Kenneth L. Marcus writes,

The new antiracism is not, as its etymology suggests, opposition to racial discrimination. Ibram X. Kendi demonstrates this in his 2019 bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist.” He defines “racism” as a combination of policies and ideas that “produces and normalizes racial inequities.” This racism has nothing to do with individual discrimination. Rather, it is support for institutions that yield disparities. Lest there be confusion, Mr. Kendi emphasizes that “focusing on ‘racial discrimination’ takes our eyes off” the policy goals he and other self-proclaimed antiracists support.

How urgent is it that we alter institutions in order to remove racial disparities?

Institutions are rules and practices, such as laws against using drugs or the practice of requiring SAT tests for college admissions. Racial disparities are outcomes that are on average worse for African-Americans, such as under-representation among the very wealthy or over-representation in the prison population.

Consider two extreme views:

a) We should get rid of any institution that might cause such disparities until the disparities disappear.

b) Unless an institution explicitly uses race or skin color as a criterion for discriminating against African-Americans, that institution should be preserved, assuming that it serves a good purpose.

My guess is that a lot of people nowadays would position themselves somewhere between (a) and (b). I would hold up my hand for (b), with no in-between.

For example, consider the use of credit scoring to screen loan applicants. I believe that credit scoring is non-discriminatory with disparate impact. That is, a black borrower and a white borrower who each have a credit score of 650 will have the same probability of defaulting on the loan. But if you set 650 as a cutoff for approving loans, then the proportion of loan approvals that are for blacks will be less than their share in the population.

Someone committed to (a) would want to remedy the disparate impact. Either explicitly or implicitly, they would lower the cutoff for black applicants until they receive a proportionate share of loans. As someone committed to (b), I would advocate using the same cutoff for blacks as for whites.

Some further thoughts:

1. This would get me accused by the religion that persecutes heretics of being a white supremacist. But by most people’s standards, I am not.

2. There are plenty of institutions that might not qualify as “assuming that it serves a good purpose.” For example, drug laws may not serve a good purpose, but not because of any disparate racial impact. I am inclined to get rid of the college admissions process and replace it with open admissions rationed by a lottery system. Again, that is not because of any disparate racial impact. [UPDATE: See the essay on college admissions by Jeffrey Selingo. It appears to me that the main purpose of college admissions office is to perpetuate itself.]

Marcus concludes,

To defeat racism, we must turn away from the new antiracism.

These days, the air is thick with straw-man criticisms of libertarians. If you want to attack my version of libertarianism, this is what you should go after:

Regarding the performance of social arrangements, I focus on dynamics. I do not assume that the best production systems and social arrangements are known. Instead, I believe that better ways of doing things are always being discovered.
My concern is with what facilitates discovery and retention of better ideas. Which systems are conductive to improvement, as opposed to stagnation or regression?

I dislike economic analysis that ignores dynamics. For too many economists, comparative statics are everything. That is, you compare two static outcomes (e.g., with or without some regulation), and advocate for policies that in theory lead to the superior outcome. Use of the term “market failure” almost always indicates comparative-statics thinking. I have two major objections, based on dynamic thinking. One objection is that static analysis fails to anticipate the dynamic response to policy–people figure out how to game the system. The other objection is that static analysis fails to account for entrepreneurial efforts to overcome market failure. In a dynamic sense, markets are the solution to market failure.

My emphasis on dynamics and institutions owes a great deal to Douglass North. Note how many of the titles of his works included the word “change.” Note that his definition of institutions is broad, and I often substitute the term “culture” instead.

North would judge an institution (or cultural practice) by what it rewards. If it rewards prosocial behavior, things will get better. If it rewards predation, we are likely to see less progress.

Markets tend to reward prosocial behavior. Not all markets at all times, but most markets at most times.

Governments tend to reward predatory behavior. Not all governments at all times, but often enough that we should take this into account when we advocate for government to “do something.” Government power is a prize for which elites will compete. The competition for government power tends toward predation rather than prosocial behavior. Under monarchy or autocratic regimes, you get assassinations and wars of succession, which are very destructive.

The great virtue of democracy is that it creates a norm of peaceful transfer of power. The great vice of democracy is that it exalts the “will of the people.” In practice, this creates a bias toward greater government intervention. Ideally, I would like to see the peaceful transfer of power without the democratic impetus for expanded government control.

An optimistic view of democracy is that parties compete for power by trying to outdo one another in the enactment of pro-social policies. If this were the case, then bigger government would be better government. But I don’t take the optimistic view. In practice, I think that big government is what North, Weingast, and Wallis call a “limited-access order.” Powerful and important members of the governing coalition capture rewards, at the expense of everyone else.

Furthermore, I believe that even if government officials were free of special-interest influence and wanted to be pro-social, they would fail. They under-estimate their own ignorance, and in choosing leaders the political process selects for a lack of humility. Officials are prone to blunders, and the error-correction mechanisms are much weaker in the public sector than in the private sector. Markets tend to correct their failures. Governments tend not to.

Here are some thoughts in reaction to the many interesting comments on my post on Peter Thiel.

1. Is libertarianism elitist?

I believe so. I think that most people value their own liberty, but they have a hard time extending this value to strangers who they do not entirely trust. It takes a lot of sophistication to appreciate enumerated powers, free speech, and the emergent order of market competition. Instead, I think that Fear Of Others’ Liberty is the norm. I believe that America’s Constitution was designed by elites, and as we gradually extended the franchise to include more FOOLs the Constitutional safeguards have been crushed under the weight of popular opinion.

2. Is libertarianism a white male ideology?

I don’t know whether there are racial differences, but I think I that empathizer-systemizer theory can explain statistical differences in male-female attitudes. To be libertarian, you have to look at the super-Dunbar world from the perspective of a systemizer rather than an empathizer, which means that libertarians are more likely to be found among males than among females.

3. Why are libertarians unwilling to sign up as conservatives or progressives?

Conservatives make concessions to FOOLs in order to get elected. Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions. Even worse, these concessions have for a long time included deficit spending and expansion of state power in the name of providing safety and security. Worst of all, conservatives long ago abandoned the doctrine of enumerated powers.

In practice, conservatives usually do not overturn progressive initiatives. Obamacare is the latest example.

Progressives propose government policies from an empathizer perspective. They will gladly toss away personal liberty in order to “help” people. Lockdowns are the latest example.

4. I think that many (most?) libertarians feel culturally in tune with college-educated progressives. I am an exception to that. I find that you can be smart and nice without a college degree, and you can be intellectually uninteresting and/or personally nasty with one.

My wife and most people in our social circle are not academics. On occasions where I have to spend a lot of time with a group of college professors, I am relieved when the gathering is over. When I was at Freddie Mac, I became bored with other economists, and I eventually gravitated toward people with experience in the mortgage business and/or information systems. When I started my Internet business, after about a year I found a partner who had only a high-school equivalency degree.

In business, I noticed that I did not like meetings attended primarily by males, nor did I like meetings attended primarily by females. At parties, when men congregate in one room and women congregate in another room, I find myself unable to engage in either conversation, and I usually end up talking to someone else who is feeling left out.

The bottom line is that I seem to get along ok with various types of people, without feeling especially sympatico with people in my field or with my level of education. Perhaps that leads me to be less inclined than other libertarians to side with progressives.

A reader asks,

I’m curious which writers you find best among the other tribes. Who do you read regularly so that you can take the most charitable view of those who disagree with the libertarian perspective?

1. I give points to anyone who looks at the virus crisis without saying that President Trump was a dominant causal factor. For example, Raj Chetty listening to the data tell him that individual responses preceded government lockdowns. I also give points to Chetty and to Amir Sufi for looking at the economic impact of the crisis without using a GDP factory framework.

2. I take points off from anyone who bashes libertarians as being responsible for things being in a bad state. If you ask me, there are many more opportunities to improve public policy by making it more libertarian, and there are very few opportunities for making public policy better by making it less libertarian. Feel free to make specific criticisms of libertarian points of view, but don’t disgrace yourself a la Niskanen Center.

3. For progressives now, I am most focused on their willingness to stand up for old-fashioned liberal values, such as free speech. So I give credit to Jonathan Haidt and Bret Weinstein and I enjoy listening to them. I like progressives who are willing to speak out for policy positions that go against their own tribe. In the past, I have mentioned William Galston and the Progressive Policy Institute as examples. Jason Furman would be another example.

4. For conservatives now, I am focused on their willingness to stand up for old-fashioned conservative values, such as fiscal responsibility and civility. Yuval Levin. George Will. Megan McArdle. I am probably overlooking many others.

5. These days, it is important to me to see writers who are not heavily dug in on President Trump. Some conservatives are too intent on supporting him. Many progressives are too insistent on attacking him.

Brian Doherty writes,

Claremont’s web journal The American Mind, though, was launched in 2018 with a more provocative agenda: to “rethink the ideological framework of the American Right.” The animating idea, founding editor Matthew Peterson explains, is that traditional right-of-center groups are out of touch: They don’t even realize that their own staffs include “people under 35” who “fundamentally disagree with supposedly fundamental [classical liberal] tenets of their organization. No one wants to hear or deal with it. They want to stick their heads in the sand.” A vibrant and ideologically adventurous new conservative movement, Peterson says, is “bubbling beneath the surface, or even online all over the place. We are not supposed to talk about these things or engage that movement?”

Yarvin is perhaps better known for the pen name under which he rose to internet fame in the late 2000s and early 2010s: “Mencius Moldbug.” At his Unqualified Reservations blog, Moldbug, a software entrepreneur by day, unspooled head-spinningly long-winded “neoreactionary” screeds. . .

I think that Wikipedia credits me with coining the term “neoreactionary.” Doherty shares my concern that national conservatism is neoreactionary and throws libertarians under the bus. His essay connects Peter Thiel to the neoreactionary view, but Doherty admits to being unsure about exactly where Thiel stands.

To the neoreactionaries, the libertarians are too soft to fight a war against the religion that identifies and persecutes heretics. To libertarians, a war to the death between neoreactionaries and that religion would be a war with no winner.

I think of the war as having three fronts.

1. The media. There, the social justice warriors have captured the most famous brands, but the Internet has diluted the importance of those brands. I might resent the NYT, but I do not fear it.

2. Politics. To me, this is a weird front, because I think most voters don’t think they have a dog in the fight, so that the outcome of elections does not tell us how much people like or don’t like the social justice religion. This November, I think that as long as there is a clear winner, the post-election period will find the social justice activists and the more reasonable left battling one another. It would be nice to let the fight play out, rather than to have an all out right-vs.-left battle. My worst fear, though, is that there will be no clear winner in November, in which case the social justice activists and the center-left will stick to one another like glue as they fight for Biden to defeat Trump in the contested aftermath.

3. Intellectuals. Here, my hope is that universities will go down the path of the media. That is, the famous brands will lose their luster, and alternative arenas for developing and debating ideas will become increasingly influential. Personally, I would rather fight the religion on this front than on the other two.

F.H. Buckley writes,

our politics can be portrayed along two axes, economic and non-economic, according to the preferences of two-dimensional men who vote for two-dimensional progressive conservatism. This divided voters into four quadrants, and the winning one was left-wing or middle of the road on economics but right-wing on social issues. Those voters went three to one for Trump.

Of course, libertarians are in the opposite quadrant: left-wing on social issues and right-wing on economic issues.

I have argued for the last few years that libertarians have been thrown under the bus by both major parties.