Category Archives: books and book reviews

Big Gods

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That is the title of a new book by Ara Norenzayan. I have just started it. It appears to be an account of religion that is based on evolutionary psychology. He argues that the religions that thrived are those with (p. 6-7)

beliefs and practices that reflect credible displays of commitment to supernatural beings with policing powers.

This facilitates trust in strangers, which is otherwise difficult for humans (or any other species) to achieve.

I found the book very persuasive–perhaps too persuasive. I worry that so many of the psychology experiments that provide support for his propositions use “priming” techniques, and I wonder how well they replicate. I also worry that the idea that fasting and other painful rituals help to signal commitment makes for a “just-so” story.

Here is a question to think about. If religions help to create social capital by allowing people to signal conscientiousness, conformity, and trustworthiness, how does this relate to Bryan Caplan’s view that obtaining a college degree performs that function?

The Decline of Marriage

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Julissa Cruz writes,

The proportion of women married was highest in 1950 at approximately 65%. Today, less than half (47%) of women 15 and over are married—-the lowest percentage since the turn of the century.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

Note also that Nick Schulz quietly published a short book on this topic. I have just started reading it.

Ira Stoll on Phelps

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Stoll writes,

Professor Phelps tries to trace what he sees as a decline in modern capitalism beginning as early as the mid-1960s and continuing through the present day. One suspect is what the author calls the “new corporatism”: “Regulations of industries are instituted, aimed at shielding companies or workforces from competition. …Shakedowns of companies by communities, nonprofits, or governments extract donations or other accommodations….The new corporatist economy, then, is pervaded by fears of holdups by the government, by stakeholders, by organized labor, and by an ocean of persons and companies ready to litigate.”

Later,

The question of whether the late-1960s radicals were rebelling against tradition or against modernity is complicated, a topic for a book, or a column, of its own. But surely even a Nobel laureate economist ensconced at Columbia can figure out that whatever the great villain is in the story of the American economy or culture since the 1970s, it isn’t “the resurgence of family values.”

I think that the value of the book is in making the case that our system is corporatist, and that, unfortunately, many people are quite happy with that. I have written my own review, for which I am seeking an outlet.

Why Do Jews Succeed?

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Jerry Muller and Noah Smith ask the question. Muller writes,

Jews had a religious culture that promoted universal adult literacy – at least for men – and a culture that respected book learning. Those attitudes and dispositions were transferred from religious texts to secular forms of education. As a result, Jews were highly oriented toward education, and willing to defer current pleasures and income to obtain more of it.

Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein in The Chosen Few say that the literacy requirement had huge selection impact. Jewish farmers were unable to comply with the requirement, and so they exited the religion. People who remained Jews tended to be more urban in their outlook and of course with greater aptitude for literacy.

My Reading Pile

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I am still struggling with Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind. I do not think any of the reviews that I have seen present a satisfying summary. I probably will take on the challenge myself at some point. I cannot tell whether my attachment to the three-axis model helps or hurts me in getting perspective on the book. He clearly dislikes the oppressor-oppressed axis, and he thinks that those who view society in those terms are necessarily headed in a statist direction that undermines individual moral character. He wants to champion individual moral choice over what he calls the “politico-moral world” of collectivist ideals. He sees individualism in moral choice as a unique characteristic of modernity, and he sees in the ideologies that bemoan “inequality” a pull backward toward traditionalism.

The rest of the books in my pile are review copies. Edmund Phelps’ Mass Flourishing overlaps a bit with Minogue, actually. In his concluding paragraph, Phelps writes,

a full return to high dynamism will require that those modern values prevail again over traditional ones: Nations will have to push back against the resurgence of traditional values that have been so suffocating in recent decades and revive the modern values that stirred people to go boldly forth toward lives of richness.

Phelps’ view of the past forty years is basically stagnationist.

Jay W. Richards’ Infiltrated suggests that the low-income-housing advocates (a) caused the financial crisis and (b) are still active politically. He describes Herb and Marion Sandler’s California savings bank in somewhat ambivalent terms. He writes,

some 70 percent of the company’s loans had substantial down payments, contrary to the subprime practice of offering loans with zero down.

His main indictment of the Sandlers is that they sold their bank at the peak of the bubble and then used the profits to fund left-wing political organizations. A strange book.

Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America is much more sanguine than I would be. He writes,

there is surprisingly little evidence that attending a highly selective college with impressive average SAT (ACT) scores produces exceptional improvement in the cognitive abilities of students.

A few pages later, with no sense of irony, he asserts,

The reason why so many capable students from low-income families do not apply to a selective college is that they are poorly informed.

Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. They indict India for its inequality and lack of infrastructure for its poor.

In 2011 half of all Indian households did not have access to toilets…compared with less than 10 percent of households lacking this facility in Bangladesh and only 1 percent or so in China.

I think that if we understood why this is the case, we probably would know a lot more about India than we do. Dreze and Sen make it sound like a lack of willpower on the part of the Indian elites, but my guess is that is not the whole story.

Ohanian, Taylor, and Wright, editors, Government Policies and the Delayed Economic Recovery. Proceedings of a conference dedicated to bashing Obama-era policies, except for Robert Hall, who did not get the memo.

In my reading, the primary source of the current state of the economy is simple–it’s that people aren’t buying enough stuff…The non-household part of private expenditure–that’s plant and equipment investment–seems to have actually outperformed its normal response to a collapse of consumption. The source of low output and employment in today’s economy is the huge decline in household spending.

Hasan Comert, Central Banks and Financial Markets: The Declining Power of US Monetary Policy. Based on a dissertation out of the left-wing, post-Keynesian U. Mass Amherst. I have high hopes for this book. From the introduction:

there has been a gradual decoupling between the Fed policy rate and both quantities and asset prices in financial markets. In this sense, the whole period [since the 1980s] can be seen as a period of decreasing effectiveness of central banks because their influence over financial markets has gradually decreased.

Expect to read more from me on Comert and Minogue, and possibly Phelps. Probably not the others.

The Neocon Servile Mind

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David Brooks writes,

The conservatism that [Irving] Kristol was referring to is neoconservatism. Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant and nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.

Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,” he argued. In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”

I am reading The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue, which takes the opposite point of view. Minogue argues that the welfare state substitutes political agency for moral agency. As citizens, we lose our moral compass and instead pick up a political one.

I find the book rather heavy going, but I probably will review it somewhere down the road. If you are looking for someone who concedes nothing to the oppressor-oppressed axis and instead views it as undermining Western values completely, then Minogue is your champion.

Back to the squishier conservatives, Reihan Salam lauds Brooks and Irving Kristol.

the right response to programs that really do undermine self-reliance and individual liberty may well be to eliminate or consolidate or devolve them. But it is important to acknowledge that not all programs undermine self-reliance and individual liberty, e.g., wage subsidies are designed to entice low-wage workers into the labor market, a crucial first step if these workers are eventually to climb the economic ladder to self-sufficiency. Wage subsidies are a paradigmatic example of a conservative welfare state initiative, and when well-designed they can do a great deal to strengthen the social foundation of a free enterprise economy by making it more inclusive.

Read the whole thing.

Do You Concur?

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I have been participating in a discussion of Mark Weiner’s book at the legal theory web site, Concurring Opinions. On this post of mine, Gordon Sollars commented,

A federal government with considerably less power than presently exists in the U.S. is not necessarily a “weak” government, opening a society to a resurgence of clans, given the existence of state and local government structures… If the only choice is between clans or governments with a direct span of control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people, the contemporary liberal project is as doomed as the libertarian one.

Indeed, there are plenty of examples of successful small states. And there are plenty of examples of successful Federal states. Canada seems less centralized than the U.S. these days, including for health care. The provinces appear to have more independence than our states do.

There are also plenty examples of successful states that do not have hundreds of millions of people. Singapore and Sweden.

Finally, there is the example of Switzerland, which is both much smaller than the U.S. in terms of population and a more Federal system of government.

A Provocative Claim

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From “Dalrock.”

Child support crowds out marriage, and even in cases where weddings still technically occur the option for the wife to unilaterally convert the family from a marriage based family to a child support based family always exists. This is part of the threatpoint designed to empower wives and dis-empower husbands. Men simply don’t have the option to choose the marriage based model over the child support model.

Incidentally, I have downloaded Robert George’s Conscience and its Enemies. He takes the conservative point of view on family issues, and I admit that I am not yet persuaded. However, it may be worth writing a longer review. Robby and I happened to overlap a bit at Swarthmore. He now teaches at Princeton. These days, he would get my vote for number one on the list of Professors Who Are Unlikely to Receive a Standing Ovation–at either place. Let’s just say that Swarthmoreans are all about the oppressor-oppressed axis, not so much about civilization-barbarism. I’m guessing Princetonians are similar.

Basically, I am just another liberal Painglossian when to comes to trends in family law. That is, I have never thought that child support laws were anything but good. I never thought that loosening divorce laws was a mistake. I am on the pro-choice side on the abortion issue. etc.

While one blog post is not going to change my mind, “Dalrock” leads one to consider the question that economists ask about well-intended policy: but then what? what happens in the long run?

Suppose you make it easier for a woman to divorce a man and to obtain child support. Then what?

Then men will prefer not to get married. Staying unmarried makes it harder for the woman to break up the relationship and still receive child support.

I am not sure that these are top-of-mind issues among young people. Of course, my contacts with young people are pretty much limited to the affluent children of Vickies. What these young people say is top-of-mind is that they really, really, don’t want to go through divorce. Compared to my generation, they seem to regard marriage as belonging to a later stage in life. My line is that for our generation, getting married was like starting a new business–a moment of promise and hope. Today, it’s like going IPO–a moment of affirmation and triumph.

Re-Reading David Brin

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I write,

Early in June 2013, a major news story was the revelation of a government program called PRISM, which taps into electronic communications in an effort to identify and disrupt threats to America. The controversy over this discovery sent me reaching to my bookshelf for David Brin’s 1998 work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Re-reading it made me realize that Brin articulated more than just an unusual approach for addressing the issue of surveillance technology. He offers a perspective on the relationship of citizens and the state which challenges conventional libertarian thinking.

Read the whole thing. I really enjoyed going back to Brin’s book and writing this essay.

UPDATE: Here is Brin on Snowden.

Snowden — and Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks) — are part of a vital trend. I do not find either spectacularly admirable. Given that the heinous things they have revealed were kind of yawners, it strikes me both were propelled by today’s addictive high — self-righteous sanctimony.