Category Archives: culture

Civil Society in a Narrower, Deeper, Older World

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A commenter writes,

the Little Platoons may not be feasible. It seems to me that the world has professionalised, with more technical, domain-specific knowledge, which is a barrier to those with moderate interest or casual observers.

The strongest institutions of civil society used to be broader and shallower. Churches were more important when more people lived in smaller communities and more people attended them. Trade unions used to be larger. Schools used to be less segregated by income class (although more segregated by race). Organizations like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and the NAACP were much more welcoming to Republicans. Such organizations have become narrower, deeper, and older. They are less capable than they once were of representing or mobilizing large numbers of people.

Let me suggest that civil society still exists (it is wrong to say that we are bowling alone), but that there are now many more associations, each with a narrower constituency that is more deeply committed. Think of television. “I Love Lucy” dominated the culture of the 1950s. “M*A*S*H” was pretty well embedded in the 1970s. I don’t think any program comes close today, even though people still consume a lot of TV-like media.

Recently, my wife and I were guilty of going to the Everly Set, a tribute duo playing a house concert setting. The whole concept exemplified narrower, deeper, older. It was also very enjoyable.

The commenter raises the issue of what it means for our role vis-a-vis government. As the shallower, broader institutions of civil society become weaker, this makes people more willing to defer to government expertise. Yuval Levin expresses similar concerns in The Fractured Republic, which I am confident that the commenter would enjoy reading.

I do not see the broad, shallow institutions making a comeback. I do not see how the narrower, deeper organizations can provide viable alternatives to government. Fifty years ago, Charity meant the United Way. Now, it means GoFundMe. Will the narrower, deeper model really work, or will we continue to think in terms of government as the primary distributor of charity? Yet I do not see how government can be sufficiently competent to handle the responsibilities that people are willing to cede to it. It looks as if we are stuck.

Narrower, Deeper, Older

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Phil Moss writes,

But the plethora of new dances comes at a cost. It increases our fragmentation. It creates a barrier to entry for both veterans (who come and go at various points in their lives) and for newbies who have to “drink from a firehydrant” in order to become regulars. For veteran non-regulars it becomes daunting to come back and see so many dances they haven’t learned. Unless one attends regularly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land instead of feeling comfortable when “coming home.”

The article is about Israeli folk dancing, which I know interests me a lot more than my readers, so I won’t say “read the whole thing.” Instead, I want to talk about the general trends I see in the way people engage with their interests. You can become engaged with any number of interests, including your religion, a sport, a hobby, your profession, a charitable cause, etc.

I want to offer some observations that apply to the entire class of interests, and I will suggest that “matching technology” (Tyler Cowen’s term) plays a role in these trends. Then I will come back to Israeli Dancing.

My central claim here is that the nature of engagement has changed over the past fifty years, in these three ways:

1. Narrower. There are fewer people casually engaged.

2. Deeper. Those who are engaged are more committed and have deeper knowledge.

3. Older. For any interest that has been around for a long time, the demographics of those interested now skews older.

For example, consider the game of bridge. A social bridge game is four friends getting together in someone’s house to play. A bridge tournament is many strangers competing against one another in a large room. In high school and college, I played a lot of social bridge. In college, I also played some tournament bridge. I then stopped playing for decades.

Fifty years ago, I believe that there were more social bridge players than tournament players. Today, it is closer to the reverse.

When I tried to get back into tournament bridge a few years ago, I found that the “barrier to entry” had gotten much higher. Players expect you to know a plethora of new tactics, which in bridge are known as “conventions.”

The other point to notice was that the median age of players at the tournament seemed to be about 70. Not many young people are willing to get past the barrier to entry.

As another example, consider people with an interest in baseball. Fifty years ago, many casual fans knew the batting averages and home run totals of well-known players. Today, there are fewer fans with that knowledge. Instead, there is a relatively small group of fans whose knowledge includes arcane statistics that did not exist when I was growing up.

Also, I think that interest in baseball skews older, in spite of marketing efforts aimed at the young. My sense is that in the ballpark it is mostly people over age 50 who are paying close attention to the action on the field. The younger people are on their cell phones and/or watching the JumboTron.

I believe that religion is becoming narrower, deeper, and older. A smaller fraction of the population is affiliated with a place of worship, but there may be an uptick among those deeply committed, such as Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, many congregations are thinning out as their populations age and die off.

I suspect that what Tyler Cowen calls “matching technology” (the Internet) plays a big role. Instead of settling for a lowest-common-denominator activity, like a game of social bridge, you can find something that really excites you and connect with people who share your excitement. With better matching technology, the total number of viable interests goes up, and the share of people who settle for activities in which they are only moderately interested goes down.

“Matching” means that any given interest draws a narrower set of people. Those people are more committed, so that the interest becomes deeper, with a higher barrier to entry in terms of study and practice. Finally, as new interests emerge, the population engaged in traditional interests gets older.
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Dan Sperber on Culture

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He says,

The classical view of what culture is, very simply, that which is transmitted in a population by non-genetic means: by communication, imitation, and all forms of interaction. In the human case, imitation is an important factor which has been overplayed. Humans imitate better than any other animal, (except maybe parrots, but parrots have a narrow range of things that they imitate).

Later,

to explain the success of bits of culture, of practices, of rituals, of techniques, of ideologies, and so on, the question was not how do they benefit the population in which they evolve; the question was how do they benefit their own propagation? Dawkins was saying that much better than I could have done at the time.

He argues against the System 1, System 2 framework of Kahneman.

[Humans] exploit reasons in our cognitive work. This is not a second system; it’s just an ordinary cognitive capacity among others, which has important implications for interaction because that’s what drove its very evolution. It’s an ability to understand others, to justify ourselves in the eyes of others, to convince them of our ideas, to accept and to evaluate the justifications and arguments that others give and be convinced by them or not.

…the basic functions of reason are social. They have to do with the fact that we interact with each other’s bodies and with each other’s minds. And to interact with other’s minds is to be able to represent a representation that others have, and to have them represent our representations, and also to act on the representation of others and, in some cases, to let others act on our own representations.

Paul Bloom Against Empathy

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The entire podcast with Russ Roberts is fantastic, but I especially like the last 10-12 minutes.

Bloom and Roberts are dismayed by what they see as a cultural change in which politicians focus on the individual case to tug at emotions. (Think of President Reagan starting the tradition of spotlighting someone at the State of the Union address.) It made me think of this WaPo op-ed, which offended me on several levels, and which I will discuss more later this week. Compare this culture with the way that America’s Founding Fathers were able to operate at a more abstract level.

Bloom hopes for a reversal of the cultural trend away from rational thinking about public policy. But my thought is that the battle is lost. Somewhere along the way, the most highly educated people, who you would ordinarily count on to get beyond emotion-driven policy views, have instead turned out to be very tribal and simplistic in their outlook.

Prestige and Social Change

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Vera L. te Velde asks

which cooperative norms are chosen to be enforced and how does this come about?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read her whole post.

Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of our Success, emphasizes the role of prestige. I can think of some examples. Joel Mokyr points out that prestigious scientists, particularly in the UK, were able to change the way people approached many issues during the Enlightenment. Another example would be the way that prestigious people, particularly in arts and entertainment, were able to quickly change attitudes about homosexuality in the United States. Another example would be the way that prestigious people, again particularly in arts and entertainment, began in the 1960s to use four-letter words in public with increasing frequency, leading to the breakdown of the norm against doing so. Another example would be racism and eugenics, which were popular among intellectuals one hundred years ago and became very unpopular more recently.

Another source of changes in norms is general upheaval, in which many people lose wealth or status. I am thinking of the changes in norms that took place in Germany after the first World War, producing political street violence and

Still, it is exceptional for social norms to change rapidly. Many attempts to change social norms are not successful. And I think that you have to allow for a lot of idiosyncratic factors.

A good example to keep in mind is the emergence and influence of the Beatles. I think it is a mistake to view every aspect of that phenomenon as if it were pre-ordained somehow. Beatle haircuts? Quite accidental, if you ask me.

Sure, maybe somebody else comes along and combines gritty R&B instrumentation with vocal harmonies, but do they go to India? Turn drug use into a high-status activity?

Finally, to say that people with prestige determine which norms get enforced invites the question: how do certain individuals or classes of people come to have high prestige?

Some of it has to do with their idiosyncratic abilities. Lennon and McCartney had a gift for cultivating pop stardom. Samuelson had a gift for making other economists feel like lesser mortals.

Some of it also has to do with where individuals fit in the entire status cosmos. Lennon and McCartney benefited from disc jockeys and others trying to raise their own status in the nascent world of teenagers listening to transistor radios. Samuelson benefited from young mathematically-oriented economists eager to raise their status within the profession.

In short, I would recommend studying the issue of how people obtain high prestige and how that in turn enables them to affect the larger society.

Tyler Cowen Talks with Joseph Henrich

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Self-recommending. A couple of excerpts from Henrich.

Humans really don’t think as individuals. We don’t innovate as individuals. We innovate as groups. Groups that, for whatever reason, are able to create more social interconnections produce fancier tools and technology, and they’re able to maintain larger bodies of know-how.

and

Much of behavioral economics, at least at the time, was based on running experiments on undergrads. It’s actually mostly American undergrads that are studied.

The point is that these studies may not replicate, because they are limited to people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic–WEIRD.

Recall that I based a lot of my essay on cultural intelligence on Henrich’s book.

The interview with Cowen is lively and interesting throughout.

Two Types of Beliefs

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Kevin Simler writes,

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don’t lie awake at night fearing that we’re massively deluded.

But when we consider the beliefs of other people? . . .

Later,

I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been “hired” not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.

Still later,

The trouble with people is that they have partial visibility into our minds, and they sometimes reward us for believing falsehoods and/​or punish us for believing the truth.

My thoughts:

1. One might suggest that incentives apply only to beliefs that you espouse. You can choose your private beliefs on merit. However, it is hard to maintain a private/public disparity. You might have to reveal your true beliefs at some point. Also, when you espouse something, I think it makes you more inclined to believe it.

2. Of course, all beliefs are socially communicated. One way to rephrase Simler’s thesis is that some beliefs are transmitted via reason and others are transmitted via incentives.

3. It might be hard to avoid proceeding from the insight that beliefs can be affected by incentives to go on to say that well, my beliefs are based on merit but yours are based on incentives. Simler, too, is worried about this. His solution is to recommend embedding oneself in a community where the norms of behavior go against maintaining confidence in beliefs that are affected by incentives. Such a community will create good incentives to counteract bad incentives.

My concern is that we are prone to deceive and to self-deceive. Suppose that economist X at Yale and economist Y at GMU are each convinced that he or she is part of a community that creates good social incentives for shaping one’s beliefs. Yet their beliefs differ. What should we do then? I think Simler would say that in that case we should reward those who have low confidence in their beliefs and punish those who have high confidence. But what if neither the Yale nor the GMU economics department effectively does this?

Defining Culture: A Good Question

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From a commenter.

if you read a book from another culture, or even an older time period, and it influences you, is it part of your culture?

In everyday use, the term “culture” usually connotes thought patterns and behavioral tendencies that are widely shared within a community, and they may be unique to a particular time and place. The definitions I have been proposing do not included this connotation.

For now, I am willing to stick to the simple definition of culture as socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. I would remark that these patterns are almost always shared within a community, because most communication takes place within a community. When you are influenced by a source outside of your usual community, you are going to be a bit of an oddball, unless you can convince your close associates to adopt the novel influence.

I would add that an interesting issue within a community is the kind of alternatives and alien influences that people are willing to tolerate among other members. I do not think that “tolerance” is a purely scalar variable, with some communities having more and some having less. Rather, I think that tolerance is multidimensional, with some communities more tolerant along some dimensions and less tolerant along others. So if in 1950 the typical American could tolerate the N-word but not the F-word, and today it is the reverse, that fact does not tell us that people today are more or less tolerant along some non-existent scale.

Joseph Henrich Defines Culture

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Since I was talking about the challenge of defining culture, we should look at how Joseph Henrich defines it in The Secret of Our Success, an important book that I have referred to often (most notably in this piece for National Affairs). On p. 3, he writes

By “culture” I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.

That’s all he has to say in terms of definition, which leaves some questions unanswered.

1. Why the qualifier “while growing up”? It implies that we reach an age at which the receipt of cultural transmission stops, which seems odd. What empirical or theoretical problems does Henrich think he is avoiding by including the qualifier, rather than taking the view that cultural transmission can be received at any age?

2. Why the qualifier “mostly”? If it were me, I would be tempted to partition our personalities into three components: biologically innate; acquired through our own experience with nature; and learned from other people. Of course, any single behavioral tendency or thought pattern can be the product of all of these components, so that the precise partition may not be readily applicable. Still, I would make the general point that much of our behavioral tendencies and thought patterns are learned from other people, either directly or indirectly. In fact, that might serve as a one-sentence statement of the thesis of Henrich’s book. But in the definition of culture, I would drop the “mostly” and say that to the extent that a behavioral tendency or thought pattern is not learned from other people, then it is not cultural. In that case, it is mostly innate and/or learned through our own experience. If culture includes more than what we learn from other people, then what does it not include?

3. Note the inclusion of “tools,” which goes beyond my shorthand of “behavioral tendencies and thought patterns.” While we are at it, why not include consumer goods, or at least say that consumer goods are included as “tools” that help satisfy our wants? If we are going to include tools, then don’t we have to include institutions? Note that “institutions” is another term that gets used to mean many things, so we would do well to define it, also.

But perhaps instead of broadening the definition of culture, why not narrow it? Tools and institutions in part act as channels for socially communicating thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. But why not define culture itself as socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies (which I think covers everything other than “tools” in Henrich’s definition)?

Anyway, I think that if Henrich were to embark on another edition of the book, I would encourage him to spend several pages discussing the definition of “culture” and related terms, rather than leaving it to one off-handedly casual sentence.

Japan, Culture, and the Economy

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A commenter asks,

how do you view post-war Japan economy and society? I remember in the 1970s – 1980s the Japan Inc. being the ultimate economic machine and now today they look like a society of Grandpa Simpsons? The Japanese culture did not suddenly turn completely 180 degree different on January 1, 1990.

I think that the conventional view of the Japanese economy is that it was well-structured for “catch-up growth” but unable to adapt when that ran out. At its best, it combined a dynamic sector of large manufacturers with stagnant retail and service sectors consisting of small firms protected by regulation. Then other catch-up countries, notably South Korea and China, started to eat into manufacturing, and things went down hill. That is much clearer in hindsight, of course, but I have no reason to second-guess that story.

More generally, I want to speculate that for economic purposes, culture has two important dimensions, which are somewhat in tension with one another. One dimension is trust, and the other dimension is receptiveness to innovation.

One way to read McCloskey, and perhaps also Mokyr (I have just started his book) is that they see the Enlightenment as creating receptiveness to innovation. The conventional story would suggest that in the 1990s Japan’s economic performance came to be dominated by the sectors where there was resistance to innovation.

Trust is valuable because when people are confident that others will follow norms, this helps to lower transaction costs. Seeing markets and government as legitimate is an element of trust.

Innovation tends to lower the status of some people relative to others. That in turn tends to breed distrust among those whose status is lowered.

So I think that societies have to navigate a trade-off. Too much innovation might lead to a breakdown in trust. Too little innovation leads to stagnation. Japan appears to have erred on the side of protecting the status of small business people but suffering stagnation. The U.S. appears to be having a hard time avoiding a breakdown in trust.