Category Archives: Politics

Positional goods and inequality

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A commenter refers to John Nye’s 2002 essay. Nye writes that as economic growth improves food choices for everyone,

For those who only care about getting a good meal, this is a blessing not a tragedy. But those with expectations of going to the great restaurants as their incomes rise will be frustrated by the fact that the best remain agonizingly out of reach unless they grow rich much faster than the average. So only the wealthiest of the wealthy can have these goods and must pay a growing premium to do so.

Nye’s point is that the price of positional goods will go up faster than people’s incomes. Think of Harvard as a positional good. The commenter’s claim is that the key positional goods are indicators of cultural supremacy. This would imply that the conflict between old-fashioned liberal values and the new social justice values is over positional goods and thus will be very intense.

Social sorting

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Daniel A. Cox and others report,

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of white Americans report that their core social network includes only people who are also white. More than six in 10 (64 percent) black Americans have social networks composed entirely of people who are also black. Less than half of Asian Americans (49 percent) and Hispanic Americans (43 percent) have core social networks that include only members of their own race or ethnic background.

Most partisans have close social ties that reflect their political predispositions. A majority (54 percent) of Republicans report that their core social network is exclusively composed of Donald Trump supporters. The pattern is nearly identical among Democrats.

Recall the cliche that you are the average of your five closest friends.

Gossip at scale

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The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.

1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.

2. As a social enforcement mechanism, gossip does not scale. Large societies need other enforcement mechanisms: government, religion, written codes.

3. Our ISS technology changes this. It makes it possible to gossip effectively at large scale. This in turn has revived our propensity to rely on gossip. Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.

4. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.

5. The result is that we are living through a period of chaos. Symptoms include conspiracy theories, information bubbles, cancel culture, President Trump’s tweets, and widespread institutional decay and dysfunction.

6. To escape from the chaos, we will need new norms of behavior that incline us away from gossip.

I will elaborate more below. Continue reading →

Mental health, age, and political orientation

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I don’t think you can understand modern American discourse, most of all social media, without recognizing that “the intellectual Left” has higher neuroticism — as defined by Five-Factor personality theory — than say centrists. The Right of course has its own correlations, but that is a topic for another time.

He reproduces a chart based on a Pew survey that asks if someone was ever diagnosed with a mental health condition and breaks the respondents down by age and political orientation. I think that the main survey page is here, but I have not tried to download the data.

According to the chart, if you are young and liberal, there is a 46 percent chance that you have ever been told by a professional that you have a mental health condition (and admit it in the survey). If you are old and conservative, this chance is only 5 percent. If you are young and conservative, the chance is 15 percent. If you are old and liberal, the chance is 21 percent.

On the liberal-conservative difference: it could be that mental health conditions are equally prevalent across political orientation, but conservatives are more reluctant to seek a professional opinion and/or more reluctant to disclose to a survey researcher that they have been diagnosed.

On the age differences, the trend is dramatic. As you move from the 20-29 age cohort to the over-65 age cohort, liberals drop from 45 percent diagnosed to 15 percent, moderates go from 35 percent diagnosed to 17 percent, and conservatives go from 15 percent diagnosed to 5 percent.

Since the question is whether you were ever told that you have a mental health condition, all else equal this should go up with age, not down as in the chart. Again, there could be differences in willingness to seek an opinion or to disclose to a survey researcher.

But suppose that we take at face value the results that with each new cohort of white Americans, mental health is deteriorating. This would have a number of implications.

1. Mental health is unlikely to be mostly genetically determined. The gene pool cannot have changed that dramatically.

2. Jonathan Haidt’s claims about the harms of social media might explain the difference between the 20-29 cohort and the 30-49 cohort, but it seems unlikely to explain the trends in other cohorts. I suspect that the trend toward smaller and less stable families is the main factor in mental health deterioration.

A grumpy thought

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John Cochrane writes,

If Blacks are, indeed, 1% of all Math SAT takers with scores between 700 and 800, after going through our shameful educational system, just how is every field in academia along with every business competing with each other to hire that 1% going to help?

Most of his post is about the Trump Administration’s attempt to remove the “diversity training” programs from the Federal bureaucracy. As John points out, this is a topic that deserves more coverage in the media. The public should know more about what is going on.

Interestingly, another politician also decided to draw the line on indoctrination in critical theory. Did you hear about what happened in California? I have a hard time finding details, but I think that the gist of it is this.

1. The California education bureaucrats proposed to the legislature an “ethnic studies” requirement and described the curriculum.

2. Jewish groups saw that BDS was included, and they went ballistic.

3. The bureaucrats revised the curriculum. They submitted the new curriculum, saying “We took out BDS, and we even added Jews as an American ethnic group. Now are you happy, Jewish Groups?”

4. Jewish groups: “No.”

5. The law passed the California legislature with overwhelming majorities.

6. Governor Newsom vetoed the law.

As far as I know, this is where it stands.

Thoughts on the state of things

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Two essays by eminent observers.

1. David Brooks writes,

the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice.

. . .The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

Brooks argues that a decline in social trust does not just happen all by itself.

High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Like Yuval Levin, the Brooks sees our only hope as building formal institutions.

Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

2. Francis Fukuyama writes,

The issue here is thus not whether progressive illiberalism exists, but rather how great a long-term danger it represents. In countries from India and Hungary to the United States, nationalist conservatives have actually taken power and have sought to use the power of the state to dismantle liberal institutions and impose their own views on society as a whole. That danger is a clear and present one.

Progressive anti-liberals, by contrast, have not succeeded in seizing the commanding heights of political power in any developed country. Religious conservatives are still free to worship in any way they see fit, and indeed are organized in the United States as a powerful political bloc that can sway elections. Progressives exercise power in different and more nuanced ways, primarily through their dominance of cultural institutions like the mainstream media, the arts, and large parts of academia. The power of the state has been enlisted behind their agenda on such matters as striking down via the courts conservative restrictions on abortion and gay marriage and in the shaping of public school curricula. An open question for the future is whether cultural dominance today will ultimately lead to political dominance in the future, and thus a more thoroughgoing rollback of liberal rights by progressives.

This is part of a new project of Fukuyama’s, called American Purpose. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I have quoted the paragraphs with which I most disagree. Fukuyama’s entire essay is excellent, and almost every paragraph was tempting to excerpt. But I put a greater weight on cultural breakdown–see the David Brooks essay–than political breakdown, and so I am more concerned with the threat from the left.

Asymmetric news bubbles?

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PJmedia reports,

On the day Yelp introduced a new “racist behavior” wokeness rating, antifa and Black Lives Matter activists in Portland were seen on Twitter soliciting names of “non-friendly” businesses that support police, singling them out as targets. By Sunday’s pre-planned “Day of Rage,” rioters had trashed one of the explicit targets, a black-owned downtown Portland cafe.

Read the whole story. My point here is that I am pretty sure that people on the left never see stories like this. Perhaps it is true that people on the right never see some stories of outrages committed by the right, although I am skeptical about that.

I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I think that in this sense the news bubbles are asymmetric.

Welcome to the Occupation

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I recently read Live not by Lies, by Rod Dreher. Takeaways:

1. Social Justice ideology is antithetical to liberalism. You can get that from Pluckrose and Lindsay (Dreher cites Lindsay).

2. The Social Justice movement manipulates language and pressures people to accept lies. You can get that from Jordan Peterson, who first came to prominence because he was not willing to let government dictate his use of gender pronouns. Dreher does not cite Peterson, but he does cite Orwell, who wrote the classic warning about coerced lying.

3. The tyranny that is coming to this country will be a “soft” tyranny. Mass surveillance will come from technology firms, not from a secret police. Enforcement will come from social pressure, restrictions on employment, and de-platforming, not from imprisonment, torture, or assassinations.

4. Dreher’s main claim is that in order to resist this tyranny, one must learn from the Christian resistance to the Soviet Union. Above all, we must not allow Social Justice propaganda to obliterate history and destroy freedom of conscience. We should live with the hope that truth will defeat tyranny.

The psychology of resentment

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Nando Pelusi wrote,

Inequities are bound to occur; it is how we react to the perceived injustice that is key. “Natural” emotions such as the anger engendered by cheaters evolved for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t perfect and they don’t necessarily improve our lives. So resist the all-too-natural tendency to nurse a grudge.

A reader forwarded me the essay, which is difficult to excerpt. The author writes of “injustice collecting” as a natural psychological program built to protect us from being cheated repeatedly but which becomes dysfunctional in many modern contexts. Some of my thoughts.

1. As a friend of mine once pointed out, at work, we naturally resent the people who get paid more and work less than we do. We almost never notice the people who are paid less and work more than we do.

2. Sometimes it seems that a person would rather collect injustices than do something about them. That can be really harmful.

3. It seems to me that in the political realm, sometimes groups would rather collect injustices than find a way to move past them.

Kling and Gurri on social movements in Digital City

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Martin Gurri and Arnold Kling have a dialog. I say,

It seems to me that the decentralized nature of these protests is a weakness. By 20th-century standards, a movement needs to mature into having an institutional structure.

He says,

I’m going to make an act of faith and say that new institutions will arise that account for the digital environment and the web culture. With luck, they will embody our ideals of democracy and equality—maybe even nudge closer to these ideals. But it’s early days.