Category Archives: Politics

Norms and unwed motherhood

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Dale Brumfield writes,

Martha had what she may have considered numerous good reasons to conceal her pregnancy and childbirth — she was almost 40 years of age and had divorced her husband in 1950 after a 16-year marriage. She may have also been painfully aware of the struggles of a single working mother in a socially oppressive post-war era that lionized couples, marriage, God and family and especially, conformity. Accidental childbirth to an unwed woman was not only maligned but frequently received with ostracism from families and employers and in a few rare cases, criminal charges.

He accurately describes the moral norms that existed at the time and the harsh consequences that those norms had for unmarried women who became pregnant, and in this particular case the harsh consequences for the baby. Implicitly, he sees the change in social norms as all for the good.

But in the 1950s, the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households was much smaller than it is today. I don’t know the figure for the 1950s, but I believe that today it is over 50 percent. I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.

Race and higher education

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Heather MacDonald writes,

Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Radical feminism, as well as gay and now trans advocacy, are also deeply intertwined with social-justice thinking on campus and off, as we have just seen. But race is the main impetus. Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement.

Starting from a premise that racial gaps are due entirely to white oppression, the social justice movement is deforming higher education. Even if it is true that white oppression is the root cause of the racial achievement gap, that gap is not going to be closed at the college level by social justice methods. Colleges cannot manufacture successful graduates out of unprepared students, where successful means learning according to standards of excellence and preparation means a combination of ability, conscientiousness, and knowledge.

If Harvard takes minority students who are not prepared for Harvard (in addition to those minority students who are sufficiently prepare), but who might be prepared for the University of Michigan, then Michigan has to take minority students who are not prepared for Michigan but might be prepared for Nebraska, etc. The result is racial gaps everywhere, and a perpetual-motion machine of social justice complaints.

ICYMI: sex differences and personality

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Scott Barry Kaufman writes,

On average, males tend to be more dominant, assertive, risk-prone, thrill-seeking, tough-minded, emotionally stable, utilitarian, and open to abstract ideas. Males also tend to score higher on self-estimates of intelligence, even though sex differences in general intelligence measured as an ability are negligible [2]. Men also tend to form larger, competitive groups in which hierarchies tend to be stable and in which individual relationships tend to require little emotional investment. In terms of communication style, males tend to use more assertive speech and are more likely to interrupt people (both men and women) more often– especially intrusive interruptions– which can be interpreted as a form of dominant behavior.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. I think that the fact that women are relatively more likely to be in charge of small businesses than large corporations has something to do with personality differences.

See also Tyler Cowen’s post on gender differences in word use in research papers.

Fringe/center, left/right

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I stuck with Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris for a long time, even though much of the discussion did not excite me. But starting around 2:10 (that is, two hours and ten minutes in), there are three interesting minutes. At one point, Harris says that the far-left fringe influences the mainstream left, whereas the far right fringe does not influence the mainstream right.

I think that is going to be a very controversial statement, so let me suggest how to think about it. What are the examples of actions or positions that people of the mainstream right (and for this purpose, I will allow you to include President Trump in the “mainstream right”) where a reasonable neutral person would agree that (a) your accusation about the mainstream right is correct and (b) that the action or position comes from the fringe right, and if you took away the fringe right it would go away.

For example, if you say that President Trump is anti-semitic, then I would say that this satisfies (b) but not (a)–that is, a reasonable neutral person would not agree that he is anti-semitic. Or if you say that President Trump and others on the mainstream right are nationalistic, I would say that satisfies (a) but not (b). That is you cannot argue that nationalism is a sentiment that would disappear from the right if the fringe would go away.

I think that the strongest case one might make would be with regard to anti-immigrant rhetoric. Clearly, the mainstream right-wing view has shifted since President Reagan’s day, and it has moved in the direction of the right-wing fringe.

Now apply these tests to the left. The NYT’s “1619 project” strikes me as an example of fringe left going mainstream. So does Google’s firing of James Damore. So does the local synagogue where I go dancing on Mondays where “men” has been replaced by “urinals and stalls” and “women” has been replaced by “stalls only.” So do the women’s athletic events that have been won by biological males.

So I think that Sam Harris’ point is basically correct. I think that if I were a Progressive, I would argue that for the left to adopt ideas from its fringe is more of a feature than a bug. Often, it seems that eventually the center (not just the left) does tend to “catch up” with ideas that start on the Progressive fringe. Gay marriage is among many examples that come to mind.

The problem is that there are plenty of fringe ideas on the left that do not deserve to become mainstream. Left-wing anti-semitism comes to mind.

My conclusion is that we do need to apply a filter to left-wing fringe ideas. And we cannot count on left-wing moderates to provide that filter. It could be that the mission of the center-right is to provide a filter for both the fringe ideas on the right and the fringe ideas on the left. But that means that we should not want the center-right to go extinct.

Martin Gurri watch

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Was 2019 the year of Martin Gurri? Consider the list of countries where protests took place, as he points out in a review post.

when the whole world is watching, a local demand for political change can start to go global in an instant. At a certain point, the process becomes self-sustaining and self-reinforcing: that threshold may have been crossed in November, when at least eight significant street uprisings were rumbling along concurrently (Bolivia, Catalonia, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon – with France, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, and Venezuela simmering in the background).

But

This would be a good time to bring up the pessimistic hypothesis. It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.