The essay is here. An excerpt:
There are many causal factors that affect human behavior and human interaction. As a result, “social science” is not nearly as reliable as physical science. We can speculate on what causes political and economic events, but we cannot prove our hypotheses. Experts may propose two or more differing theories, none of which can be definitively ruled out.
Commenters bring these topics up a lot. They also show up occasionally in excerpts that I quote. I want to put my own positions out there, for the record.
On race, my position is that we should treat people as individuals. One hundred years ago, Progressives were racist, even eugenicist. In the 1950s and 196s, Progressives were closer to my current position. Now they are against treating people as individuals. They think that they are fighting racism, but in my view they are perpetuating it (and perpetrating it).
I believe that as a society we are approximately treating people as individuals. So when outcomes as tallied by race or sex are disparate, I do not automatically assume racism or sexism is the cause. On the contrary, I assume otherwise.
On college admissions, as you know, my position is that they should be done by lottery. The determination of whether the student is capable of handling the courses should be made after admission, not before.
On immigration, my position is that we should have a more open front door and a less open back door. There should be fewer hurdles to impede legal immigration. The Center for American Progress is actually close to my position.
Build a generous and well-functioning legal immigration system that can be responsive to the nation’s changing needs. This would include realistic and independent evidence-based avenues for immigration that allow families to stay together and businesses to get the workers they need, while enhancing all workers’ rights to fair and increasing wages, safe working conditions, and the opportunity to thrive together. The rules of such a system would be designed to recognize the fact that the only way to have an immigration system that works is to more closely align supply and demand, rather than force the system to adhere to artificial caps, untethered from reality and revisited only once in a generation at best. Importantly, if immigration were successfully channeled through a functioning regulatory system, enforcement resources could instead be dedicated to preventing individuals from entering the country outside of that system and to appropriate enforcement actions necessary to maintain the integrity of that system and U.S. borders, which remain central to the very notion of national sovereignty.
I disagree with the idea of trying to figure out which people to allow to immigrate. Instead, I would prefer to use a price system.
Charge the would-be immigrant a fee, say $10,000, to obtain the right to get on the path toward citizenship. Of course, if these immigrants are immediately eligible for government benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps, then the fee should be higher.
If employers or relatives or bleeding-hearts are motivated to bring in particular individuals, then those sponsors can pony up the money. Note that the bleeding-heart funds could handle the asylum cases.
To close the back door, we would need to reduce the potential rewards from illegal immigration, increase the penalties for it, and increase the probability of getting caught and incurring the penalties. What I would say to bleeding hearts is that if you don’t like to see would-be immigrants suffer because of such policies, you can put up the money to enable them to immigrate legally.
Measured on an individual level, Republican voters contribute more to GDP than Democratic voters. The paradox where Republican voters are higher income than Democrats but Republican areas tend to be poorer has been analyzed extensively by people like Andrew Gelman and discussed extensively over many years in the media. Hard to believe Wilkinson is unfamiliar with this. Essentially affluent voters in poorer regions vote Republican so overwhelmingly resulting in a Republican majority despite the poorer voters voting Democrat.
Conversely, it may be the case that the voters who solidify the Democrats’ hold in urban areas may are not necessarily the folks generating the GDP there.
The comment then goes on to question the attribution of Trump’s support to racial animus. I know that there are many researchers who claim that racism forms the core of Mr. Trump’s support. I am afraid that I tend to discount their claims as long as they appear to come from someone who is clearly personally hostile to Mr. Trump. Such a claim would sound more credible to me if it were coming from an analyst who is clearly neutral or sympathetic to Mr. Trump.
Why is Spain so much richer now than almost any country in Spanish America? Before you answer with great confidence, ponder this: According to Angus Maddison’s data on per-capita GDP in 1950, Spain was poorer than Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and roughly equal to Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama. This is 11 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and Spain of course stayed out of World War II.
Suppose that we think of Spain as always having had higher average human capital than countries in Latin America, but that many Latin American companies were more resource-rich than Spain. What we have observed is consistent with the share of world wealth accounted for by human capital going up and the share accounted for by natural resources going down.
Among those ensconced in powerful institutions, the view seems to be that the breakdown of trust in establishment voices is caused by the proliferation of unauthorized voices on the internet. But the causal arrow surely goes the other way as well: our highly fragmented casting-about for alternative narratives that can make better sense of the world as we experience it is a response to the felt lack of fit between experience and what we are offered by the official organs, and a corollary lack of trust in them. For progressives to now seek to police discourse from behind an algorithm is to double down on the political epistemology that has gotten us to this point. The algorithm’s role is to preserve the appearance of liberal proceduralism, that austerely fair-minded ideal, the spirit of which is long dead.
Thanks to a reader for recommending the article. I think that Crawford’s main point is that choices made by algorithms can be difficult to legitimize. People want to know who made the decision and the reasoning behind it. Hiding behind an algorithm may seem to be a good way to avoid blame, but it is likely to exacerbate public distrust.
I know that in the world of credit decisions, where algorithms have been around for a long time, the standard when credit is denied is to list the top three reasons for denial. If Google and Facebook are going to get into the censorship business (against my recommendation), then they might want to adapt this approach. That is, whenever they do censor someone, list specific reasons, rather than some vague claim that someone “violated our terms of service.”
Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my perspective on youth culture now vs. the 1960s. To me, campus culture today seems idiotic. I think that the hippie culture of my youth also was idiotic, but it was not as aggressive. If you weren’t a hippie, the hippies didn’t try to shut you up or get you fired.
What was idiotic about hippie culture? Drugs and communes come to mind.
In my opinion, the “higher consciousness” that drugs supposedly fostered is Baloney Sandwich. I know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback, and I read Pollan’s book, and I still think it’s Baloney Sandwich.
As for communes, I see them as a reversion to small-scale society, with the governing principle “we care for one another.” In large-scale society, you have specialization governed by markets. You have social relationships grounded in families. Sooner or later, a commune is going to run into friction over the inefficiency of not having specialized economic roles, and also over relationships that are not grounded in traditional families.
If our existing schooling system is unnecessarily exacerbating mental health issues, then parents, teens, educators, and policy-makers should re-evaluate the premises of our existing schooling system. If schooling-as-we-know-it is excessively different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then how should we rethink schooling in order to create healthier adolescent populations in the future?
It is a long essay, which covers a lot of research on the problems of contemporary adolescents. As I read it, I applied my rule of thumb, which is to focus on technology as a cause. Also, I came across the essay concurrently with my reading of Panic Attack by Robby Soave.
For example, Strong lists five characteristics of adolescent tribal life that are not shared by today’s youth. I will put them in a table.
| tribal life | modern life |
|---|---|
| (1) small tribal community of a few dozen to a few hundred with few interactions with other tribal groups. | exposed to hundreds or thousands of age peers directly in addition to thousands of adults and thousands of electronic representations of diverse human beings (both social media and entertainment media). |
| (2) shared one language, one belief system, one set of norms, one morality, and more generally a social and cultural homogeneity that is unimaginable for us today. | exposed to many languages, belief systems, norms, moralities, and social and cultural diversity. |
| (3) immersed in a community with a full range of ages present, from child to elder. | largely isolated with a very narrow range of age peers through schooling. |
| (4) engaged in the work of the community, typically hunting and gathering, with full adult responsibilities typically being associated with puberty. | Have little or no opportunities for meaningful work in their community and no adult responsibilities until 18 or even into their 20s. |
| (5) mating and status competitions would have mostly been within their tribe or occasionally with nearby groups, most of which would have been highly similar to themselves. | are competing for mates and status with hundreds or thousands directly and with many thousands via electronic representations (both social media and entertainment media). |
Of these five contrasts, (3) and (4) are linked to our schooling process. (1), (2), and (5) are much exacerbated in the world of smart phones and the Internet. I speak of it as the world of our new species, Homo Appiens.
The mental health problems of Homo Appiens have been emphasized by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.
In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,
it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.
I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.
Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.
I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.
But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.
At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.
Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.
for some singles, sex has become the getting-to-know you phase of courtship. In a study conducted for Match.com, Dr. Fisher found that among a representative sample, 34 percent of singles had sex with somebody before the first date. She calls it “the sex interview.”
I find the idea of deciding whether to begin dating someone by first having sex with the person to be. . .counterintuitive.
Of course, stories like this tend to be sensationalized, so one takes them with a grain of salt. Yet I think that there is a genuine generational difference. It used to be that your first impression of someone came from an in-person encounter. For young people today, it often comes from an app.
Lately, the thought has occurred to me that we are evolving a new species, that I might call Home Appiens, to distinguish it from Homo Sapiens. Technology is changing us in ways that we have not begun to grasp. Smart phones and the Internet are giving us new experiences and taking away old ones. People are developing new skills and new patterns of behavior. The factors that influence social dynamics are changing.
Republicans don’t need this firewall to win; they need it to win as the party of pastoral supremacy in a city-powered republic James Madison could never have foreseen. But this Republican Party, defined by seething hostility to the urban multicultural majority, is teetering on the brink of irrelevance. Continued urbanizing migration, both domestic and international, is likely to push it over, sooner or later, which helps explain the vehemence of the GOP’s current opposition to basic norms of fair democratic representation.
We should dearly wish for the demise of the current dispensation to come sooner rather than later. When it comes at last, and the GOP can no longer clinch national elections as the minority party of pastoral supremacy, it will be forced, as a matter of political survival, to tamp down rather than inflame ethnocentric impulses, broaden its coalition, and begin hunting for nonwhite and higher-education votes inside the outer suburbs. This should set in motion a healing process of depolarization and moderating partisan
realignment. New legislation establishing robust voting rights and structural electoral reform would kickstart this process and help shift American democracy into a healthier political equilibrium in which effective governance in the public interest is once again possible. If there’s anything we can do to neutralize the toxicity of the density divide, it’s this.
As a quibble, I would point out that others see the divide differently. Colin Woodard uses his nine nations model. And there is the divide between college-educated women and non-college-educated men. Of course, these various descriptive models overlap.
As a second quibble, I just came back from a vacation that included seeing Normandy, and it is likely that this visit affected my mood when I returned and read Wilkinson’s article. Now is not a good time to presume that I would choose to side with contemporary urban hipsters in their cultural conflict with the descendants of the men who fought on those beaches.
As a more serious disagreement, I do not share Wilkinson’s view of the bias in our political system. His phrase “basic norms of fair democratic representation” is a claim that the structure of our political system is unfair to the urban majority. What he calls “effective governance in the public interest” sounds like the continuation of the project to overthrow the Constitution and replace it with the administrative state.
But I would point out that the government office buildings in our nation’s capital house technocrats who almost all share an urban progressive outlook. Inside those agencies, the urban majority is closer to tyranny than to impotence.
The philosophy Wilkinson expresses in favor of empowering the urban majority is the exact opposite of that articulated by George Will in The Conservative Sensibility. That book argues for giving priority to the Constitutional protection of liberty, even when–especially when–this goes against majority opinion.
Wilkinson, once with the libertarian Cato Institute, now comes across as a full-fledged partisan Progressive Democrat. In theory, he could argue for his new views from a perspective that respects the ideas he no longer finds congenial. Instead, he has adopted a Krugman-esque approach of painting non-Progressives as cartoon villains. I don’t begrudge him his ideological evolution. But I do fault the manner in which he expresses it.