Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The vice-presidential nomination

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Looking back over the last 60 years or so I think that

1. It goes at least 90 percent of the time to a long-time Washington insider relatively acceptable to the opposing party.

2. About 75 percent of the time the nominee subsequently runs for President.

3. When he runs, about 80 percent of the time he gets knocked out in the primaries or the general, typically losing to a relative outsider.

Interesting to compare a process where the public is not involved with the Presidential nomination process, where the public is involved.

What is the future of journalism?

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One element of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is the collapse of trust in journalism as practiced by newspapers and mass media. There are various diagnoses of this.

1. Gurri himself would say that the Internet has made the knowledge distribution more egalitarian. People are not as dependent on the media for knowledge, so that professional journalists cannot just stand on their authority.

2. Someone on the left would say that the problem is that bad actors have appeared on the scene: Fox News, the Internet’s right-wingers, etc. We could get back to the golden age if we could just get rid of censor these evil, “post-truth” outlets.

3. Eric Weinstein would say that we are living through a time in which our “sense-making apparatus” (one of his favorite terms) is up for grabs. He would say that he always was suspicious that the New York Times was feeding us a narrative and covering up stuff. Of course, since he is on the left, what he complains about mainstream media covering up is not what someone on the right would complain that mainstream media is covering up.

4. Yuval Levin (his book will finally be out shortly) would say that the institution of journalism no longer functions well. The institution of journalism ought to form journalists by giving them a sense of obligation to report truthfully and objectively. Instead, journalists see their organizations as platforms from which to pursue their individual careers, primarily by enhancing their personal “brands.” This leads them to take sides and play the outrage-stoking game.

5. Many of us point to the incentives of advertising-obsessed media to amplify those who stoke outrage and stifle those who are moderate and/or reasonable.

My thoughts are these:

I don’t think we are going back to the Age of the Single Narrative, when the left-wing media were more centrist and the right-wing media did not exist. Nor is that necessarily the age we would want to go back to if we could.

I think that mainstream media outlets like the Times are behaving in a manner that is nearly suicidal. On the one hand, they are taking up the silliest causes of the campus left. On the other hand, they are insisting that they should be taken seriously. They seem to think that any day now, the country will come to its senses and accept their narrative as definitive. I think that they will be lucky to retain as much of a following as they currently have.

It could be that a new sense-making apparatus will emerge. This will produce a new set of observers and analysts to replace traditional media. This will be highly decentralized.

Some people will specialize on gathering observations. Think of the people who have written books on the Opioid Crisis. Some have looked at the characteristics of users. Some have looked at the actions of pharmaceutical companies. Some have looked into the illegal Opioid production and distribution system.

Some people will specialize in analysis. Think of someone like Scott Alexander.

Some people will specialize in calling attention to good ideas and debunking bad ones. Think of someone like Tyler Cowen.

The question is whether this decentralized process will lead to consensus or fracturing. I am guessing a bit of both. That is, I think that weird opinion niches will thrive. But in a best-case scenario we will reach a point where some narratives are widely accepted. Even more ideally, where narratives are contested, most people will be familiar with the best arguments on each side, and not be rigidly committed to their preferred narrative.

References on prestige and dominance

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Several comments on my previous post lead me to want to include some references.

1. My views indeed are derived from books by Joseph Henrich and Kevin Laland. I see humans as particularly evolved to learn from one another, and I view prestige hierarchies in that context.

2. The distinction between prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy did not originate with me. I think I got it from Henrich, but I believe I also had read Kevin Simler, to whom a commenter linked. Another commenter linked to Scott Alexander’s reply to Simler.

3. I don’t think that prestige requires low-status people to suck up, as Simler implies. As a chess player (I’m not, but let’s pretend), I don’t have to suck up to Magnus Carlsen. But I recognize the reality that he is above me in the hierarchy. If you want to study chess games, you should study his rather than mine.

4. So why do humans express admiration for skilled people? As an example, think of me expressing admiration for my doctor. My motive is not to suck up to the doctor. I want my friends to take advantage of the doctor’s skills. I may think that the doctor deserves more business. I want my friends to value my judgment, and so my incentive to be honest is stronger than if I were just trying to do what Scott A calls coattail riding.

5. I go back to my contention that prestige hierarchies tend to be positive-sum. Yes, you may be jealous of somebody who has more prestige. Yes, you may waste resources trying to acquire signals of prestige. Yes, to the extent that contests to acquire prestige are set up to reward the wrong skills, the outcomes are going to be non-optimal. But that is the crux of the issue. As long as a contest rewards the right skills, then a prestige hierarchy is of great social value.

Prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy

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Humans have two types of hierarchies–prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. I admit that there are some cases where a hierarchy is not clearly one or the other, but bear with me.

A prestige hierarchy is positive sum. Those at the bottom of, say, the chef hierarchy or the guitarist hierarchy, can learn from those higher up. We get better at doing things by copying what prestigious people do. When we need help, it is useful to have an idea who the real experts are.

A dominance hierarchy is negative sum. The more resources I obtain at gunpoint, the less for you. And the fight to get to the top wastes resources.

The business world has elements of both. Your boss may have prestige but also has the ability to threaten you.

Marxists see capitalism as a dominance hierarchy. Non-Marxists see capitalism differently. A mesh of prestige hierarchies? Or a competition that is not interpretable in terms of hierarchy?

In our Martin Gurri world, some important prestige hierarchies are under stress. Elites don’t enjoy the prestige they once had.

Elites who lose prestige tend to resort to dominance. China in Hong Kong. Journalists who want Internet censorship. But making dominance moves is no way to recover prestige. It does the opposite.

Cancel culture uses dominance moves. From a prestige perspective, it is a poor tactic. As Peggy Noonan wrote,

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America

Assuming that our erstwhile elites are not going to recover their prestige, where are we headed? Will a new stable prestige hierarchy emerge? Or will we have to settle for either chaos or a dominance hierarchy?

The state of the Internet

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That is a subject of a memorial symposium for John Perry Barlow. So far, I have only read James Boyle’s essay asking whether the Internet is over. In a footnote, he writes,

6 One of the true architects of the internet, Vint Cerf, has a slide deck about blockchain with one slide in it. It takes the form of a flowchart. The flowchart box asks the question “Do I need a blockchain?” The arrow goes to a single answer. “No.”

Here is a provocative remark:

only the state has the power, status and administrative capability to become the Kantian superego of corporations

What I believe Boyle is saying is that a corporation is just a set of contracts, not a human being capable of understanding and following the Golden Rule. Therefore, only a set of legal constraints imposed by the government can induce corporations to act as if they were moral human beings.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Some thoughts of mine.

1. Hal Varian took Barlow’s economic ideas very seriously, even though Barlow was no economist. Back when I was just starting to try to figure out the Internet, Varian recommended to me Barlow’s “economy of ideas” article in Wired, which now ironically resides behind a paywall.

2. In 1993, I heard a talk on the Internet’s governance structure by Vint Cerf (a last-minute substitute speaker!) at an MIT alumni dinner. I was struck by the beauty of it–the way that the IETFs formed, solved problems, an then went away.

3. I wrote a brief essay on the topics related to the symposium which I called How the Internet turned bad. It’s a good essay. A sample:

The masses came to the Internet. Many of the new arrivals were less technically savvy, were more interested in passively consuming entertainment than in contributing creatively, and were less able to handle uncensored content in a mature way. They have been willing to give up autonomy in exchange for convenience.

Also,

catering to the mass market can lead software developers to focus on making the software easy to learn rather than easy to use. This distinction may be useful for understanding how Facebook triumphed over blogging.

An ominous sign for higher education

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Joanne Jacobs reports,

Confidence in college dropped the most in adults 18 to 29 years old. Only 41 percent said it’s very important, compared to slight majorities in older age groups.

That is down from 74 percent in that age bracket in 2013. There appears to be some combination of alternatives to college now seeming plausible and recent college experience seeming unimpressive.

Note that the effect of this will really be felt in about 15 or 20 years, when these young people have children who are graduating from high school. At that point, colleges had better hope that attitudes turn around.

When newspapers experience a similar generational loss of confidence, the consequences were predictable, and the predictions proved true.

The history of philosophy

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That is the title of a book by A.C. Grayling. On page 417:

in all other areas of philosophy–ethics, theory of knowledge, political philosophy, aesthetics–the history of the subject continues to be a resource which enriches contemporary thinking. But in the philosophy of language there is relatively little, other than in the way of some suggestions and insights, that is not original to the twentieth century itself, and to its second half in particular.

Grayling seems to score this as a point for twentieth century philosophy, as his section on Analytic Philosophy covers 131 pages (out of 585 total), which is as much as he devotes to Plato and Aristotle plus everyone from Bacon to Hegel, put together. For me, that was like encountering a history of the New York Yankees that pays as much attention to the 1970s squad as it does to the Ruth, Dimaggio, and Mantle eras combined.

The book displays an amazing breadth of Grayling’s reading. I can see it as a monumental reference work. But as an actual history of philosophy it did not work for me.

UPDATE: Michael Huemer offers praise for Analytic Philosophy. Comparing it with continental philosophy, Huemer writes,

analytic phil is better. These things:

Clear theses
Clear, logical arguments
Direct responses to objections

The plight of American low-skilled workers

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Nicholas Eberstadt writes,

America’s overall unemployment rate today is lower than at any time since the 1960s, and the official unemployment rate for prime-age men is just 3%. Yet for every prime-age man who is out of work and looking for a job, there are four more who are neither working nor looking. This is not a problem that can be solved by more Keynesian stimulus, a new industrial policy, or other so-called “demand-side tools.”

. . .Barely half of native-born, prime-age American men with no high school degree are in the job market at all. By contrast, labor force participation rates for their foreign-born dropout counterparts are as robust as for native-born college graduates.

Turning to supply-side factors, he writes,

the vast and yet somehow invisible army of former convicts; the new normal of unfathomably slow advances in educational attainment—these are just some of the major problems hiding in plain sight.

Let me add these possibilities to the list:

1. The cumulative effect on the worth ethic of people experiencing significant assistance for not working and high marginal tax rates on those benefits when they do work.

2. Assortative mating, with the lower portion of the male skill distribution made much less attractive as husbands because of (1).

3. A mismatch between demand and supply. Perhaps the demand is for working with people (elder care, child care) and those out of the labor force, particularly men, prefer working with things.

Null Hypothesis watch

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In 1987, Peter Rossi wrote,

The Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.”

The Iron Law arises from the experience that few impact assessments of large scale2 social programs have found that the programs in question had any net impact. The law also means that, based on the evaluation efforts of the last twenty years, the best a priori estimate of the net impact assessment of any program is zero, i.e., that the program will have no effect.

The Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”

This law means that the more technically rigorous the net impact assessment, the more likely are its results to be zero—or not effect. Specifically, this law implies that estimating net impacts through randomized controlled experiments, the avowedly best approach to estimating net impacts, is more likely to show zero effects than other less rigorous approaches. [pg5]

The Brass Law of Evaluation: “The more social programs are designed to change individuals, the more likely the net impact of the program will be zero.”

This law means that social programs designed to rehabilitate individuals by changing them in some way or another are more likely to fail. The Brass Law may appear to be redundant since all programs, including those designed to deal with individuals, are covered by the Iron Law. This redundancy is intended to emphasize the especially difficult task in designing and implementing effective programs that are designed to rehabilitate individuals.

I arrived at this by following Tyler Cowen’s recommendation to check out Gwern and starting to read the latter’s essay on why correlation is so frequent and causation is so rare.

My comments on the Rossi article.

1. James Manzi had very similar thoughts in Uncontrolled. Is that correlation or causation? Concerning the “brass law,” Manzi said that you are more likely to effect change by taking people’s nature as given and changing their incentives.

2. Imagine how much more often we would see these sorts of results if it were not for social desirability bias in reporting on interventions.

The UK political extinction event

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William Galston writes
(Link fixed),

Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned as the second coming not of Margaret Thatcher but of Benjamin Disraeli. His pledge of “one-nation Conservatism” means his government will lavish funds on long-neglected parts of central and northern England and on the National Health Service, which he terms a “beautiful idea that represents the best of our country.” In the short term, that means larger deficits; in the longer term, higher taxes. Proponents of limited government—a dwindling band—will be licking their wounds for years.

Note the last sentence in particular. Recently, when I have talked about The Three Languages of Politics, I have just talked about the Progressive oppressor-oppressed axis and the Conservative civilization-barbarism axis. I don’t mention libertarians.

I joke about 2016 being an “extinction event” that wiped out libertarians. Also fiscal conservatives and sane Democrats (like Galston). Libertarianism survives as a scapegoat–it turns out that we have been running the world all along, although we didn’t realize it. We caused the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, etc.