I try to explain inflation’s real cost.
I think of inflation as causing the following problems: it rewards the most alert and aggressive economic actors, and it punishes people who are passive and habitual; it interacts with the tax system to reduce productive investment; and it makes planning for the future difficult, particularly when it comes to buying a home.
A lot of the questions parents have — either in the COVID-19 context or elsewhere — are about very rare outcomes. Monday’s newsletter had a brief discussion of the SNOO and SIDS risk.Several people wrote to ask: does the SNOO actually reduce SIDS? To answer this convincingly in a randomized trial, you’d need an enormous sample size. Even a 50% reduction in SIDS risk — which would be astronomical — would require a sample size of between 100,000 and 150,000 infants, which may be impractical even putting aside the cost of the SNOO. It just isn’t feasible to answer this in this way.
Nobody does randomized controlled trials of that magnitude. So that makes the claims that back-sleeping reduces SIDS risk unconvincing.
A reader points me to this poll.
The first national poll to ask detailed questions of American voters about efforts to impose Critical Race Theory and “social justice” curriculum on K-12 schools found overwhelming opposition to it and strong support for a de-politicized curriculum.
The poll seems to have been commissioned by a parent’ group that opposes CRT in the schools. You can discount the results if you like, based on the theory that when it comes to polls wording is everything, but you cannot discount the fact that there is an organized parents’ opposition group.
Such organizations seem to be sprouting up daily. Here is an organization focused on Jews. I think it is rational for Jews and other ethnic groups to walk away from the Woke left, which has nothing constructive in its agenda.
The WSJ had an article about prices going up for various things, all seemingly caused by market-specific factors.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on April 28 that inflationary pressures resulting from supply-chain problems would likely be temporary and wouldn’t prompt the central bank to change policies aimed to keep borrowing costs down.
With apologies to Milton Friedman, the “new” theory seems to be that inflation is, anywhere and everywhere, a temporary and idiosyncratic phenomenon.
Except that the theory is not new. It is the same theory that prevailed in the early 1970s. Apparently there aren’t any economists left at the Fed who are old enough to remember back that far. And no journalists.
One can regard political activists, on either the left or the right, as crying because their demands are not being met. To the extent that their demands are reasonable, then more crying reflects greater sensitivity. If the left has reasonable demands, and they care about them, then that is a good thing. But if their demands are unreasonable, then this means that they are crybabies.
If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?
Pointer from Bryan Caplan. The linked essay is long but worth your time.
Later, Hanania writes,
Those who identify on the right are happier, less mentally ill, and more likely to start families. Perhaps political activism is often a sign of a less well-adjusted mind or the result of seeking to fill an empty void in one’s personal life. Conservatives may tell themselves that they are the normal people party, too satisfied and content to expend much time or energy on changing the world. But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies.
My father interpreted Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer as saying something similar. That is, people who are dissatisfied with their lives are likely to blame the social system for their personal unhappiness and join radical movements.
I have an essay about them.
Players who performed better than expected in April and who were consequently prize picks for May included Emily Oster, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Alex Tabarrok. Relative to the April draft, fewer tech people were included. For May, I count only Ben Thompson, Mike Solana, and Balaji Srinivasan. Also relative to April, there were many fewer chosen who work in the D.C. world of politics or think tanks. For May, Yuval Levin seems to be the only one.
In my latest essay, I write,
It turns out that the most difficult challenge in scoring opinion pieces is that the writer or podcaster rarely states a succinct question. As a reader or listener, I struggle to figure out what the pundit is trying to say.
All too often, someone goes off on a general rant, without stopping to formulate a specific question.
I noticed years ago that most opinion pieces are intended not to open anyone’s mind but instead to close the minds of people on your own side. If they were really designed to persuade, opinion pieces would state clearly the point that they are trying to make.
I think there is a contradiction – or at least some tension – between this metaphorical framing of being a ‘scout’ and your conception of ‘social epistemology’.
The concept of social epistemology says that you are who you copy. If you copy people with a scout mindset, (a) you are likely to have a scout mindset and (b) the opinions you take on are likely to fit better with reality.
What we are observing in journalism and academia is the rapid abandonment of the scout mindset. That means that we have to search more carefully for people to copy. The heuristic of “trust the journalists to give us the news” or “trust academics to give unbiased analysis” works much less well today than it did a few decades ago.
I have started reading Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. She depicts a dichotomy between: scout mindset, in which you continually test your beliefs in pursuit of truth; and soldier mindset, in which you put up defenses against changing your mind.
My Fantasy Intellectual Teams project tries to use metrics to reward the scout mindset. In contrast, Twitter’s metrics of likes, shares, and followers tend to reward the soldier’s mindset. How many times have you seen someone “like” a tweet that expresses a view with which they disagree?
Last night on Clubhouse with Erik Torenberg, a couple of April’s FITs owners and I talked about how paying attention to the metrics that we use can change the way you look at pundits. You see that some of the commentators you like operate in soldier mindset, and you start to raise your evaluation of commentators who do a better job of remaining in scout mindset.
For more about the FITs project, see this essay as well as some of the other essays at my substack site.
If you would like to help with the project, leave a comment here to that effect.
If you are interested in following the project to see how it goes, subscribe to me on substack (free).