We do not see predatory pricing, collusion, or cartelization among the tech giants. What we do see are those giants acting as vehicles for the ideological rents being sought and extracted by the specialized labor cultures they employ. Economically this counts as market power just the same, but the mode of exercise is quite different.
Pointer from Megan McArdle’s column.
He argues that tech workers are progressive, and they have power over their employers, which enables them to force employers to cater to progressive demands, including cancellation of conservatives.
But my guess is that the majority of workers in tech firms are not progressive. Instead, we are seeing what Nassim Taleb calls minority power. If a minority feels strongly about something, and the majority does not feel strongly in the opposite direction, the minority wins. For example, most people do not care if the food they buy has a “heckscher,” a symbol that the food has been deemed kosher by an authority (there are actually something like 600 different authorities). But it is easier for big food manufacturers to pay an authority to inspect themselves and provide a heckscher than it is to blow off the relatively small number of Orthodox Jews who want only kosher food.
Getting back to corporate wokeness in response to employees, I think that the problem is that the employees who are not into enforcement of extreme progressive orthodoxy are like the people who do not care about buying kosher food. They do not feel strongly enough, so that it is the intense minority that has the power.
The key difference with Kosher food is that the cost to people who don’t care very much of making food Kosher is very low. By contrast, the costs of wokeness are often high. Which seems to mean it shouldn’t work.
We talk about “costly signals” when discussing human dynamics. People want to give off “costly signals” to others for all sorts of reasons. Wokeness mostly seems to work by transmuting costly signals. First, by simulating a costly signal without it actually being that costly (performative wokeness). Second by making it costly but to others instead of oneself (sometimes in a diffuse way like cost disease, sometimes in an acute way like cancellation).
I’d say that what we just went through with COVID was similar. Closing schools had massive costs, but they were mostly born by people other than the ones making the decision, who then got to claim some costly signal (we are taking on this great sacrifice to save lives).
Wokeness seems to work best when decision makers (administrators) receive some kind of benefit (or at least avoid some kind of cost) while foisting that cost on stakeholders without the power to affect the decision (or at least whose game theory makes it such that affecting the decision would require an even greater sacrifice then going along with it).
P.S. Didn’t the tech firms get caught fixing prices for labor between each other.
I’m pretty sure they were caught agreeing not to poach each other’s staff or get into a bidding war over employees.
So price fixing. If coke and Pepsi agree not to get in a bidding war it’s called collusion and it’s illegal.
Heckscher are not sought to satisfy the minuscule number of observant Orthodox Jews but because a non-negligible number of ordinary people think that the cleaning measures to ensure that the products are pareve guarantee a higher level of hygiene.
Hardwick his new to me but I pinned his most interesting blog immediately. In another piece he discusses clientelism:
“Essentially, a significant power bloc of society now feels that it can divert more value to itself by replacing the fixed rules of bureaucratic administration with what Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama have called “identity rules.” Such rules explicitly organize the identity categories that have become increasingly salient in recent decades into permanent interest blocs and embed them in a clientelist administrative structure, through which benefits are distributed. This is not uncharted territory: this is simply a bureaucracy gutted of its self-conception devolving into the stable, zero-growth administrative structures of the premodern era. As the devolution progresses, intra-left fights over whether identity rules should be structured along ethnic or class lines can be expected to intensify.”
https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/22/its-not-socialism-its-clientelism/
One wonders how much of the organizational surrender to minority power in the tech companies is a manifestation of this sort of clientelism. More importantly because it is more perilous to progress is the tech company managers abandonment of any obligations to shareholders: they view investors’ money as an entitlement that is at their disposal to build personal loyalty networks. One wonders how hard the market will crash when investors finally realize that the tech companies have no intention of ever paying a dividend.
The somewhat scary Taleb article is The Most Intolerant Wins (also a chapter in Skin in the Game).
I just finished reading that. His exploration of the idea of stubbornness is fascinating:
“…So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one. “
So it wasn’t the inquisition but rather the Spanish Jews who were intolerant for refusing to worship Jesus in addition to Yahweh? Someone should explain to Taleb that tolerance and syncretism aren’t the same thing.
“I think that the problem is that the employees who are not into enforcement of extreme progressive orthodoxy are like the people who do not care about buying kosher food. They do not feel strongly enough, so that it is the intense minority that has the power.”
No way. It’s mostly the law.
If you don’t obey the demands of the woke, you are legally hostile.
Current law emboldens and immunized some and chills and fails to protect others. The woke get a megaphone, the rest get a muzzle.
To miss the dominant influence of the law on this topic is not so much to ignore the one ton elephant in the room, but the 70 billion-billion ton moon that moves the tides. Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement” is a must on this topic.
I should take you on a tour of my workplace. Leaders are constantly walking on eggshells, reluctant and hesitant to say anything critical or impose any disciplinary measures, because they fear doing anything both innocent and trivial but then someone literally “making a federal case out of it” anyway. Even if you win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Yes, they want to avoid scandal too. But they are willing to accept scandals on the right. They are not willing to accept them on the left, because the law, like the left, is on the side of protected classes.
If you have a workforce that is 90% A and 10% B, and A and B regard an issue in rival ways with the same amount of intensity and commitment, but the law suppresses and intimidates A into silence and provides B with a strong incentive to make a fuss, then it will *look* like a Talebian situation of indifferent majority and pushy minority, but that’s an illusion: looking at the situation through a distorting fun-house mirror.
Indeed.
The question, then, is how it got to be the law in the first place.
Is this the oppression the Progressives are so fond of talking about? Do Americans of lower classes resent and oppose these rules? Or do Americans largely support the ideas behind these rules? (Aside from some whining when it harms them personally.)
So Q is whether making political identity a suspect class would equalize. Seems like the only likely legislative fix on offer.
Well, a few things.
First, there are lots of other legal approaches than just the ‘suspect class’ route, and they are by no means all mutually exclusive. The more the merrier; let a thousand flowers bloom!
But as to legal measures, while I’m open to argument to the upside of my expectations, I personally don’t regard them as a ‘fix’ at all. There is no true ‘fix’ for the real problem at this point that doesn’t involve the equivalent of regime change. Sad but true. So, short of that, new law is a least worst choice when all options left are bad or even more extreme long-shots. It is also one that doesn’t exclude also trying the long-shots.
When Arnold says, ” Our best hope is … ” he is talking about a more extreme long shot, and, in my view, not being accurate by excluding a superior possibility, which, it must be admitted given our gloomy situation, is still not that all great a hope.
He excludes it by asserting it would be counterproductive thus not worth trying at all. But he doesn’t argue why. If I simply asserted that trying to overturn the ranking of intellectual status would be counterproductive – which it might very well be – he would likewise criticize me for not making an actual argument, and he would be justified in doing so.
So, what I’m saying is that there are legislative measures which, if they could become actual effective law, might be the equivalent of “desperate, life-saving measures”. Something akin to applying a tourniquet to a soldier who is in imminent danger of bleeding to death, knowing that everything below the cinch is going to get amputated. They’ll buy you extra time, but you’ll never fully recover. Still, better to lose a leg than your life.
Another reason I say such measures are not a ‘fix’ is that I feel no need to pretend that it wouldn’t cause all kinds of additional problems, bad side-effects, and unintended consequences.
To extend a wise man’s theme, “Protective Laws Fail, Use Protective Laws.”
Because I view the woke cancellation problem as a genuine existential crisis which must be stopped by hook or by crook lest it triumph and take us all down with it, I take a “bite the bullet” attitude towards all the obvious problems that would arise in the wake of passage of such protective laws.
So, when people make obvious criticisms, “Well, what about this bad thing that might happen?” I ask, “So what? It’s not as bad as the alternative, so being a rational, mature adult means that sometimes you have to accept bad things to avoid worse things.”
To me, this is like when people argue against human challenge trials, “Because someone might die!” To which the sane response is, “Yeah, they might! But what do you think taking an extra year to validate a vaccine in the midst of a pandemic is going to do?”
If you think the problem is serious, you should be willing to take it seriously, which means being willing to bring out the heavy artillery. If you claim you regard a problem as serious, but aren’t willing to bring a knife to a knife fight, then you’re not taking it seriously. States vs revealed preferences. Talk is cheap. Watch what people do, not what they say.
Taking a broader view of the claim of counterproductivity, Arnold often seems to take a “King Canute and The Tide” approach to the state, with a “government effort doesn’t matter” attitude. Or if not all government, then the American form of government.
The American state takes on a lot of challenges bigger than its capacity. It it tries to raise test scores with education, it accomplishes nothing. If it tries to make us healthier, it just wastes trillions on Hansonian medicine. If it tries to manipulate interest rates or inflation, it is a drop in an ocean of a bigger market. If it tries to pass laws against the elite cultural consensus, it will find it can’t enforce them, can’t get the courts to bless off on them. It is tries to fight a war on drugs, it loses. If it tries to lock people down, it only succeeds to the extent they were already locking themselves down.
On the other hand, Arnold also seems to believe that government *does* have the power to make a lot of things worse. When it tries to restrict supply and subsidize demand, it gets it done! When it doesn’t want people to use cheap and fast virus test strips at home by themselves, they don’t!
The theme is that when we have a problem, we should resist the progressive urge to leverage state power. If we are to solve it, it is up to us. Avoid hard power, use soft power.
But the contradiction is heightened in this case. If the government can make things worse, then, as with genuine ‘deregulation’, getting the government to reverse itself should make things better. However, the bind is that, if this situation is caused in large part by bad law, but one can’t favor remedial action by the state, then one has to grasp at straws for other causes.
Let me add a note. My guess is that this “pushy minority” hypothesis is an example of “interpretation subject to constraints”. Let me explain.
If an interpretation can’t imply a potential legal-political solution to a problem – because we’ve put the cart before the horse and deemed that to be beyond the pale – then the interpreter cannot see the problem as having a substantially legal-political basis. So he must go fishing for other potential origins and causes, no matter how much of an unlikely stretch.
Just like with “normative sociology”, the imposition of such constrains is not compatible with epistemic rigor.
If one was constrained by geocentrism, then the Ptolemaic system with its epicycles and pushing angels – while wrong in its underlying model of reality – is still a reasonable and predictive interpretation of what one can already see.
On the other hand, one can’t explain the tides, and the anomalies will never point one toward more truth, like the discovery of new planets. On the contrary, extrapolation beyond the small envelope of easy observation will constantly lead one astray.
If, for the sake of argument, one accepted certain core progressive empirical assertions about human uniformity, then the interpretation under that constraint of all the stubborn disparities and inequalities in the world, persisting despite generations of extreme efforts to intervene and eradicate them, would indeed be one of a world beset by an almost unfathomable horror of relentless, terrible evil and unjust oppression and rampant predatory victimization. A moral imperative to counter it would justify the most radically revolutionary program conceivable.
This is why, for example, Null Hypothesis Conservatives argue to Wishful Thinking Conservatives the centrality of rejecting these false empirical assertions, else the whole game is given away.
I’ll be blunt. Many conservatives and libertarian public intellectuals know that the woke cancellation crisis is a huge social problem that threatens to severely damage social harmony and the functioning of institutions at the heart of innovation and prosperity. It aggravates and worries them a lot.
But. They have already decided that they do not want the government involved. So, they don’t want it to become a political issue or agenda item, they don’t want new laws, and they are coy about being consistent and advocating for repeal of existing ‘civil rights’ laws. That coyness is understandable, because, well, see above. But the inconsistency undermines persuasiveness.
If one has already decided against the obvious solution, then one has no choice but to try to invent much shakier, law-orthogonal explanations.
Is it really the obvious solution, though? Why would you think you can trust the government to do what you think is right? Especially now that the entire government is in the control of your political enemies?
First of all, the trend is going down fast, and so, while it is bad luck to jinx it and say that these efforts “could hardly make things worse”, on net, I think a “trend discontinuity” amounting to an acceleration is unlikely, so that it’s worth the attempt.
Secondly, while I certainly don’t place much trust in the current American state and those running it, that doesn’t mean it’s gone down to Soviet absolute zero yet. We remain in a situation in which it is still difficult for the state for the state to blow off written law altogether without upsetting at least some judges and also undermining its own political formula and sawing off the branch of legitimacy on which it sits.
Soon enough, it either won’t require legitimacy, or will have successfully and fully transitioned to the alternative political formula of the revolutionary “successor religion”. But until then, there is still some time, and we should use it.
I will just say that, with the current congress and president, the chances of passing anything like you are suggesting is pretty darn close to zero.
+1 to the argument that this phenomena is not about lack of passion or numbers of those who resent the left, but that the left has been better at wielding the law and the power of the state to punish their rivals by getting them removed from positions of power and to coerce moderates to obey and follow suit, and silencing dissent.
The school system is supposed to be politically neutral, and the left has succeeded at capturing those, ruthlessly pushing out rivals, and coercing moderates.
The left has even installed overtly political DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) apparatus within existing corporations that have been operated by people who wished to remain politically neutral and were overrun.
There are tons of people who hate + resent the left; currently they are silenced and repressed, but they may find a way to legally or politically escalate to a viable pushback.
Tech workers are paid money to do a job. It’s a competitive serious environment. Politics and religion are normally officially taboo and not allowed in the workplace. The political left managed to sneak their politics into the workplace and get it normalized, where the right has not. “diversity + equity + inclusion” have become official company terms, most companies have to hire DEI staff and speak the slogans in public. Kling says the right wing minority “does not feel strongly”. This is not correct. Lots of right-wing tech workers are quite emotional and passionate but feel they are powerless to do anything about it.
I see the same phenomenon at my children’s public elementary school. It is supposed to be a non-political public elementary school that does normal school stuff. The parents aren’t supposed to bring their adult political views to the school, that’s inappropriate. The left managed to sneak their politics into the school. The school is officially promoting two of Ibram X Kendi’s books and has that blasted on the public billboard, blasted to all the parents in emails, the books are given to every single student. The principal who I know to be a moderate was pressured into supporting this. Many parents are outraged, feel this is wildly offensive, sure it’s a minority of parents, but they feel they don’t have the leverage to do anything about it.
“Tech workers are paid money to do a job. It’s a competitive serious environment.”
Maybe at Amazon. Judging from the stories from Google, there seems to be plenty of frolicking.
This idea was developed at length by Mancur Olson. A much more careful and original thinker than the one you mention.
Placing a Kosher symbol on food lowers cost for a corporation notwithstanding the cost of certification. This is because fixed costs are spread over a larger volume of sales.
Something people don’t mention about cancel culture is that it’s asymmetrical.
Asymmetrical Executioners
The primary relationship between employer and manager is performance quality. Not the only thing, we’ve never been that perfect, but at least the firing decisions were mostly restricted to the employment silo.
So what cancel culture does is introduce other factors of job performance and those factors go far outside the workplace–and, in fact, may not involve fellow employees at all.
Tech employees demanding diversity nonsense is only the start of the problema while others stay silent is only the start of the problem. An employee could never complain about it but just go to a Trump rally, or register as a Republican, or give money to the wrong cause. When discovered, *either* fellow employees scream about it *or* outside wokesters can make it a PR problem. In either case, the employee could be terminated, again for factors entirely unrelated to job performance.
Similarly, parents or other teachers at a school that’s pushing a progressive agenda can’t object without fear that it will hit their employment. It’s not fear of disapproval from fellow parents or teachers, but fear of firing. Their objection becomes public, people bring it up to the employer, employer fears PR scandal. (The right tries this as well, just not successfully because the key player is the media, which protects people on its side by refusing to publicize news).
The question, as I wrote in that piece, is not “why do people demand such fealty?” but rather “why do employers fire people on these demands” or “why do parents go along with woke school stuff”. Arnold’s answer is “well, it’s cheap”. And that’s just wrong. Dean Baquet didn’t dump James Bennet and Donald McNeil because it was cheap.
The answer is that the asymmetrical quality of cancellations make the employers fear their own demise. Dean Baquet is all powerful within the NYTimes, but in the publishing world or the Davos world, his employee Nikole Hannah Jones is more powerful. Thus he makes decisions based on what We can’t silo our lives any more.
Hypothesis 1: cancellation culture-warriors find something cancellable, decide to cancel.
Hypothesis 2: cancellation culture-warriors find someone they don’t like, decide to dig up something cancellable. (Which includes everyone, because Kafkatraps.)
Test: has Joe Biden ever said or done anything politically incorrect?
Result: …
Anyone care to put a number on the replications odds of my little n=1 study?
James Damore of Google certainly felt strong enough about it to write a careful letter – but not careful enough.
He was fired.
He sued, wrongful firing/ breach of contract (does it really matter?)
He lost.
Handle is right: It’s mostly the law.
And there are almost no other high paying SW jobs that don’t discriminate against Reps – see the list of HiTec companies that banned Trump.
See how the current oligarchy rapidly deplatformed the “alternative” Parler.
Elite culture informs and guides the judges, and gov’t administrators, who decide what the law is. In practice.
Reps are not yet ready to get punished for disobeying unjust laws – and not yet ready to support Republican/ conservative martyrs. Like Damore.
I hate it when bold doesn’t turn off.
It’s elite status power, whether minority or majority of any group. And in any group of “non-elites”, there will be some leadership shown by those decision makers which have the most followers, so that such leaders become the non-elite elite. Among Rep groups, usually college educated, even if anti-PC, pro-market, anti-government, pro-free speech, anti-abortion.