Category Archives: Politics

Concerning Twitter

Posted on by

Glenn Reynolds says,

Social media have their function, but the superiority of the old blogosphere — the internet as it existed say in 2006 — is that it’s a loosely coupled system. Bloggers could be as obnoxious as they wanted, and if you didn’t like them, you just didn’t go read their blog. And it didn’t really affect much of anything else.

Pointer from a commenter. I agree with most of the interview.

I have not read Reynolds’ book, but this sounds like the essence:

these social media platforms, which cram a bunch of people together with no effort of sanitation – and honestly, the way the algorithms are designed, they basically encourage people to fling poo at each other — allow for the spread of toxic ideas, fake news, irrational ideations and such, with no control for people whose immune systems, mental immune systems, were not really designed to withstand that.

As Reynolds points out, Twitter is elegantly suited to forming self-organizing mobs. In my view, blogging is elegantly suited to forming self-organizing discussions. That is what makes “academic Twitter” such a mystery to me. I would think that more academics would prefer participating in blogs to participating in Twitter, but my impression is that in reality it is nearly the opposite.

The Virtue Industries

Posted on by

Back in the days of Occupy Wall Street, Kenneth Anderson wrote

OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

Pointer from Glenn Reynolds. I recommend the entire essay, but especially like the term “virtue industries.”

On deaths of despair

Posted on by

Philip N. Cohen writes (pdf download),

This paper uses complete death certificate data from the Mortality Multiple Cause Files with American Community Survey data to examine age-specific mortality rates for married and non-married people from 2007 to 2017. The overall rise in White mortality is limited almost exclusively to those who are not married, for men and women. . . .Analysis by education level shows death rates have risen most for Whites with the lowest education, but have also increased for those with high school or some college.

This is an important finding. I was sent an advance galley of Deaths of Despair, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, due out in March. I wonder if they will want to revisit the causal narrative that they tell, which strongly emphasizes economic factors, based on the link between (low) education and high mortality rates. Cohen writes,

If White mortality increases are concentrated among people with low levels of education, for whom marriage has become rarer, it’s possible the increased White mortality among single people could reflect the greater share of that group with low education. However, Figure 3 suggests this is not the whole story. . .it appears the overall White marriage mortality ratio is driven both by increasing death rates for everyone at the lowest levels of education, and by increasing marriage disparities at higher levels of education.

Best of times, worst of times

Posted on by

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at the University of Indiana to students and some faculty in a graduate program in public policy. As usual, the best part was the Q&A, and one of the more challenging questions was why this feels like a bad time in terms of the political climate even though it seems to be a good time in terms of economic indicators. Some possible answers:

1. People evaluate the economic results of the political system by asking “What have you done for me lately?” with an emphasis on “me” and “lately.” So Americans don’t feel better because hundreds of millions of people in India and China are climbing out of poverty. And we don’t say that we are really grateful to be living in a world with antibiotics, indoor plumbing, air travel, and the Internet.

2. Yuval Levin would say that we have gained affluence but become unmoored. That is, people derive meaning from their participation in institutions, including marriage, religion, membership in professions, and work in organizations. Institutions give us roles, responsibilities, obligations, and guides to behavior. But nowadays, rather than treating institutions as a set of customs and obligations that we ought to follow, we either exit from institutions or treat them as platforms for promoting our individual “brands.” (Note that this is a very terse and incomplete description of Levin’s thesis in A Time to Build. I continue to strongly recommend the whole book when it becomes available.)

Law and blame

Posted on by

Robin Hanson writes,

Law is our main system of official blame; it is how we officially blame people for things. So it is a pretty big deal that, over the last few centuries, changes to law have induced big changes in who officially blames who for most things that go wrong. These changes may be having big bad effects.

He argues that institutions have evolved in a way that creates incentives for people to blame businesses rather than other people when bad things happen. This made me think of the opioid crisis being blamed on manufacturers of legal drugs.

A proposal to move that will go nowhere

Posted on by

National Review reports,

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) will introduce legislation on Wednesday that would move the majority of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. to economically depressed areas. . .

Under the bill, the Department of Agriculture would be relocated to Hawley’s home state of Missouri while the Department of Education would move to Blackburn’s Tennessee, in order to disperse the economic benefits associated with relatively high-paying government jobs that currently accrue to just a few zip codes.

As I see it, the economic argument for this is sound. It seems like a great way to redistribute wealth from the DC area, which is now one of the wealthiest areas in the country, to poorer areas.

But there really is a Deep State, and there is simply no way that a mere elected official like Hawley is going to get anywhere butting up against it.

Bari Weiss and Yuval Levin on building

Posted on by

Coincidentally, I picked up at about the same time their latest books.

Bari Weiss’ is How to Fight Anti-Semitism. On p. 167, she writes,

I suddenly saw all of the debates and hand-wringing inside the Jewish community about the latest boycott of Israeli hummus at the local food co-op, or the right response to Israeli Apartheid Week, or the proper approach to the appearance of a swastika on campus. . .as not just a waste of our precious time but a betrayal of what we were meant to do and be. I began to realize that building was better than begging, affirming better than adjuring. Not just better strategically, but better for Jew emotionally and intellectually and spiritually.

She cites this essay by Ze’ev Maghen, which I recommend.

Levin’s is A Time to Build, and it will not come out until next January. He sent me an advance copy. In a Martin Gurri world (my terminology), he argues that we need to work to build up institutions. p. 41:

Our challenge is less to calm the forces that are pelting our society than to reinforce the structures that hold it together. That calls for a spirit of building and rebuilding, more than of tearing down. It calls for approaching broken institutions with a disposition to repair so as to make them better versions of themselves.

Out of context, that probably sounds bland. Hardly a passage that would entice you. But the book is actually a must-read, with a lot for you to sink your teeth into. If I count it as 2019, it will make my list of best books of the year.

Two articles on white privilege

Posted on by

Both from Quillette, which is what you should be reading instead of political posts on Twitter or Facebook. Both from the same authors, Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson

First, they write

In general, the percentage of white liberals who perceived discrimination against blacks to be a “very serious problem” increased from 25 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2016, with 70 percent believing the criminal justice system was biased against blacks. Compare this to the 75 percent of minorities that reported rarely or never experiencing discrimination in their day-to-day lives.

Second, they write

In the case of white privilege, there are a number of variables which, when taken together, better explain differences in group outcomes. Here, we share four potential factors: geographic determinism, personal responsibility, family structure, and culture.

Read the whole essays, particularly the second.

Re-starting Twitter Echo

Posted on by

I have decided to re-start the practice of echoing my blog posts to Twitter. I still don’t participate in Twitter in any other fashion. If you direct a tweet at me, I probably will see it, but I will not respond.

Two reasons for re-starting.

1. I have been thinking lately that going off Twitter did not provide me with much benefit, other than letting me feel that I was making a statement.

2. I like that Jack Dorsey wants to refuse to take political ads on Twitter. I realize that this is a complicated issue. But I am hoping that, even though Dorsey does not intend it this way, that people see this as an indicator that social media and politics are a toxic mix.

I have to say that I don’t know how he is going to enforce it. If somebody pays for an ad campaign to de-fund Planned Parenthood, that might be construed as a political ad campaign. But if so, then wouldn’t a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood also be a political ad campaign?

So I understand that Facebook’s approach, of not censoring political ads, is easier to implement. But I hope that someday political discourse migrates to other forums that encourage reasonableness rather than posturing, snark, and anger.