Category Archives: Politics

Martin Gurri watch (from Matt Taibbi)

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Matt Taibbi writes,

Just as the Internet allows ordinary people to DIY their way through everything from stock trading to home repair, they now have access to tools to act as their own doctors, from caches of medical papers at sites like pubmed.gov to symptom-checkers to portals giving them instant looks at their own test results — everything they need, except of course the years and years of training, experience, and practice, and therein lies the rub.

. . .Doctors around the world have expressed frustration at the “populist treatment,” as it’s become common in Central and South America in particular for poor people to defy authorities and self-medicate with ivermectin. Experts frequently associate the drug with “pharmaceutical messianism,” i.e. politicians promising panacea cures, often in conjunction with rhetoric bashing experts and credentialed authorities.

Thus the revolt of the public plays out in medicine.

The root of the problem

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I write,

Higher education has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone, meaning an institution that has lost its sense of purpose and instead is focused on self-perpetuation. For many reasons, we need to do away with college as we know it.

Broadly speaking, we need to replace two aspects of college. One is the process of obtaining knowledge and demonstrating what one has obtained. The other is the rest of the college experience—its extracurricular aspects.

Read the rest.

Some of you are disappointed that I am not all in on the fight against CRT in K-12. My thinking is that even winning that fight (in some jurisdictions) won’t change college campuses. Maybe K-12 is a battle worth fighting, but it won’t win the war. K-12 is only a branch of the problem, and cutting if off will not take care of the root of the problem. The root of the problem can be found on the college campus.

There are organized efforts to try to save college as an institution. In the essay, I instead suggest that we do away with it.

One definition of CRT

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From Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001)

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

This is from the 2016 edition, but it is identical to a paragraph quoted by Max Eden and attributed to the first edition in 2001. The way I see it, the characterization of CRT by its critics today is reasonably close to this definition, which comes from two of its prominent proponents twenty years ago.

Eden quotes another paragraph that is slightly different in the 2016 edition. Here is the more recent version:

Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools. They discuss the rise of biological racism in education theory and practice and urge attention to the resegregation of American schools. Some question the Anglocentric curriculum and charge that many educators apply a “deficit theory” approach to schooling for minority kids.

I will put more quotes from the introduction to the 2016 edition below the fold.

Last week, I had a jarring experience the day after I heard Jonathan Haidt talk to a conference of mostly high school educators. He had some disparaging things to say about CRT.

The next morning, I was supposed to do a workshop on The Three Languages of Politics to a small subset of conference attendees. Innocently, I decided to start with Haidt’s distinction between Discover and Defend, as analogous to my distinction between political rhetoric that is intended to persuade (which we rarely observe nowadays) and rhetoric that is intended to demonize. I said that I might end up repeating a lot of what Professor Haidt had said the previous evening.

“I hope not!” a woman in the audience piped up. It turned out that his talk had angered many in his audience. They pegged him as a straight white male (correct) and as a hard-right ideologue (wrong–at least for now).

Figuring that I was not going to get any traction otherwise, I let the teachers vent. Among their complaints was that CRT was misrepresented by Haidt and by other opponents.

I came away from my close encounter with teachers marinated in CRT thinking that there is no stopping them. They have their excuses ready when CRT is criticized. They claim that their critics are right-wingers out to distort CRT and suppress discussions of race.

I could have refuted these teachers by reading the two paragraphs above, but I did not have them handy. From now on, I will be able to find them doing a quick search of my blog.
Continue reading →

A recommended book

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I review Andrey Mir’s PostJournalism. [link fixed]

But relatively placid stories do not motivate people to pay subscription fees. Today, people can get news for free. They can get sports scores, financial information, and entertainment without going to newspapers. Mir argues that nowadays people pay newspapers to validate their worldviews. Newspapers do this most effectively by highlighting stories about the outrageous actions of their subscribers’ political adversaries.

An excerpt cannot do justice to my review. And the review cannot do justice to the book.

Glenn Loury on black self-making

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He said,

One argument comes from the left. It says history has dealt blacks a bad hand and we have been oppressed and we have been beaten and abused. What can you expect but that you would see pathological behavior? It’s fixed by the historical inheritance. The wealth gap is what it is because we didn’t get the hand down from our parents because they didn’t get the hand down from their parents. What can we do? The crime rate is what it is, the test scores and what they are, et cetera. Fixed by history. Predetermined.

And the genetic argument. It’s in your genes. What can we expect? Do the best you can. We’ll respect you as a human being, but we won’t expect you to be doing calculus and we won’t expect you to be performing at a high level. And if we see that you’re not a good parent or that you break the law frequently or that you’re more often involved in violence, while we regret that, we can’t say that we’re surprised. Because after all your genetic et cetera.

I excerpted half of it, and I am short-changing you if you don’t go read the whole “aria.”

I myself wrote that there are three narratives for racial gaps. As Loury points out, the oppression narrative and the genetic narrative deprive blacks of moral agency and hope. The third narrative, which I prefer, is cultural characteristics that can change. That essay was influenced by listening to and reading Loury. It also was influenced by reading The Mind Club. Recall this blog post.

If so-and-so is for it, then I must be against it

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Yascha Mounk calls this 180ism.

For a long time, I have struggled to understand why so many of my old friends and colleagues have embraced the reductionist worldview that is now taking over public discourse, in some cases even turning themselves into enthusiastic enforcers of the new “moral clarity.” The key to the answer, I have come to believe, lies in a phenomenon that, at the suggestion of my colleague Emily Yoffe, I propose to call 180ism: the tendency of many participants in public debate to hear what their perceived enemies have to say and immediately declare themselves diametrically opposed.

Later,

This is the world of 180ism. According to the logic of the moment, you must either think that Dr. Seuss never made a cringe-worthy drawing or that we should cheer when public libraries remove his early books. You must either believe that antifa is a major threat to national security or defend the right of a bunch of extremists to beat up anyone they consider a fascist. You must either cheer when state legislatures tell teachers what they can say in the classroom or celebrate that a growing number of them are telling students to make their racial identity central to their lives.

I recommend the entire essay

Academia: exit or voice?

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Michael Robillard chooses exit, but he urges others to use voice.

It is my hope that this essay will inspire others in academia, students and professors alike, to also begin speaking up loudly and vocally and to continue to speak up against this pernicious woke ideology until we bat it out the door of academia and society at large. Until then, I will continue to sound the alarm for any of those with minds and hearts open enough to hear. Listen to or dismiss these words at your own peril. However, when the woke mob comes to cancel you, when the HR department calls you into their office for mandatory remedial pronoun training, or when the agents of the pink police state come to knock at your door in the middle of the night, don’t say I didn’t warn you. So farewell academia,

I disavow you.

McWhorter on Murray

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John McWhorter speculates,

In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

I think McWhorter is being shockingly uncharitable* to progressives with the sentence that begins “Meanwhile, white leftists. . .” I don’t think anyone wanted to maximize the number of poor black women on welfare. But regardless of intent, one can argue that the consequences of the War on Poverty were that work and marriage were strongly discouraged. I think that to this day, in spite of the (temporary) “end welfare as we know it” turn under President Clinton, the implicit marginal tax rates on the poor of all races are very high. That is because benefits like Medicaid and food stamps fade out as income goes up. For a woman, the financial advantage of a husband who earns about $30,000 a year can be close to nil.

[*UPDATE: I am wrong about this. See Handle’s comment. McWhorter knows what he is talking about, apparently.]

The larger topic of McWhorter’s essay is Charles Murray’s latest book. McWhorter writes,

in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.

I agree with the complaint that Murray is not being forthcoming. In yesterday’s post, I called it “ducking and dancing.”

To repeat my own views, I would like to see us treat people as individuals and not pay attention to group outcomes. That approach may not be perfect, but other approaches strike me was worse.

But suppose you told me that it was unrealistic to ignore group outcomes, and you insisted that I offer suggestions for improving outcomes among blacks. My thoughts would be along these lines:

1. I take the Null Hypothesis seriously. I would not put a lot of my chips on formal education as a solution.

2. I take incentives seriously. So I would get rid of Federal poverty programs and replace them with (a) a small UBI that lowers the heavy marginal tax rate on the working poor; and (b) community programs to identify and support families with special needs.

3. I take cultural forces seriously. Personality traits and social norms differ markedly across groups and over time. We don’t know a great deal about the process by which these factors change. For example, when marriage rates decline, we have great difficulty disentangling the many possible causes and effects. There are many arguments to be had about what is a good cultural trait and what is a bad one. And there is no policy dashboard sitting in front of us with buttons and dials that allow us to steer culture. But culture should be the focus for research and policy experiments.

I note that McWhorter’s ideas about violence in poor black communities fall within this framework.

Charles Murray and Glenn Loury

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In this podcast, Glenn Loury applies some gentle pressure to Charles Murray. It is like a boxing match in which Loury has Murray ducking and dancing, but Loury fails to put him away.

As I see it, Loury is more forthright than Murray in spelling out his own views. I come away thinking that Loury believes that average differences in outcomes between blacks and whites are meliorable. It may take a long time, and the policies that take us there will be much closer to conservative policies than progressive policies, but we can approach a state of equality.

Murray will not allow himself to be pinned down on this question. But he holds views that clearly imply that he does not think that differences can be overcome. He believes that genetic differences matter, and he emphasizes that they matter most at the upper tails of distributions. So if group X has a slightly higher mean IQ than group Y, by the time you get to the upper 0.1 percent, you will see an extremely high ratio of group X to group Y (this reminds me a bit of Larry Summers’ notorious explanation for the predominance of males among top mathematicians, although Summers does not even require a difference in means). Murray also mostly believes what I call the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have little or no effect in erasing genetic differences. It seems as though the purpose of his book is to get us to accept that something like the black-white school achievement gap is inevitable, but in the podcast Murray himself at times stops short of such an assertion.

Murray and Loury spend less time on the issue of crime. I think one can be pessimistic that the academic achievement gap between whites and blacks will be closed and still be optimistic that we could sharply reduce the difference between black and white crime rates. I do not think that research supports anything like the Null Hypothesis for interventions in the field of crime reduction. My intuition is that culture matters a great deal, and culture can change.

Returning to achievement outcomes, you cannot, except by being dogmatic, totally dismiss Murray’s pessimistic view that the distributions of genetic factors affecting cognitive ability differ on average between blacks and whites. But researchers have not found the genetic factors that determine cognitive ability, which creates a big hole in the chain of reasoning that you need to go through in order to be fully convinced that Murray is correct.

In the end, my view is that we ought to treat individuals as individuals, and stop paying attention to group outcomes.

Why politics and religion don’t mix well

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Leighton Woodhouse writes,

The problem is that politics is, in important ways, the very antithesis of religion, and in a democratic society, the more politics takes on the shape of faith, the more intractable and dysfunctional it becomes. That’s because politics, when put to its proper use, is the search for what disparate groups share in common, and the bargaining over their differences. Religion is practically its inverse; at its root, it’s tribal. And so as our politics have taken on the character of religion, they have become tribal, too.

Read the whole thing. Woodhouse shares my view that the banning of heretics is central to the religious version of progressivism.

The Twitter dogpile is the political equivalent of the banishing of the heathens — perhaps not in the gravity of its consequences, but in the function it serves of reproducing the community of the elect. And given the sadistic glee with which so many partake in it, it may also serve as a virtual experience of collective effervescence. We revel in the ritual of casting out the sinner, because it affirms the existence of the Tribe of the Woke, and our membership within it.