Category Archives: books and book reviews

Haidt and Lukianoff talk their book

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You can watch yesterday’s AEI event.

1. Apparently the book is selling well. That is probably a good sign.

2. Is Haidt now a full-blown conservative? It sort of seems that way. Near the end, I thought I heard him talking about the fragility of our society in a way that suggested the civilization vs. barbarism axis. But maybe I think he has become conservative because I believe he ought to be conservative, given what he has observed. But my theory is that he’s afraid to come out of the closet, and that keeps him from admitting it, even to himself.

3. I used my question, at one hour and seventeen minutes in, to try to get them to admit that the right is not as closed-minded as the left. Haidt tried to parry that by saying that conservatives are starting to talk about themselves as victims, which means that they are joining victimhood culture. Moderator Jonathan Rauch brought up Sen. Lindsay Graham’s speech at the end of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing as an example of that. To me, the most powerful line of Graham’s was “Boy, you guys want power. God, I hope you never get it.” That does not sound like victimhood to me.

Conservatives on campus and in the media are subject to antagonism and double standards. That is simply a fact. Left-wing students have gotten speakers disinvited. Right-wing students have not. Left-wing students have demanded protection from having to listen to opposing views. Right-wing students have not. Conservative professors, and even centrist professors, have to be very careful about expressing their beliefs. Meanwhile, there are departments and administrative offices that are garrisons for radical leftists. On the panel, Prof. Allison Stanger, who says that she, too, is no conservative, made an impassioned defense of free speech and intellectual rigor. But does she or anyone else hold the Gender Studies Department or the Office of Inclusion to the same standards she expects of her students?

4. Afterward, I thought of an even more obnoxious question. Haidt talked about the high rates of anxiety and increased rates of suicide among young people. I wanted to ask whether other trends are more favorable. The obnoxious way to put it would have been:

You know what p-hacking is. It’s when you search through a hundred relationships to find one or two that have “significant” p-values. Maybe there is something that we could call danger-hacking. We look through generational trends to find the ones that suggest danger. You brought up teenage anxiety and suicide rates. But other indicators look better. Homicide is down. Teenage pregnancy is down. I’ll bet that the most recent yearbooks of certain DC-area prep schools are not as bacchanalian as the ones from 35 years ago. Shouldn’t we stop danger-hacking and take a more holistic view of Gen Z or I-Gen, which might suggest that they are actually in pretty good shape?

Francis Fukuyama talks his book

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In Quillette, he writes,

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

That seems to be the thesis of his new book, Identity.

In the podcast of Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein, I recall them saying that the future in the U.S. might see a contest between a “social justice” party and its opposition. They mock the opposition (“who could be against social justice?”). But that is exactly the problem. When one side believes that it has complete moral superiority, then this deprives the other side of dignity. Win or lose, moral arrogance is a very divisive political force.

I have not decided whether to read Fukuyama’s book. Based on what I have seen so far, I do not see any new insights.

Kai-fu Lee talks his book

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In an essay in the WSJ adapted from a book due out today, Lee writes,

While a human mortgage officer will look at only a few relatively crude measures when deciding whether to grant you a loan (your credit score, income and age), an AI algorithm will learn from thousands of lesser variables (what web browser you use, how often you buy groceries, etc.). Taken alone, the predictive power of each of these is minuscule, but added together, they yield a far more accurate prediction than the most discerning people are capable of.

I am willing to bet against that.

1. A credit score already makes use of a lot of information that human underwriters did not use to look at. Credit scoring was “big data” before that term existed.

2. To use those “lesser variables” in the United States, you have to prove that they don’t harm access to credit of minorities.

3. The marginal value of additional information about the borrower is not very high. In a home price boom, “bad” borrowers will repay their loans; in a bust, some “good” borrowers will default.

I am starting to believe that artificial intelligence, when it consists of making predictions using “big data,” is overrated by many pundits. As with Lee’s mortgage underwriting example, it does not help if AI solves the wrong problem. To take another example, figuring out which ads to serve on content sites that shouldn’t be ad-supported in the first place is solving the wrong problem.

My Kavanaugh take

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Eliot Cohen writes,

Of the many forms of cruelty, that directed against those who are weak or powerless is one of the worst. Of itself, it undermines whatever legitimacy a person can claim by virtue of intellectual or professional distinction. Societies and governments will have elites—that is simply inescapable, except perhaps in an ancient city state, and probably not even then. But in a free society, for those elites to exercise their power—their very real power, as those subject to it well know—they have to do so with restraint and good judgment.

He is referring in part to Ed Whelan, who made an accusation, which he later retracted, against what he called a “Kavanaugh look-alike.”

1. I really strongly endorse the first sentence of the quoted paragraph. My philosophy is “punch up, not down.” There is a columnist who writes often for Medium. Every column boils down to “America is bad. Capitalism is bad. American capitalism is bad.” If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. The Medium editors plug him relentlessly. Probably 8 out of 10 emails I get from Medium highlight one of his columns, and that annoys me.. But I let it go. I would much prefer to go after two Nobel Prize winners.

2. I have another strongly-held view, which is that I should avoid commenting on whatever news story is most prominent at the moment. There are many reasons for that: don’t feed the trolls; write for the long term, not the short term; write where you can add value; etc.

3. But I admit that the Kavanaugh story grabs me somehow. So here goes.

[paragraphs deleted]

On second thought, no. Everybody’s nerves are too raw. I am back to my principle of letting the hot news story of the day pass.

Scott Alexander on causal density

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He calls it the omnigenic model.

the sciences where progress is hard are the ones that have what seem like an unfair number of tiny interacting causes that determine everything. We should go from trying to discover “the” cause, to trying to find which factors we need to create the best polycausal model. And we should go from seeking a flash of genius that helps sweep away the complexity, to figuring out how to manage complexity that cannot be swept away.

I prefer the term “causal density,” which James Manzi introduced in Uncontrolled. Many economic phenomena are characterized by causal density. Unfortunately, the mainstream approach is to “sweep away the complexity” by coming up with the simplest possible model that might explain some phenomenon.

Handle on the right wing

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He comments,

A reactionary then is in favor of radical change to reestablish and restore the status quo ante. Instead of just being yesterday’s conservatism, reactionaries seek to ideologically justify and explain the practical basis for the wisdom undergirding the prior regime. And what naturally accompanies that project is the attempt to explain the root causes of what went wrong with the new system and why it resulted in such atrocious excesses and led to political and economic catastrophes.

He has more to say, and he includes a link to his very long essay on Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. In that essay, he writes,

it seems clear that a Benedict Option community should be one in which life in centered around frequent study, learning, and teaching. Like, say, a small ‘campus’ of connected, committed households in close proximity.

Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

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Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

Influential books

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A reader asks,

I would love to see your personal list of the top most influential books of the past 10 years (or so).

I have to approach this by working backwards: How has my thinking changed in the past ten years or so? Who influenced those changes? What books did they write?

The most important change is that I think of economics as embedded in culture. I note that culture evolves rapidly, at least in comparison with biological evolution. Economics really ought to be tied in with sociology, except that sociologists are so fixated on the oppression story.

People who have influenced me along these lines include Joseph Henrich, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Douglass North, Kevin Laland, Matt Ridley, and others. Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success struck me the most. Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony deserves mention. I am currently reading Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies, which might end up deserving to be listed here. Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything fits in.

I am captivated by the sociological history spawned in David Hackett-Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which is a masterpiece. For contemporary sociology/politics, I continue to recommend Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. I often cite Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids on the socioeconomic divide that is now clearly visible.

For political economy, I have come to believe that liberal democracy is not an easy equilibrium to achieve. I was very much influenced by North, Weingast, and Wallis (Violence and Social Orders). I also was persuaded by Mark Weiner’s Rule of the Clan.

Another important change is that I have come to see economic modeling in the MIT style as a crippled way of dealing with the complexity of the real world. Influence has come from McCloskey, James Manzi, Edward Leamer, and others. Manzi’s discussion of “causal density” in Uncontrolled deepened my already-existing skepticism of regression modeling.

I got pulled back into macroeconomics by the episode of 2008 and beyond. I was drawn to heterodox views. Maybe Leamer’s Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories is the book that stands out the most. I came to better appreciate Hyman Minsky’s thinking by reading Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters.

Somewhat related, I have come to see American economics as “born bad.” Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers was the eye-opener there.

I have come to view political economy in terms of “This is your brain on politics,” with a lot of tribalism built in. Various anthropologists and psychologists contributed to this view. Also Robin Hanson. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was an early influence.

I have come to view specialization and trade as the core of economics. No one book stands out (Adam Smith clearly falls outside “the last ten years or so”). As much as my views fit with the Austrian school, neither the classics of that tradition nor any modern works are directly responsible. I did enjoy Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization, which probably counts as one of the books that nudged me to view economics as connected with sociology.

Pascal Boyer looks like the winner

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You thought it was a contest between Hazony and Lukianoff-Haidt for which book I would read next. And by the time this post goes up, Fukuyama’s book will be out. For that matter, security guru Bruce Schneier’s provocatively-titled Click Here to Kill Everybody was on my radar even before a commenter mentioned it.

But then, fairly deep among Amazon’s recommendations, I find Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer.

1. The introduction didn’t cause me to want to raise objections.

2. I have already told you that I think very highly of the concept of evolution as an interpretive framework.

So Boyer wins. That’s what I’m reading now. [UPDATE: Finished the book. A couple of the chapters did not succeed with me, but overall I found the book very stimulating and insightful. It will easily make my list of best books of the year.]

Here is a taste:

people find the authors of descriptive texts, for example, about a computer program or a hiking trip, more competent and knowledgeable if the texts include threat-related information.

The mechanism is this: We have evolved to detect threats. We have evolved to learn about threats from other people. Therefore, we have evolved to ascribe expertise to people who describe threats.

Hence, rumors and conspiracy theories. And of course, some small fraction of those will prove to be true, so we can’t completely throw away our evolutionary programming.

It occurs to me that this explains how Henny-Penny could make “The sky is falling!” go viral. Instead, if she had said, “I just saw a gorgeous rainbow with polka-dots,” no one would have believed her. The threatening story is taken as credible, and the benign story isn’t.

I used to think of Henny-Penny as a stupid bird with stupid friends, like Turkey-Lurkey. But after reading Boyer about the way we build coalitions on top of our evolutionary program for threat detection, I would say that Henny-Penny is an astute coalition builder. She shows aptitude as a journalist or politician, while Turkey-Lurkey displays an aptitude for signaling his value as a reliable follower.

Yoram Hazony: my preliminary criticism

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So far, I have only finished the introduction to The Virtue of Nationalism. I think he fails Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test. He says that the opposite of nationalism is imperialism. I don’t think his opponents would accept the imperialist label. It is like telling a secular leftist that your religion is leftism. Such analysis might have a grain of truth, but it is not a good approach for engaging in dialogue.

I think there are two versions of internationalism in the U.S.: the neocon version; and the Western Guilt version. They are usually opposed to one another.

The neocon version could plausibly viewed as imperialist. They see America as the indispensable nation, supporting the peace and prosperity of the world. The term Pax Americana is positive in the neocon view. (Although they are not card-carrying neocons, Findlay and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty, if I recall correctly, make a case that periods of trade expansion, peace, and prosperity historically have coincided with strong hegemonic power.)

The Western Guilt version sees America as the nation that needs to be cut down to size. Instead of telling other people how to behave, Americans ought to learn from other cultures. The neocons disparage this view, as when they refer to “Obama’s apology tours.” But whether you love or loathe the Western Guilt proponents, they would not recognize themselves as imperialists.

Indeed, the way that Hazony describes imperialism, almost any transnational proposal becomes an imperialist project. A libertarian idea for open borders. An environmentalist proposal to fight climate change. While there is plenty of room to argue that these ideas could only be implemented in the context of a global empire with a single ruler, establishing such an empire is not the objective of these specific initiatives.

In any case, I am not ready to accept Hazony’s either/or distinction between imperialism and nationalism. I would say that there are questions of jurisdiction. You know how when two businesses sign a contract, there might be a provision saying that any dispute will be decided in a particular state? If contracting were costless, every interaction between people could have such a provision. To put it another way, one can imagine in theory a world in which the jurisdiction for every interaction is chosen voluntarily. As it happens, but that is not possible in practice.

In the real world, for most interactions there is a presumption that jurisdiction is based on location. So within the U.S., you presume that if you go to court it will be an American court, not a French court. As I see it from this jurisdictional perspective, although nationalism is not something that was dreamed up by libertarians, it can be treated as a “libertarian realist” outcome.

Part of “libertarian realism” is my belief that the ultimate arbiter of jurisdictional disputes is force. As another illustration, think of crime families. If you’re in the Corleone family territory, the Godfather has jurisdiction.

There are a lot of cross-border interactions nowadays. So how do we settle ultimate jurisdictional disputes? It could be an international body–an international Supreme Court, if you will. Or it could be ultimately the strongest country interested in the dispute.

To be cynical, I can see why an Israeli, with the Palestinian conflict in mind, would not be an advocate of deferring to an international body. To be equally cynical, I can see why a professional Weberian bureaucrat or diplomat might advocate increased deference to international organizations. I would be surprised if one can make an over-arching, overwhelming theoretical argument in favor of one model over the other.

But that is all preliminary to reading the book.