Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Jordan Greenhall on media and society

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He writes,

This is the formal core of the Blue Church: it solves the problem of 20th Century social complexity through the use of mass media to generate manageable social coherence.

He argues that mass media facilitated a form of social management in which an elite communicates to the population at large. What he calls the “Blue Church” thrived within and justified this arrangement.

Read the whole essay. It is hard to choose what to excerpt. Here is one more:

In Blue Church society, to hold and express good opinion means that you are part of the pack, in the tribe, on the team. Holding and expressing good opinion brings social benefit. More importantly, failing to hold and express good opinion can be ruinous.

I’ve been on a Jordan Greenhall kick lately. I like this 18-minute YouTube video also.

Try competing with Facebook

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I would instead start with the sentence “Most Americans don’t value their privacy or the security of their personal data very much,” and then discuss all the ways that limits regulation, or lowers the value of regulation, or will lead many well-intended regulations to be circumvented. Next I would consider whether there are reasonable restrictions on social media that won’t just cement in the power of the big incumbents. Then I would ask an economist to estimate the costs of regulatory compliance from the numerous lesser-known web sites around the world. Without those issues front and center, I don’t think you’ve got much to say.

He is commenting on a scheme for regulating Facebook.

I would instead start like this:

You didn’t come up with the idea. You didn’t build the business. Now that it’s here, who the heck do you think you are telling them how to run it?

That is from a brand new essay, in which I offer up my idea for a Facebook competitor. I’m sure that folks at Facebook have thought of my ideas and discarded them, probably for very good reasons. But I would much rather see people thinking like competitors rather than like fantasy-despot regulators.

A pro-civilization faction?

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Jacob Lyles writes,

ProCiv probably favors a daring approach to institutional reform. Institutions like governments, universities, and the health care system represent society’s collective intelligence. When they are operating well, society is effective, productive, and nimble in addressing crises. When they are operating poorly, they can suck up infinite money while producing less and less benefit, a process sometimes referred to as “institutional sclerosis”. There is good evidence that American institutions are quite sclerotic. Infrastructure is slow to build and expensive compared to the past. Education and medicine are skyrocketing in price while most of that extra money goes to hiring administrators and regulatory compliance. A ProCiv point of view advocates for paying the cost to make bold reforms now in exchange for upgrading our collective intelligence to manage the challenges of the coming decades.

Read the whole post. The idea is that conservatives, concerned about the survival of civilization, ought to focus on avoiding catastrophic global risks while encouraging a lot of limited experimentation.

But I am afraid that “daring approach to institutional reform” and conservatism are not a natural match.

It seems that that what you would want would be to preserve institutions and norms that are helpful and to reform those that are harmful. Other things equal, conservatives have a bias toward preservation. Progressives have a bias toward reform. If we are lucky, then conservatives will preserve good institutions and norms while gradually accepting reforms that get rid of bad institutions and norms.

But what happens when the bad institutions and norms are cherished by progressives? Think of higher education, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or being non-judgmental about people who have children outside of marriage. The progressive does not see the need for reform, and the conservative is hesitant to attempt radical change.

Seemingly related: Scott Alexander’s summary of readers’ comments on Jordan Peterson.

Immigration laws and others not enforced

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Look at what I wrote more than 15 years ago.

many laws are the legal equivalent of oxymorons – legamorons, if you will. A legamoron is any law that could not stand up under widespread enforcement. Laws against marijuana use are a prime example. Rigorous enforcement of these laws on middle-class college campuses would cause a furor.

There are many other legamorons, where we have become accustomed to low levels of enforcement.

immigration laws
laws against sexual harassment
laws against betting on sports
speed limits
software licenses
laws against music sharing
laws requiring people to pay social security taxes for household workers

A couple of things have changed. Sexual harassment is not being overlooked any more, but that change is a cultural phenomenon more than a legal one. And iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify have created legal substitutes for Napster. It still seems like illegal music sharing happens on YouTube, but I guess Google makes enough of an effort to curb it that the music labels are not going as beserk as they did about Napster. Back in 2002, the consumer market for shrink-wrapped software was still a big deal. Now, not so much, I don’t hear much complaining about people using unlicensed software.

Read the whole essay. It makes a number of interesting points.

The Anti-tribal tribe

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David Fuller writes,

Recently a new meme started doing the rounds on the Internet — the “Intellectual Dark Web”. The phrase was coined by the mathematician Eric Weinstein. It seems to have caught on — showing that whatever it is, quite a few people are recognising it — even though there’s a lot of discussion about what exactly it means.

. . .one of the things that unifies many of the thinkers in the IDW is a belief that the evolutionary strategies that got us to where we are now are unlikely to get us any further — particularly our hard-wired tribalism.

He links to the intellectual darkweb site, which is sort of a self-appointed unofficial hall of fame for the IDW. Also to a piece by Meghan Daum that appeared in a mainstream media outlet, the LA Times.

Reading Fuller’s essay and Daum’s column, I believe that my Three Languages of Politics book is in the IDW spirit. Also, at least a couple IDW hall-of-famers have read it.

Some challenges that the IDW faces:

–how to be non-tribal while opposing tribalism

–how to expose and overcome smugness without becoming smug about it

Russ Roberts on worker exploitation

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He writes,

When free-market types like myself hear about a worker who is made uncomfortable by inappropriate language or inappropriate physical contact on the job, our usual response is: quit. You don’t have to work for a crude, or worse — abusive boss. And of course, you are free to quit, and many do. But what is clear from the MeToo moment we’re in is that many people couldn’t quit. Or at least they felt they couldn’t. They stayed in abusive work relationships. Women privately shared information about who to stay away from and who not to be left alone with. But they often stayed on the job and endured humiliation, gross discomfort and sometimes, much worse.

It’s a long, sensitive, thought-provoking essay. The issue is whether workers are only treated well if employers are “nice,” either by choice or by government dictate, or whether the forces of competition are sufficient to protect workers. My thoughts:

1. Russ brings up sexual harassment in Hollywood, which indeed does look like exploitation. I do not see how this phenomenon would have developed if there weren’t a very high ratio of wannabe actresses to prominent film producers.

2. I think that as the economy becomes increasingly specialized, it becomes harder for competitive forces to work in employer-employee relationships. The specialized worker has fewer firms to choose from, and the firm needing specialized skills has fewer workers to choose from. This creates more scope for social norms and idiosyncratic negotiating skills to affect compensation levels.

3. The phenomenon that I talked about, consolidation, also is a factor. If my hypothesis is correct that differences in executive skill at overseeing and deploying software are driving consolidation, then I would expect the high-caliber management teams to attract the best workers, in part because they can afford to offer higher compensation. But the strong firms also have leverage, because workers want to affiliate with them for better long-term career development. Meanwhile, I would expect workers at firms with mediocre management to have no bargaining power, assuming that they do not meet the standards of the stellar firms. Poorly-managed firms are threatened with extinction, which gives their workers no scope for demanding more compensation.

4. Getting back to social norms, I hope that going forward women feel empowered to say no to harassers and to get help from HR departments or Boards of Directors in getting harassers removed. But I do not think that public shaming ought to be the weapon of first resort.

5. I am worried about what can be defined as harassment. Back in the 1950s, there was a presumption that “nice girls don’t.” A man had to be patient and seductive in order to get consent. With the sexual revolution, there no longer was a presumption that men had to be patient. But “seduction” minus patience is hard to distinguish from harassment. Some people, especially on college campuses, think that the solution is to make the process of obtaining consent formal to the point of being legalistic. I think we would be better off, in a lot of ways, if instead we could somehow get back to requiring patience.

TLP makes a cameo appearance

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in a new book by Eunice and Sabrina Moyle, called Be the Change. In the section of the book that discusses political activism, they write,

Arnold Kling says that people tend to act according to a dominant axis–a trade-off between two ideas. On one end of the axis is what you want. On the other end is what you don’t want. When people make decisions, they tend to rely on their dominant axis to make a quick decision.

My remarks:

1. In a book that will appeal primarily to those on the left, it is nice to see an attempt to un-demonize conservatives and libertarians. I hope that readers stop and think about these pages and don’t just skip over them.

2. They cite Jonathan Haidt as well, and in fact they replace the oppressor-oppressed axis with Haidt’s care/harm dichotomy. That is an interesting shift. I think that oppressor-oppressed better describes the loudest voices on the left, particularly on college campuses. On the other hand, care/harm represents a less militant and more tolerant form of progressive expression, but one which is not so prominently on display.

3. Without the discussion of the three-axes model (and perhaps even with it), progressives might be inclined to use the book as a “how-to manual” for political action along the lines of the recent nationwide high school student walk-out to support gun control.

4. As a nitpick, I would prefer to replace “tend to act” with “seek a sense of moral certainty and political tribal solidarity” and I would prefer to replace “make decisions” with “communicate to signal approval and disapproval.”

5. The book has very rich graphic design. It reminds me of the look that many publishers are trying to achieve for “family seder” books for Passover. I guess I should not be surprised that the design is striking, given that this is what they do in their cards and stationery business.

Trump and TLP

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Handle points out that the emergence of Donald Trump has scrambled the model of the Three Languages of Politics. For example,

Even since Trump started his campaign, it seems to me that the progressives have been using “civilization vs. barbarism” rhetoric all the time. Not just the “breakdown in civility,” but also complaining about “chaos” and the potential collapse of the “international order” that was based on American strength guided by a progressive vision and set of values.

My thoughts:

1. I do think that Trump created a new axis, of Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.

2. I think that progressives want to throw everything possible at Trump at see what sticks. But they have certainly not given up on the oppressor-oppressed frame. They still make the “white nationalist” charge.

3. As Jeffrey Friedman pointed out long ago, libertarians go back and forth between arguing for liberty as a value in itself and arguing for it as instrumental to social improvement, particularly economic prosperity and growth. I don’t think we are seeing anything new from libertarians. They argue differently depending on the issue, putting more emphasis on liberty as a value in discussing free speech and putting more emphasis on economic consequences when arguing for free trade.

4. Libertarians have got to be feeling pretty badly these days. I cannot imagine anyone talking about a “libertarian moment” without being laughed out of the room. In Europe, it looks more like a “fascist moment” nowadays. In the U.S., referring to Google, Facebook, et al, Joel Kotkin writes,

Whether one sits on the progressive left or the political right, this growing hegemony presents a clear and present danger. It is increasingly clear that the oligarchs have forgotten that Americans are more than a collection of data-bases to be exploited. People, whatever their ideology, generally want to maintain a modicum of privacy, and choose their way of life.

And of course, everyone’s idea of fighting the corporate hegemony involves enhancing the hegemony of bureaucrats in Washington.

This is Nassim Taleb Week

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Russ Roberts does a podcast Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Skin in the Game. Listen to the whole thing or read the transcript. One random excerpt:

Crossing the street reduces your life expectancy by 1 in 47,000 years. It’s not a big deal. So, the–crossing the street basically is close to zero risk for me, because my life expectancy is not infinite. But if you made humanity cross the street, that would be a problem, because it would reduce life expectancy commensurably.

So, the problem of these analyses that people throw around is that they ignore the value from life expectancy of whatever you are threatening.