How my thinking evolved–a few loose ends

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Related to yesterday’s long post.

1. As I think about it, I find it hard to see how I could have been anywhere but on the left when I was growing up. Conservatives in those days were wrong on race and wrong on how to fight Communism. If there is someone here who identified as conservative in 1964 and was in favor of racial integration and against the Vietnam War, I would love to hear about it. You were the only one.

Note that in those days, there were Republicans who were for Civil Rights, and the most stalwart segregationists were Southern Democrats. So for this purpose conservative does not equal Republican.

2. Some people asked what I think about using data in economics. I think that one should judge theories in social science by looking at as many different types of evidence as possible. But not “this one chart” or “this one significance test.” It is good to take a statistics class to learn the formal theory of inference, so that you know how to use data to make an argument. But then you have to unlearn formal statistics to some degree, so that you don’t end up deceiving yourself and others. There are many abuses of data, and the academic publication process does not do enough to incent better methods. Recall my recommendation to give a Nobel Prize to Ed Leamer.

3. Some people asked me to talk about intellectual influences in terms of specific people and ideas. I will get to that in about ten days or so.

27 thoughts on “How my thinking evolved–a few loose ends”

  1. My father marched during Civil Rights and is about as conservative as it gets. Very much likes the little guy and equal opportunity. Voted straight ticket Republican most of his life. Sees post Civil Rights race relations as disappointing (not from the left wing critique, but from the right wing blacks started behaving very badly and against affirmative action). It’s pretty obvious that what people singed up for in 1964 was totally mutated by 1967, and my Dad knew it. If the median voter at the time could figure that out, why not you.

  2. Thanks for these fascinating posts on intellectual history.

    Arnold sure is right on the wretched opposition to Civil Rights from many conservatives.

    Here is a brief passage from Salon’s history of William Buckley on the issue….

    “In 1958, National Review printed a cutting article on the black politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., entitled, “The Jig Is Up.” Buckley professed not to know the racial connotations of the word “jig.” In his 1959 book, Up From Liberalism, Buckley responded to an African nationalist, saying, “Your people, sir, are not ready to rule themselves. Democracy, to be successful, must be practiced by politically mature people among whom there is a consensus on the meaning of life within their society.”

    How Buckley could look at the photographs from Little Rock of dignified black children faced with redneck cretins, and still make his claim with a straight face, baffles me still.

    • His sentiment was literally correct. Within a short time after Civil Rights blacks were burning down their inner cities, many never to recover to this day unless the blacks were gentrified away. The localities where they maintain political dominance are some of the worst places in the country today (Detroit, Baltimore, the entire west half of DC, etc).

      When the blacks of DC elected crackhead Marion Berry for the fourth time Congress essentially had to strip the office of its ability to make most of its governing decisions. People complained Democracy was being overturned, and they were correct. DC was too important to let black votes run it into the ground.

      How can one not look at the last fifty years and conclude that Buckley was essentially correct that they were not ready to rule themselves?
      Fact Check: True

      • >—“How can one not look at the last fifty years and conclude that Buckley was essentially correct that they were not ready to rule themselves?”

        One way you could do it is to consider Buckley’s own views on the matter. He later repudiated his earlier white supremacist views.

        • Yeah, so Buckley was correct (as quoted), at least here in the U.S., and the last 60+ years have vindicated him time and time again.

          Also, @asdf neglected to cite Chicago as an example, so just dropping that here as well.

      • Well, I can probably find 30 white communities before supper who have elected officials as corrupt as Marion Berry. I might be able to do the whole search just in Louisiana.

        I can also find KKK communities who have burned down as many properties as were burned down by black rioters.

        • Sure, go for it. Please find us 30 large white metro areas with a mayor as corrupt and incompetent as Marion Berry.
          And, while you’re at it, please provide the KKK organizations that have burned down major cities.

        • +1 Hans

          Look, there are some deep Appalachian white communities that struggle, but even they aren’t that violent or depraved as the inner city blacks despite some bad IQ deficits. And they have a good excuse, they are too far away from the jobs without abandoning their families and property. What the hell excuse do blacks squatting on the most valuable real estate in the world have? People a few blocks away are cleaning their clocks.

          I happen to have lived in a community where to one side I had lower class Scotts Irish and to the other side I had underclass blacks. The Scotts Irish occasionally had a fight outside the local salon, but were involved in zero crime and voted against all the corrupt local politicians. The local blacks committed multiple crimes against my neighbors and voted for total incompetents.

          What’s your problem with these people? They helped win the war of 1812. They supported the democratic enfranchisement of Andrew Jackson. They opposed the planters in the Civil War. They provided disproportionate support for our armed forces. They liked Ike. They have more or less been on the better side of most cultural currents in America, and whatever problems they’ve had they have never bothered me personally. If the Dems had stayed 1990s triangulation Bill Clinton they could have them, but they wanted to go loony left.

    • Was Buckley referring to Africans or African-Americans? The next year (1960), most African colonies became independent and had elections. Alas, soon after, some wit invented the description, “one man, one vote, one time”.

      • >–“Was Buckley referring to Africans or African-Americans?”

        Good question. He was referring to the Civil Rights legislation in America in the 60’s. His later opinion was that his opposition to that had been wrong and that the Civil Rights legislation had been a good thing.

        He continued to support apartheid in South Africa long past the point he favored ending segregation in America.

  3. All four of my grandparents voted for Goldwater in ’64. We’re long-time Midwesterners that have voted Republican for about 150 years. We did not support segregation.

    On Vietnam, if Nixon hadn’t been impeached and finished out his second term, then North Vietnam would not have reinvaded South Vietnam. Under that scenario, likely today we would compare South Vietnam and North Vietnam like we compare South Korea and North Korea (I do not think North Vietnam would have equaled North Korea’s brutal totalitarianism, but you get the point). The mistakes we made in Vietnam were tactical, not strategic. (Examples of tactical mistakes include not firing Westmoreland sooner/putting Abrams in charge and removing troops by length of stay–“first in, first out”–that made our force inexperienced).

    • I think you are way over-optimistic. In the time around Nixon’s impeachment, there were significant sections of South Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) that North Vietnam controlled. And even in much of the area that the South Vietnamese government officially governed, it could not guarantee the safety of the residents. The North Vietnamese government had no intention of accepting a permanent division of the country. The best that American policy-makers could have hoped for would be something like Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

      • Viet Nam – the baby boomers need to get over it already. Literally no one in Viet Nam cares about anything what you have to say. They moved on in the 1980s and are doing just fine, thank you very much.

        • My wife family votes Dem based on Vietnam. I find it crazy they are still thinking about it, but it was a formative part of their coming of age story.

        • Boomers, including me, will care about it till they die. Did the WW II “Greatest Gen” ever get over WW II? The “fight” is not with Vietnam, tho – it’s with those who claim the US was wrong in Vietnam. I agree they were wrong to escalate, and especially to assist in the ’63 coup vs Diem. (Is the CIA involved in election manipulation vs Trump in 2020? Where are the Dominion logs? Source code? Little evidence but lots of conspiracy thinking.)
          And I opposed the kind of fighting in Vietnam, not to win. Tho War Is Hell. Once fighting, why not fight in N. Vietnam as well? Because of China.
          US Democrats allowed the N. Viet to invade in ’75.

          Look at NY Times and other 1974 reports on how S. Vietnam was so peaceful “after the war”, that most reporters went home. Very little of S. Vietnam was under North control – they lost almost all their S. Viet support in the failed Tet offensive – which was a huge PR success.

          Japan and Germany industrialized with market econs, are now US allies and pretty friendly, after being enemies. Most Viet folk want that, too.

          “Communist” Vietnam is pretty small company market friendly, and ready for good trade relations. They’re over it. It was mostly against foreign influence.

          Today US “enemies” are the domestic folk, on both sides, so it can never “go away.” Like arguing here.

          • I should mention I was born in the early ’90s. I have read a lot about the Vietnam War and WWII. I also got really into the Civil War. Currently, I am reading about the Russian Civil War.

          • So, there is Vietnam, the war, and then there is Viet Nam, the country, with various citizens trying to better their lives, which they have since Doi Moi in 1986.

            In my experience, the boomers are almost exclusively fixated on the war part and completely neglect the human welfare part. I find this sad and confusing.

            So, how are the folks in Viet Nam doing? Isn’t that the most relevant question?

          • One of my closest friends from college is from Vietnam. They vaguely wanted the foreigners out, but weren’t hot on the communists. They kind of wished that the independence movement was anyone but the communists.

            There was also an undercurrent that the communist represented the Vietnamese and the capitalists were the Chinese Vietnamese. Chinese Vietnamese more successful, kind of like White Cubans. Lots of third world communists were proxy war for low performing indigenous population versus market dominant minorities.

            My friend works for his families successful business because they can’t trust outsiders since they might steal their business. Sucks to live in low trust communist state.

  4. I am curious about why you think you have to unlearn formal statistics to not deceive yourself. I have always thought that the problems lies in an insufficient understanding of what statistical concepts really mean.

    In other words. A statistical analysis cannot prove that a relation between two variables exists. It can only disprove it. So, performing a statistical regression of data can be a useful tool to find relationships, but these have to be confirmed using other means. Sadly, in the social sciences it is believed that demonstrating the statistical significance of a relationship in a certain datasheet is all that is needed to prove an hypothesis.

    • I agree, the problem isn’t with formal statistics, but the failure to understand what formal statistics really implies.

      One uses formal statistics, for example, to determine whether there are biases in the published literature for parameter estimates (e.g., funnel plots help show if, for example, there is publication bias in estimates of the effect of CO2 on temperature or of fiscal policy on GDP).

      I expect Dr. Kling would agree with the temperament of Andrew Gelman (I’m not sure if he follows Gelman); Gelman is pretty consistently skeptical of ‘neat’ findings in social science, but the basis of his skepticism of putatively statistically significant findings seems to be in rather standard statistical ideas like family-wise error rate, ambiguity over the direction of causality, etc. His ‘Garden of the Forking Paths’ critique of empirical research is about considering the issue of family-wise error more broadly and consistently than most researchers do.

  5. Thanks for great personal articles, and good insight.

    “how I could have been anywhere but on the left”
    Looking at history, perhaps? Of how communism and socialism were and are terrible for their people. Capitalism, private ownership, and individual responsibility is, historically, the main way for average / median workers to advance economically.
    Tho both commie Russia & later commie China were able to push a huge amount of industrialization, with lots of pollution, to improve their workers’ econmic lives.

    One annoying thing about all smart people I know is that they’re smart enough to lie (rationalize) to themselves whatever their hearts wants to be true. Even “conservative” Libbertarian-hating Ayn Rand – who many Libbers like. (I was more Heinleinian than a Randroid). Huge numbers of genius Jews have been, and often are still today,”socialists”, despite decades of evidence of socialist failures. Also many other college Professors. Able to lie to themselves and believe their own lies.

    Conservatives: “wrong on race”. Southern Dems who treated Blacks as inferiors and wanted to keep it that way you call “conservatives”, and they were wrong. Most Republicans officially wanted non-racist Equal Rights and no legal discrimination – more Reps voted for the ’64 Civil Rights Act than Dems. Tho one could argue that on “race”, the ’64 Dems were more “conservative”; and Goldwater was against the CRA. Because of too much loss of state power to the Federal gov’t. (Which he was sort of right about – it is being abused and the USA is less good because of less state freedom in other areas.)

    There is controversy about whether or not Blacks have lower IQs than Whites, on average. Lots of data is pretty clear, and strong. Would you call those people “wrong” if they believe what the data indicate as true?

    The group IQ issue should be considered as not so important as each individual’s personal behavior, and that should be considered the “correct” answer to this, and most, group identity questions of groups by birth.

    “wrong on how to fight Communism” . America, and Nixon, won the “war” in Vietnam, as seen by the Nobel winning 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Which the lying commies violated in 1975, and non-elected Pres. Ford was not allowed to fight back by Congress, newly under the control of Democrats after Nixon’s disgrace at Watergate. The result was hundreds of thousands Viet people killed, and Killing Fields of about 2 million people murdered in Cambodia.

    How many Asians would have to be killed before a non-conservative would say the anti-War method was “wrong”? Still, if there is not a consensus in America about fighting to win AND what winning will look like after, and a path towards leaving, it does seem better to have America not get involved. Like we were not involved in China’s multi-million murders in their Great Leap Forward, nor their Cultural Revolution. Similarly, we were not involved in Rwanda’s Hutu vs Tutsi million plus murdered genocide. With more global industrialization and urbanization, this is even more true today, and going backwards less true in Vietnam (fighting is more justified) and even less true in Korea.

    On leaving – when did America leave Germany after WW II? Oh, right – we’re still there. And moving some troops to a Poland that is far more afraid of a Russia which has troops supporting rebellion in Eastern Ukraine. A good World Policeman would be optimal for the world, but there is not national agreement on what is “good”, and few nations want a World Policeman that is not good. The US does not really want to be the World Policeman, but won’t accept some other one.

    “you have to unlearn formal statistics to some degree, so that you don’t end up deceiving yourself and others. ” Many smart folk with statistics knowledge are excellent at demonstrating, with data!, various things as true which might well not be true. It’s really important to know enough enough to ask relevant questions.

    Another great thing here on Arnold’s blog is how short and sweet most of his notes are – unlike some of my own responses (which I appreciate the opportunity to rapidly get written down.)

    • Nixon, won the “war” in Vietnam, as seen by the Nobel winning 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

      And in 1928 war was forever ended when all the governments of the world signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war.

      The North Vietnamese government had no intent of abiding by the treaty, and Nixon and Kissinger knew that Americans had mostly lost any stomach for renewing the war. At best, the Accords would have provided a “decent interval” between the withdrawal of US troops and the fall of the Saigon government. In fact, if you believe Ray Locker’s Nixon’s Gamble, Nixon had come into office pretty much convinced that the war was unwinnable (but had to be continued for some time as a demonstration of American commitment, and perhaps could be traded off for concessions from China and the Soviet Union).

  6. Too young by a good generation to have had an opinion of issues in 1964, and in Australia, so somewhat removed from US politics, but … is the case against the Vietnam War so clear-cut? If nothing else, it was confined to Indo-China when it might have spread to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. And persistence might have prevented the atrocities of Kampuchea.

  7. Good morning, America. Now everybody knows that Hunter Biden was a doorman for the Chinese government to access the rotten and corrupt democrats in Obama’s WH. The many useless idiots serving the Old Guard and their radical leftists didn’t want to hear about Hunter before the election. but now the bosses need to clean the table. Also, they need to get rid of some useful idiots, in particular those in charge of social media. Welcome to Darkness, Mark Zuckerberg.

    I miss Gordon Tullock. I still hear him saying “I told you so”. He’d have enjoyed this plot so much.

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