The publisher of the forthcoming third edition insisted on having the second edition taken down from Amazon months before the new edition will be released. But if you want to read the book, it seems to be available here, as a pdf, for free.
Category Archives: Libertarian Thought
Heritability and social justice engineering
Heritability estimates and eugenics drew a lot of comments, including one from the author of the piece to which I linked. Apparently I misinterpreted his abstract, and I apologize for that.
I am going to wade into this controversial area again. The 6 points below are just throat-clearing. My main point follows that.
1. My reading of the data is that individual differences typically swamp differences by race of gender. That is, you may find a difference on average between men and women. Suppose that women on average are better at verbal communication. That does not mean that when you encounter a man it is safe to assume that his verbal communication skills are weak.
2. Many characteristics are highly heritable. You cannot perfectly predict the characteristics of a child based on the characteristics of the parents. But as a statistical matter, a child is more likely to have characteristics of the parents than some other child chosen at random from the population.
3. There are average differences by race that are due to heritability and average differences by gender that are due to biology.
4. In my opinion, the government should not deliberately establish policies with the intent of influencing who should reproduce and who should not reproduce. My choice of whether to reproduce or not reproduce could be mistaken in some way, but I trust myself to make that choice rather than hand that responsibility to a government official.
5. Plenty of policies can have the unintended effect of varying the incentives to reproduce, but those policies can be judged based on their own merits, without focusing on their demographic implications.
6. I am even more strongly opposed to eugenic social engineering that involves killing or sterilizing people.
But here is my main point:
Social engineering takes another form, based on the denial that heritability matters or that average differences by race and gender have a basis in heritability or biology. This engineering for social justice takes it as given that the distribution of rewards or opportunities ought to be what one would expect if there were no heritability and no average differences. It assumes that any outcomes that one dislikes must be due to discrimination. As an aside, social justice engineers tend to overlook some distributional outcomes, such as the distribution of dangerous jobs.
There is an economic argument that one person’s unjust discrimination is another person’s profit opportunity. Therefore, discrimination tends to be driven out by the market process. By the standard of perfection, this economic mechanism fails. But that does not provide a rationale for social justice engineering, which involves affirmative action, demands for redress when high-status occupations are disproportionately held by white males, etc. To defend social justice engineering, you have to be able to show that government officials in the real world (not just in some theoretical model) develop and implement policies that work better than the decentralized decisions of individuals. Even worse than social justice engineering by government officials is social justice engineering by the mob.
In short, I think that in the real world, social justice engineering does more harm than good. It is the mirror image of government-imposed eugenics. Both ignore point (1) about individual differences, and both inject someone into a decision-making process who is not directly involved in the decision. If it were up to me, social justice engineering would be just as taboo as social engineering for eugenic purposes.
A conservative case for countervailing power?
The earlier conservative self-understanding, in which the right was defending nongovernmental institutions against the power of the state, tacitly depended on the assumption that many if not most nongovernmental institutions would be friendly to conservative values. But as civil society has decayed over recent decades, its remaining power centers have also become increasingly left-wing.
. . .Yet conservatives can still win the White House and the Congress, which means that the one power center they can hope to control is the one they are notionally organized to limit — the administrative state.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. To me, Douthat seems to be saying that since conservatives have been driven out of universities, mainstream media, and entertainment, they need to get hold of government to counterbalance this. I disagree with the proposed solution.
It reminds me of the early Progressive notion of “countervailing power.” The idea was that the emergence of large corporations starting in the late 19th century made market capitalism unfair to ordinary individuals. Government could serve as a countervailing power to offset the new corporate power.
I have two main reasons to be skeptical of the idea of conservatives using government as a countervailing power with respect to leftist cultural institutions. Instead, I think you have to strike directly at the cultural institutions.
1. If the cultural institutions are strongly left, then conservatives are not going to succeed in capturing government.
2. I think that the most effective countervailing power would consist of alternatives. Alternative media have been helpful in limiting the damage of mainstream media. I think that alternative educational approaches are the best hope for limiting the damage caused by public education and elite colleges.
Our goal should be to nourish primary education and higher learning that is not steeped in leftist ideology. The first thing to do is stop making gifts to existing colleges and universities. Instead of donating to that new grandiose fundraising campaign at your alma mater, put that money into some innovative higher education initiative.
Also, resist increases in funding for public education. Without more funding, the public school systems will be so burdened by pension obligations that they will have to scrimp on classroom education, and parents will turn to other means. That will encourage parents to turn to home schooling, private supplemental education, and independent learning for their children. As they make more choices for themselves, most parents will prioritize knowledge over ideology for their own chilren.
Am I a welfare state advocate?
social insurance can enhance market dynamism and economic freedom in four key ways: By enabling entrepreneurial risk-taking; by easing the adjustment and search costs associated with creative destruction; by detaching social benefits from market structure; and by making the economy more robust to immigration. Together, these point to a set of design principles for reforming existing U.S. social insurance programs in a pro-market way.21
Now, check out the footnote:
Discerning readers may recognize an Austrian School influence in the first of these three defenses of social insurance. Austrian School economics places an emphasis on (1) entrepreneurial discovery in the face of fundamental uncertainty; (2) equilibrium as a dynamic, evolutionary process; and (3) the decomposability of capital, implying particular market structures will often need to liquidate given shifting patterns of specialization and trade. While the Austrian School has become mood-affiliated with small government libertarianism, its basic analytical toolkit turns out to be highly congenial to the “free-market welfare state” perspective. For an introduction to these themes see: Kling, Arnold. 2016. Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction to Economics.
One of Hammond’s suggestions is that government-provided benefits are better than employer-provided benefits. One reason for this is that with employer-provided benefits, politicians have a stake in keeping the corporation alive. He uses the example of General Motors getting bailed out in 2008.
In a response to Hammond, Kai Weiss writes,
Instead, advocates of the free market should look to a strengthening of civil society, combined with a job-rich economy, to help those left behind. In the end, responding to skepticism about the role of free markets by arguing for more statism might be an oxymoron after all.
If the Scandinavian countries are such great examples of welfare states, then this shows that a risk pool of 5 or 10 million is sufficient. You do not need 300 million. To me, that suggests that at most we need the Federal government to provide a small universal basic income. Otherwise, smaller units, such as cities, counties, states, private insurance companies, or large voluntary associations could deal with health coverage, retirement savings, unemployment insurance, and aid for households dealing with mental and physical disabilities.
Conservatism after Trump
This topic is popular in my circles. For example, the brilliant and extraordinarily nice Chris DeMuth writes,
I believe that an important cause of our political turmoil is the decline of representative government—where law is enacted by elected legislatures—and the rise of declarative government—where law is dispensed by bureaucracies and courts.
With all respect to Chris, I cannot see the Trump election as a revolt against the Administrative State. His hammer just doesn’t connect with the nail.
If you read the whole piece (it may be behind a paywall), you will find that what Chris wants conservatives to support going forward is what I want them to support: reining in the Administrative State; more competition in K-12 education; more commitment to free inquiry in higher education; regulatory reform (not always meaning deregulation); and finally, and most important in my view,
One way or another, America is going to move from a debt-financed welfare state to a tax-financed welfare state. If the transition is abrupt and chaotic, it will bring widespread hardship, especially to the Somewheres who have become increasingly dependent on transfer payments, and possible political instability. For this reason, it would be nice if a few courageous souls in active politics would specialize in mastering and advertising the problems; this could help condition public expectations and encourage personal contingency-planning, and might even set the stage for a Churchill-like summons to leadership down the road. But the transition, hard or soft, will present opportunities as well—as the political scientists say, the American system gets around to needed reforms only in response to crises. When Congress is obliged to fund a much larger share of entitlement and welfare spending with tax revenues, it will just have to pick up its fiscal reins and exercise a level of collective discipline that no current member has experienced. The political parties will have to wake up from populist hallucinations over taxation, redistribution, and economic growth. And American citizens will acquire a much keener sense of their obligations to one another.
But there is a sense in which it strikes me that our standard focus on political economy may be anachronistic. I find myself muttering, “It’s the culture war, stupid” as a description of the situation that we face currently. Think of it as the progressive-minded, college-educated women forming up at one end and the cantankerous non-college educated men forming up at the other, with the rest of us either choosing sides or trying to find some middle ground.
A conference on moderation (Martin Gurri watch)
I attended this event on the 25th.
There are two videos, one for the morning talks, and one for the afternoon talks. If you watch the video for the afternoon talks, near the end, close to the 4 hour, 11 minute mark, I ask the last question at the session that featured Tony Blair.
My father would have been proud. He always liked to measure the social distance that he traveled from his childhood with Yiddish-speaking parents in the St. Louis ghetto. Finding me in the same room with the former British Prime Minister would have given my father lots of nachas, so to speak.
My review of the conference overall:
David Brooks gave a lucid, entertaining opening speech. About minute 44-45 in the video, he gives an account of contemporary progressiveness that could come straight out of my three-axes model.
Earlier, he cites Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream, which argues that America has had three phases of animating cultural idea. Until around 1830, it was “God.” Americans were fulfilling God’s will. From then until World War II, it was “nation,” meaning manifest destiny for the United States. After the war, it became the “self.”
Brooks argues that the individualism of the latest phase has reached its end as a successful animating idea. We need a cultural paradigm shift. He suggests that what might work better now is a form of communitarianism, in which we care about children (not just our own), the dignity of work, our local living places, and racial and social integration. We need for politics to be less important.
In the end, his “politics of love,” as he calls it, is easy to ridicule, and he recognizes that. But he tries hard to justify his proposal.
The first panel was “Why isn’t the center holding?” and it included Martin Gurri. Not surprisingly, I found Gurri’s remarks the most compelling. But I think he also came through to people in the audience who were not as familiar as I am with his views.
Frances Lee did make the interesting point that as political parties separated on ideological grounds (recall that 60 years ago, the Democratic Party was an amalgamation that included Northern African-Americans and white segregationists from the South where African-Americans were kept from voting) and elections became close enough that either party could win, party loyalty has strengthened. There is fear that if you work with the other side, you are helping them win, and this fear is expressed very strongly in the primary-voting public.
I got to ask a question at this panel. I wanted to make the point that the political divide is a subset of a broader cultural divide. It’s about the 2 hour and 9 minute mark. I don’t think anyone wanted to answer the question, but Brink at least helped to clarify what I was trying to get at.
The next panel struck me as less focused. I did note that Damon Linker cited a poll that suggests that in the 2×2 quadrant of left/right and social/economic issues, the least populated quadrant among American voters is the libertarian one of socially on the left and economically on the right. Will Wilkinson expressed doubt that any poll holds for very long, because American voters are volatile on the issues. Yascha Mounk suggested that demagogic politics is on the upsurge because people want contradictory things (I would say that in economic jargon, they don’t appreciate trade-offs), and politicians must try to cater to that.
The third panel turned me off quite a bit. Often, the discussion veered into philosophical and historical trivia. When it got back to present-day reality, it seemed to consist mostly of ritual expressions of contempt for Mr. Trump. At one point, Professor Levy implied that the Republican Party as an institution would benefit by having a prominent conservative Senator utterly denounce Mr. Trump. While I think that it would help to have a Republican challenge Mr. Trump in the primary in 2020, that challenge should serve to articulate what mainstream Republicans want the party to stand for. The challenger should in no way denounce Mr. Trump but instead should commit to supporting whoever the party nominates in the general election. And, no, William Weld does not get my endorsement for the role.
Denouncing Mr. Trump as Mr. Levy recommends would amount to the political equivalent of a suicide bombing that fails to even approach its target. Mr. Trump does not depend on establishment support in the way that President Nixon did. When Nixon lost the establishment, he was gone. But today a politician’s personal brand is more important than establishment support. See Tyler Cowen’s column on the young Democratic congresswomen. In general, hearing Professor Levy’s pontifications reminded me of the refrain, “You want more Trump??? This is how you get more Trump.”
In the hallway, Elaine Kamarck, a Bill Clinton Democrat who has written a book on primary politics, expressed her view that the winner of the Democratic nomination in 2020 will be someone who drives down the “center-left lane,” as she called it. I suggested that the convention might arrive with 12 candidates each having 8 percent of the vote. She ridiculed that possibility. If there had been time, it should have been possible to formulate a bet. A simple one would be, “A center-left candidate will arrive at the convention with more than 40 percent of the delegates.” Presumably, she would bet for this. I would bet against it. I would not bet more than a few dollars, because she knows much more than I do about the subject. That is what would make it fun if I won.
What do I think of the overall project of reviving a “third way” or a moderate center? I was skeptical going into the event, and I remain skeptical.
I would like to see a more moderate tone in politics. But oddly enough, Levy speaks for me when he writes,
if “moderate” is the name of a substantive position, then it risks being nothing at all, or at least nothing stable, only something defined with reference to the shifting sense of who counts as extreme.
I look at the “shifting sense of who counts as extreme” differently than he does. To me, it looks like the Overton Window is racing full speed to the left. In fact, the window has moved so far to the left that I think most young Democrats see Blair and Clinton as far right-wingers. Consider that when Barack Obama ran for President, he was against gay marriage, and by the time he left office his Administration was pushing trans-gender bathrooms. Consider that President Clinton took pride in balanced budgets and gave thought to fixing entitlement programs*, and now we have Larry Summers and Jason Furman writing that with interest rates so low the government should do a lot more borrowing and spending. And of course, socialism is now a yeah-word and capitalism is a boo-word among Democratic politicians.
After Munich, Winston Churchill said,
for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.
I cannot support a moderation that amounts to serving the left’s victuals course by course. Get the Overton window to stand still, or maybe move it back to the right a couple of notches; only then we can talk about moderation.
*one of the event’s panelists, I believe it was Damon Linker, suggested that Clinton was getting ready to propose entitlement reform until a certain #metoo episode weakened him politically
Tyler Cowen and Jordan Peterson
Many of you are probably familiar with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. One of the points that they make, which shouldn’t have been up to them to make, was that if you set out to design a conceptual system to make weak and timid people who can’t operate in the world, you couldn’t do a better job than to create what constitutes the safe-space culture that currently permeates university campuses.
But I think he is on a much better track than Haidt and Lukianoff. For he says,
generally speaking, if you want to improve something, rather than criticize and change what already exists, it’s easier, especially now, it’s easier just to build a parallel system and see if you can put something in that’s a competitor.
And there is this:
I would say if you want to become a good educator, which perhaps might mean that you were following in my footsteps, for better or worse, is like, well, you have to learn to read, and you have to learn to think critically, and you have to learn to write, and then you have to learn to speak. You have to get good at all those things. And they’re all worth getting good at. They’re unbelievably powerful skills.
At best, I only accomplished three out of four. When speaking, I can be OK in Q&A format, but otherwise I am insufficiently animated. It is hard for me to stay awake during someone’s monologue, especially my own.
I strongly recommend the entire interview. I came away from the transcript convinced that Peterson has accumulated a great deal of wisdom. You can criticize him on any given point, just as you can criticize a championship baseball manager for taking out a pitcher and having the next guy give up a home run. Even the best managers make mistakes sometimes, but that does not make you better qualified to be the manager.
On hiatus
Until February 19. I am away from my computer, and I keep messing up HTML.
Also, there is nothing to write about. Covington? Northam? If we have the luxury of turning these stories into headlines, then we are either doing very well as a country or else we are desparate for distractions from whatever real problems we have.
A few days ago Tyler Cowen recommended a book called Whiteshift, which claims that the cultural disruption we are experiencing is due to whites feeling threatened demographically. I probably should examine the book. Off hand, though, I think that Martin Gurri has a better explanation, because I don’t think Whiteshift can explain the Arab Spring or Greece or Spain. Gurri’s story is that elites are getting knocked off their perch in the age of the Internet.
In the U.S., I see a progressive elite that pounds the table insisting that it stands against oppression. And we have a conservative elite that pounds the table insisting that it stands against barbarism.
The 2016 election exposed the conservative elite as a slim minority.
The progressive elite is larger, but it is still just a minority. I think it is in a precarious position. Puritanism always provokes a backlash. And just as the Republican base decided that the conservative elite is not worth supporting, might non-white ethnics at some point decide that the progressive elite is not worth supporting? One can envision a scenario in which the progressive elite finds itself as beached as the conservative elite finds itself today.
Politics is about group status
Hypothesis: We don’t much care about the good of society. Refinement: Love of the social good is not the main motivation for (i) political action, and (ii) political discourse. We don’t talk about what’s good for society because we want to help our fellow humans. We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself against, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.
He looks at causes of death compared with those that have political salience.
Social Justice and moral tribalism
In a lengthy essay that is worth your time, James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna write,
Sacred beliefs are ones that have been for moral reasons removed from the realm of skepticism and doubt because they’re viewed as too important to be subjected to these corrosive influences. Instead, sacred beliefs are effectively set aside from rational inquiry, which results in an expectation for them to be understood mythologically rather than literally, technically, or scientifically. The presence of sacred beliefs that cannot be questioned, challenged, or doubted—including their corollaries, even in minuscule ways—is a strong positive sign that a moral community is, in fact, a moral tribe.
Every community needs the enforcement of social norms. But I read the authors as saying that a moral tribe carries things further by requiring members to subscribe to a set of sacred beliefs. Traditional religions are examples of moral tribes, but a main point of the article is that we can have a moral tribe that shares only some but not all characteristics of traditional religions.
The conclusion of the article is that we ought to place the sort of constraints on the moral tribe of Social Justice that we place on religious groups. In particular, we should resist institutionalizing Social Justice.
That conclusion resonates with me. I have no desire to persecute the advocates of Social Justice. But I insist on having the right to question some of their beliefs.
I have no desire to persecute Christians, but I appreciate living in a society where any widespread movement by colleges or corporations to demonstrate “commitment to Christianity” or to mandate “Jesus training” would be vomited out of the system. That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”
I will put some more excerpts below the fold, but I urge you to read the whole essay. Also, Handle’s comment on a different post might fit well here.