Below is a survey you can try out, based on the three-axis model. Do your progressive friends answer as one would expect? Does the survey help to separate conservatives from libertarians? Continue reading
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The Three Axes and Immigration
Vipul Naik uses the three-axis model to examine how immigration restrictionism differs between progressives and conservatives.
Combining a focus on the oppressor-oppressed axis with territorialism and local inequality aversion produces the kinds of proposals and concerns that Costa raised in his EPI blog post. Explicitly, it generally involves a combination of a path to citizenship, stricter enforcement, strong laws against worker exploitation, and an immigration policy designed to benefit currently low-skilled natives.
…center-right individuals are likely to be more focused on concerns of civilization versus barbarism, and while the alien invasion metaphor is probably an exaggeration, basic concern about how illegal immigration undermines the rule of law adds to the general worries about the harms created by immigration. Thus, center-right restrictionists are more likely to favor reform proposals that include attrition through enforcement and stronger border security while simultaneously reducing future levels of legal immigration
For libertarians, of course, immigration restriction is one of the biggest evils in the entire world. From the perspective of the freedom-coercion axis, there is nothing more powerful than the ability to exit government. I believe that America is a great country because through so much of its history it drew people who wanted to exit other lands. Also, the availability of a less-governed frontier gave the pioneers an exit option.
In this century, many trends have made exit more difficult. The consolidation of school districts into gigantic city-wide and county-wide units is one example. The increase in the scope of government (what economists would call “bundling”) is another. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced talks about problems and solutions in these terms.
I am not sure that I can be charitable toward progressives who favor immigration restriction. I believe that the oppressor-oppressed axis naturally would favor open immigration. However, open immigration is a political loser. The people who are here do not want it to be easy for other people to come in. Even Hispanic citizens probably do not want more immigrants, but they sense (correctly) that some of the hostility toward illegal immigration is motivated by ethnic prejudice. So my uncharitable view is that progressives are choosing the most politically advantageous position on immigration, which is to not stand up for more open immigration policies but instead to express solidarity with Hispanics by showing sympathy with currently-illegal immigrants.
I find it easier to be charitable to conservative immigration restrictionists. I do not see them as being cynical or hypocritical. They are just dead wrong.
The Task of Persuasion
once the libertarian has persuaded someone that government interference is wrong, at least in a certain realm, if not across the board, there is a much smaller probability of that convert’s backsliding into his former support for government’s coercive measures against innocent people. Libertarianism grounded on the moral rock will prove much stronger and longer-lasting than libertarianism grounded on the shifting sands of consequentialist arguments, which of necessity are only as compelling as today’s arguments and evidence make them. Hence, if we desire to enlarge the libertarian ranks, we are well advised to make moral arguments at least a part of our efforts. It will not hurt, of course, to show people that freedom really does work better than state control. But to confine our efforts to wonkism dooms them to transitory success, at best.
Pointer from Don Boudreaux. Let me re-state this in terms of the three-axis model. Using consequentialist arguments is an attempt to meet someone on their own axis. The “moral rock” that “will prove much stronger and longer-lasting” is to get someone to shift axes.
Claiming that government anti-poverty programs do not work is a consequentialist argument that is intended to meet the progressive along the oppressor-oppressed axis. Claiming that drug laws tend to increase violence is a consequentialist argument intended to meet the conservative along the civilization-barbarism axis. The advantage of these sorts of arguments is that they are easily comprehended by those you are trying to persuade. The disadvantage, as Higgs points out, is that this form of argument involves painful struggles, issue-by-issue and fact-by-fact. Arriving at the inevitable military analogy, Higgs writes
the anti-freedom forces with which libertarians must contend possess hundreds of times more troops and thousands of times more money for purchasing munitions.
Instead, suppose you try to convince people of the similarity between government and organized crime. You say that both provide “protection” backed by coercion. The advantage of this is that if you can get someone to shift to looking at issues along the freedom-coercion axis, that person will be less receptive across the board to arguments for state intervention based on the oppressor-oppressed axis or the civilization-barbarian axis. The disadvantage with this strategy is that your position is likely to be incomprehensible to most of those you are trying to persuade. To most people, drawing an analogy between government and organized crime seems crazy. It makes you sound like a very bitter, alienated person who resents the obligation to participate in society.
My guess–and perhaps Higgs would agree–is that the best strategy is to meet people along their preferred axis and to use consequentialist arguments until they begin to have doubts about the utility of government in dealing with oppression or barbarism. At that point, they may be ready to consider the freedom-coercion axis. However, if you go straight to the freedom-coercion axis and skip the step of meeting progressives with consequentialist arguments along the oppressor-oppressed axis or meeting conservatives with consequentialist arguments along the civilization-barbarian axis, then you risk getting nowhere.
The Decline of Jewish Genius?
The Ron Unz piece on meritocracy to which I referred contains a provocative claim that Jews are maintaining, or even increasing, their admissions rate to elite colleges while their rate of genius appears to be reverting back to average. He documents the decline in Jewish genius by looking at performance in high-level competitive examinations, such as the Putnam exam. My thoughts:
1. Perhaps the period from 1920 through 1970 was unusual in some respects. Maybe instead of asking why Jewish genius has declined since then, we should be asking why it became so prominent in those years.
2. My wife and I attended a talk by an official from the Technion, an Israeli version of MIT. He said in his talk that the Israeli students are less interested in science and technology than in the past. When my wife asked him afterward to speculate on why this is the case, he curtly replied, “The DNA hasn’t changed.” Like Unz, he attributed it to a softening of life, so that Jews feel less need to deal with the difficult courses in math and science.
3. I am struck by the way genius seems to come in small clusters. Read Eric Kandel about Vienna or George Dyson about the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s and 1940s. In the latter case, it seems as though much of the genius originally was concentrated in a part of the Jewish community in Budapest. So, my hypothesis is that having one high school with 5 really bright students produces more geniuses than five high schools with one bright student each. Together, the bright students are more competitive and also learn from one another. The same would be true for tennis players or artists–people with talent will be pushed to higher levels by being around other people with talent. According to this hypothesis, the decline of Jewish genius might come from the dispersion of the population of bright Jewish students, instead of a high concentration at particular high schools in Vienna, Budapest, or New York.
4. Tyler Cowen argues that the status accorded to math and science matters, and I would say that the status of science and math has fallen among Jews. Perhaps part of the reason is that, as Unz points out, elite colleges are emphasizing “well-rounded students.” If the parental status symbol is the child admitted to Harvard, and this is less likely to be achieved by an outstanding math score than by participating in community service projects, then parents will not press their children to cultivate math genius. One would think this would affect non-Jews as well as Jews, though.
5. Another possibility is that the mediocrity of the American teaching profession is dampening the emergence of young genius. Back when the teaching profession was populated in part by highly intelligent women, bright students probably felt better understood and more appreciated. Again, one would expect this to affect non-Jews as well as Jews.
I urge you to read the Unz piece before commenting.
A Solution Exists…I Can Quit Any Time
Unfortunately, longer-lasting solutions require coordinated agreement among many euro-zone nations and, possibly, the broader European Union. That would include significant debt write-offs (as the International Monetary Fund is suggesting), quick moves toward better-integrated European banking institutions, and a general agreement that the European Central Bank unconditionally support troubled debt securities without trying to manipulate home governments’ policies.
I would say that a longer-lasting solution has to include adopting sustainable fiscal policies. Read the whole column. Another excerpt:
Unfortunately, the relevant governments — and their citizens — still don’t seem close to accepting the onerous financial burdens they need to face. And when those burdens are unjust to mostly innocent voters, no matter whose particular story you endorse, acceptance becomes that much tougher.
Still, we shouldn’t forget that a solution exists.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, Jonah Goldberg writes,
You could confiscate 100 percent of income over $1 million, and it would cover about a third of the deficit (and crush the economy in the process). You’d still have to deal with spending, particularly entitlement spending.
But the Democrats want to do . . . nothing. Or at least that’s the position they seemed to be taking this week.
I want to caution readers not to commit the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, do not attribute the current political strife and apparent short-termism to the personalities of politicians. Instead, these characteristics are structural defects of a system without a hard constitutional brake against deficit spending. Absent an effective constitutional brake, deficit spending is like smoking. In theory, the politicians can quit at any time. In practice, in many cases we end up with cancer.
That is the import of Lenders and Spenders, an essay that I expect I will be linking to regularly. The point of that essay is that debt crises are easy to slide into and very difficult to get out of.
At the end of the second World War, the United States was fortunate in that (a) running deficits in peacetime was still taboo and (b) Social Security was running surpluses that the politicians had not yet put their hands on, because it was considered a separate account. Unfortunately, both of those taboos went away in the 1960s, when Keynesianism became orthodox and President Lyndon Johnson got his hands on the Social Security surpluses by changing to a “unified budget”.
Eventually, some smokers get cancer. And some deficit-spending countries succumb to the fiscal equivalent. I used to think that Europe was going to get there before the United States, because I thought that in this country we had a stronger political will to restrain deficit spending.
I am starting to change my position. The mainstream views in the United States on deficit spending now lie somewhere in between, “We can quit at any time, but now is not the time” and “We never have to quit.”
Have a nice day.
The Tax Deduction for Charitable Contributions
Reihan Salam discusses some ideas for reforming the charitable deduction. In particular, why let rich people have all the fun? You could make it a credit rather than a deduction.
I need to think more about this whole issue. My initial inclination, years ago, was to take a very hard line against any attack on the charitable deduction. If you think about it in terms of government vs. the rest of civil society, then I prefer the other institutions of civil society.
More recently, however, I have begun to question the idea of assigning privileged status to non-profit organizations. I think of profitable organizations as sustainable and accountable for delivering results to customers. In contrast, non-profits are not sustainable (at least on a market basis) and are accountable only for making donors feel good.
Or consider General Motors. GM received a lot of money from the government in 2008, because it had become a non-profit. Should it have been eligible for charitable donations as well?
Many non-profits are no less dependent than GM on direct government support. They compete for government grants. Why is government largess bestowed on non-profits more ethical than the largess it bestows on profit-seeking enterprises?If a for-profit could turn a government grant into better results at lower cost than a non-profit, should the non-profit still get the grant?
When I get my thoughts sorted out, I will probably turn them into an essay.