Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin face off. Getting the last word, Levin writes,

And as Martin has shown better than anyone, social media and related technologies have powerfully undermined our capacity for self-restraint too. They encourage fast, short, unconsidered reactions and counter-reactions, and the pleasure we derive from these sours us on the habits of discipline.

In order to become “elites who can stand straight in the digital storm,” as Martin beautifully puts it, our leaders would need to hone the capacity for restraint despite all of these pressures. And the rest of our society would too. In the hands of restrained users, the benefits of social media would surely outweigh the costs. In the hands of restrained citizens, the tools of radical transparency could serve democracy rather than scorch it. In the hands of restrained elites, our institutions would be much easier to trust.

Both Gurri and Levin stress the need for better behavior on part of would-be elites and ordinary citizens. And both realize that this is easier said than done. Both would make my list of FITs, so the fact that this about the best they can come up with shows that the problem of restoring trust and authority is quite a challenge.

Tyler Cowen writes about the fiasco that is vaccine distribution,

Virginia runs prisons, schools, maintains roads, has a Medicaid program, and various state-level functions, such as hiring staff for the governor, some of those in conjunction with other levels of government. Maybe those services are not productivity marvels, but they work OK — I’ve lived here for a long time. So why the differences?

It is important to distinguish baseline functions from project management. Baseline functions work reasonably well. Even the DMV has gotten better. But projects, like the Obamacare web site and the fight against the virus, don’t work the same way. In business, a project needs a strong project manager and a project executive who is powerful and involved. The project manager figures out how to solve every problem in getting the project done, and the project executive knocks over everyone who the project manager says is standing in the way.

The project executive should be the governor (it should be the President, but the only project on his mind is overturning the election result, at which he is flailing). The project manager in this case should be somebody with experience in solving a logistical crisis.

I would bet that Ralph Northam, Barack Obama, and many other elected officials have never learned the first thing about project management. They just expected people whose main concern is their baseline function to somehow “handle” vaccine distribution or developing a web site. When it comes to serving as executives, elected officials are mostly bush league. That is why vaccine distribution should have been left to the private sector, as horrifying that is to many people.

Rachel Bovard writes,

The Trump administration suffered from an abundance of heavyweights, “experts,” and vipers, but a notable lack of loyalty to the president’s agenda. The result was an unwillingness to subordinate D.C. political machinations to a focus on accomplishing the president’s agenda, and long periods of infighting, drift, and internal gridlock that hamstrung the Trump policy agenda in key areas.

Her essay aligns with my view that personnel failures were important, as well as my view that it is difficult for an outsider to find the right people. But she puts little or no blame on Mr. Trump himself. I am more inclined to say “You had one job,” and to fault him personally for handling that job clumsily.

When I was in graduate school, I gave up bridge and took up folk dancing instead. I’ll stick with that choice as long as I can.

But sometimes I think about bridge bidding. Continue reading →

Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History. Originally published in 1997, but there is a 2010 edition. It is an intellectual history, somewhat sprawling and tangled. I get the sense that the book should have made more of a splash than it did, and that I should have come across it sooner.

He draws a distinction between what he calls “historical pessimism” and “cultural pessimism.” I think of it in terms of the REM anthem, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” Both types of pessimists agree with the first phrase, and the cultural pessimists add the last four words. They want to see the world end so that they can create it anew. I think there is a pretty obvious link between cultural pessimism and the religion that is animated by finding and persecuting heretics.

Non-pessimists these days would be people like Matt Ridley or Steven Pinker. Many conservatives are historical pessimists, who fear for the fragility of civilization.

Martin Gurri writes,

No less a figure than Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, waved the white flag. “You don’t need to protest,” he said. “You won. You won. You accomplished your goal.” Then, plainly baffled, Cuomo added, “What do you want?”

Here is an exercise. Try to write the ending to the following story.

Once upon a time, people fleeing religious persecution came to the New World and built a nation that would have no nationally established religion. True, the nation would experience political movements that included religious impulses: anti-slavery; temperance; eugenics; civil rights; environmentalism. But none of these movements embraced persecution of heretics.

Recently, unlike any of these movements, the social justice movement has become animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics. The end result will be. . .

I don’t know how to fill in the ending. In the near term, demographics favor the social justice religion. Its most vociferous opponents are almost all over 50. Among people under 40, it seems to be a juggernaut.

As Gurri points out, it is the nature of the religion not to accept victory. It seems likely that no matter how many heretics it cancels, there will still be more to be rooted out.

But neither will it accept defeat. The temperance movement faded with the failure of Prohibition. The eugenics movement faded because it became linked in the popular mind to the bad guys in the World War II movie.

So what will happen?

One of Tyler Cowen’s correspondents writes,

I expect that there are a certain set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) pre-dispose you to have a severe case of COVID, another set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) predispose you to have a mild case, and if you’re lucky enough to have the right variants of these you are most likely going to get a mild or asymptomatic case.

. . .It’s now mostly accepted that there are two “strains” of COVID, that the second arose in late January and contains a spike protein variant that wasn’t present in the original ancestral strain, and that this new strain (“D614G”) now represents ~97% of new isolates.

On June 1, I wrote,

We will down-rate the importance of lockdowns or track-and-trace. Instead, we will up-rate genetic differences and lifestyle differences that affect the immune system in general (take this WSJ essay as a portent). The significance of vitamin D will receive more attention. In addition, we may find that someone’s previous exposure to other viruses affects the immune response to this virus, so that the history of other viruses in a population matters. Sunlight and/or temperature may prove to be important factors affecting the severity of the virus. Finally, we may find that some of the regional variation is due to different mixes of virus strains that prevail in different areas.

Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson write,

While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less busy ones in the same industry.

This is consistent with other findings, as described by Raj Chetty. It also aligns with my intuition.

The Peter Principle is that in an organization someone will be promoted to a level where they are incompetent. The intuition is that if you prove successful in a job, you will get promoted. You only stop getting promoted when you end up in a job that is beyond your capability.

Now apply that same intuition to a successful government agency. If it does its job well, it will be given additional responsibilities, until it reaches the point where it does nothing well.

The CDC has taken on a very broad mission, and it has bungled its narrow mission. It seems to me that political leaders keep broadening the missions of the military and the Fed, and this probably will not turn out well.

But what made me think of this is the issue of police reform. My first thought was to whittle down the mission of the police and train them more rigorously. But then I thought that if we did that and it worked, the result would be that they would get a good reputation. And then we would give them a broader and broader mission, until. . .