shares, is that French pensions are filled with special-interest provisions that impose inordinate cost to the general public, and reform is clearly needed. But the general public is so anxious to express dissatisfaction with elites that it is supporting the status quo.

Garett Jones’ forthcoming book is 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.