I wanted to note these links for future reference.
1. A classic election-year post of mine from 2008 that a Twitter user chose to highlight recently. An excerpt:
no politician will figure out a way to bring the bottom half of America’s children up to the level where they can benefit from a college education.
2. Alex Mackiel’s unsatisfyingly brief review of the WEIRD Henrich book. And an essay by Robert Henderson that is interesting to read in light of Henrich’s view of the importance of Christian family values in seeding the emergence of liberal society. Henderson writes,
American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods. What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.)
3. Jack A. Goldstone and Peter Turchin claim to have predicted the current political turbulence.
Somewhat related, but not really. Saddleback College (Mission Viejo, CA) recently hosted a zoom call to explore the potential replacement of the school’s mascot, the Gaucho. The Gaucho is clearly racist and should be murdered.
Here was one suggested replacement:
https://twitter.com/colestwitt3r/status/1306728874470813696?s=21
My two favorite lines:
The new mascot is a “woke, sloppy goblin girl who rides around the campus on sweat-stained rollerskates and begs each student to come out as bi.”
“Tough break straighty, have fun sticking out like a sore thumb should you ever visit a beach in Palestine.”
That sounds pretty bad, but I’ve got a proposal for a chart that will probably look much worse:
The Handle Metric is “percent nuclearization”, that is, the fraction of those turning 18 in a particular year, who were raised from birth by their married biological parents.
Two generations ago that was not just the ideal but the overwhelmingly normative case. There are communities and social strata today in which that condition is nearly nonexistent.
Bryan Caplan has been discussing the “normative core” of Public Choice lately, which is that the ratio between the true and projected cost-benefit ratios for government interventions is about an order of magnitude. One might say something similar for the “normative core of social conservative norms” – that the ratio between the true and projected consequences of some social change directly bearing on family formation is also about an order of magnitude worse than the advocates of emancipation figure that some liberating reform will have when they propose it.
At this same time, in a galaxy far, far away:
@Candide III:
Interesting, though I wonder how the oversupply of men plays into that. The cohort born from 1995-2005 has a sex ratio approaching 120 men per 100 women. An average educated rural young woman can reasonably expect to marry an above-average man, if that’s what she wants.
India has a similarly-skewed sex ratio, so might be an interesting comparison.
I don’t buy much of #3. They seem to think leadership matters, but according to their model, I’d think that leadership would be endogenous. In other words, I think they would think that poor leaders would be deterministic now.
Henderson’s essay calls to mind Longfellow:
I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the school-boy’s brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
Just for argument’s sake, here’s the blatantly obvious conclusion that nobody is talking about:
Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. As a result, American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods.
(yes, I know correlation causation, but prove me wrong anyway).
It’s easy to prove all that wrong.
For example, one big source of ‘poverty’ these data is single motherhood. Poverty didn’t go down because of family breakdown, but in spite of it.
Canada. Substantially lower GDP per capita, substantially higher median household income, much lower rates of out of wedlock childbirth.
Touche´
True…
… but, Canada has a less crazy population in general.
My argument is that in, say, 1950, X% of marriages were unhappy and one of the partners to the marriage was a bigger source of poverty, racism, and abuse than the other.
In 2020, those X% of marriages don’t exist. On the one hand, the remaining child-raising parent has to struggle to make ends meet. On the other, they aren’t dragged down by abusive partners.
Disappointing piece by Goldstone. In particular, he and his co-author seem to rely on progressive platitudes in lines like this,
“What we need is a new social contract that will enable us to get past extreme polarization to find consensus, tip the shares of economic growth back toward workers and improve government funding for public health, education and infrastructure.”
Ignoring, of course, that the U.S. has one of the highest per pupil expenditures on education in the OECD and that per pupil education expenditures have roughly tripled since 1970,
https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart
As well as the fact that there is no evidence that additional spending makes much of a difference. And, of course, nary a mention of school choice.
I expect everyone here is familiar with this information, but the notion that there would be any significant impact from “improving” government funding of education seems delusional at this point. Should we triple it again and expect anything different?
Many academics seem to base their worldview, and therefore much of their research, on a boilerplate progressive belief system that seems completely impervious to information.
Yeah, that article was a disappointment, “get past extreme polarization to find consensus” … by pursuing a thoroughly left wing policy agenda. It annoys me that people can actually write sentences like that and not see the absurdity. ‘We need to find a compromise… which involves you forfeiting and me winning the whole pot.’
Oh wow, I found this gem: “Democrats are certain that if Donald Trump is re-elected, American democracy will not survive. Republicans are equally certain that if Trump loses, radical socialists will seize the wealth of elites and distribute it to underserving poor and minorities, forever destroying the economy of the United States.”
That’s the kind of caricature I’d expect from Rachel Maddow.
#1 — Sorry, Arnold, but rather than focusing on the good that politicians could make in another world, we should focus on how to prevent that politicians continue harming people (for an example of how much harm they can make, see
https://www.aier.org/article/witchcraft-leprosy-and-covid-power-to-harm-as-political-weapon/ )
My theory of human history is based on the idea that containment of our dark side is a necessary condition for taking advantage of our bright side.
#2 — Indeed, Henderson addresses a critical issue: in many Western countries, for more than 50 years the nuclear family has been declining for several reasons, including deliberate attacks by the radical left as part of their campaign against the Western/WEIRDest culture. Even if Henrich’s theory about the role of the nuclear family* in the evolutionary origin of the WEIRDest people were right, they would still human and my theory of history would apply to them. To me the relevant question –again, if Henrich’s theory were right– is why the WEIRDest people would have been revolting against the nuclear family.
* Henderson refers to the nuclear family but Henrich refers to MFP for Marriage and Family Program.
#3 — Goldstone and Turchin claim that “selfish elites lead the way to revolutions”. If we were to agree on a clear definition of elites, the claim could be obvious. Since I haven’t read their two books, my only reference to define a society’s elite is the society’s group of people inclined to commit the three cardinal sins they define at the beginning of the column. I’m not sure how the three sins would allow me to define the U.S. elite in 2020 because they seem to be common to too many people (I’d say they are common to the world’s WEIRDest people, and I’m not sure how many non-WEIRDest people are inclined to commit them). Yes, a long time ago maybe they were enough to define an elite, but not today.
“is why the WEIRDest people would have been revolting against the nuclear family”
Hopeful (sort of) Explanation:
Welfare state substitutes for husband and therefore no need for husband.
Pessimistic Explanation:
In any situation where females can survive and breed surviving offspring without monogamy, bottom half does not form stable pair bonds.
People in Asia aren’t WIERD and while they aren’t having out of wedlock births that is primarily because they aren’t having births. They are affluent though.
I found the Turchin and Goldstone piece pretty unconvincing, and actually cast doubt on Turchin’s theories in general. First of all, the fact that he claims to have predicted events that are largely the result of a pandemic, but claims they validate his model of sociopolotical cycles. That may be a good metaphor for his theory: mistakenly attributing cyclical patterns caused by ‘real’ factors like biology, epidemiology, and climate to social or cultural patterns.
When they try to apply their theory to American politics, the giant endogeneity problem (and their political biases) becomes unavoidable. The era from the New Deal to the 80s as a high point in the cycle because of big government, high taxes and redistribution, and then neoliberalism comes along and ruins it. This narrative really needs to die, it’s so obviously false that its constant repetition by esteemed academics is astonishing. The ‘downslide’ clearly began by the late 1960s. That’s when economic growth started stagnating, crime skyrocketed, industry dried up, cities depopulated, etc. Cuts to spending were a necessary response to that failure. ‘Anti-worker’ deregulation was a necessary response to the increased competitiveness of the global labor market.
We spend and redistribute a lot and impose wage floors when we have the resources and the market power to get away with doing those things. When we’re running out of resources we cut spending because we have to, and when we no longer monopolize the old industries, we let wages fall because we have to.
Sometime in the future, we will try to PAY kids to “learn” – study and be able to pass competency tests. When we pay THEM more, not teachers, more students will learn more.
#2 WEIRD stuff is good history, but what’s most important is since WW II – and how the gov’t has been PAYING people to have kids outside of marriage. Most economists know that when we pay more for some thing, we get more of that thing.
We should probably be PAYING couples more for getting married and staying married. Like an annual anniversary gift of some $1000 * number of years married (up to 10? 5? 20?), for those in the poorest zip codes.
#3 G&T elite problems seems to have some reasonable critiques, along with a lack of specifics (in the summary) as well as quite a bit of mis-representing Trump as part of the elite problems.
It’s pretty clear Trump’s anti-globalization is part of the kind of populist anti-elite movement to get Reform rather than Revolution. Their article talks about “redistribution”, as if it’s good – but Trump talks about Jobs (Jobs! Jobs!). Which they don’t seem to focus much on.
You can’t pay people money simple to be X. You need to pay people for sustained behavior Y.
If you pay people to “be married”, you will get a lot of sham marriages.
If you give married men with children lots of tax breaks, you will get *employed* more married men with children.
The fundamental problem though is you probably need miserable single mothers if you really want the lower half to get married, but if miserable single mothers can vote you will never get miserable single mothers.