John Samples on identity and free speech

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Responding to me, he writes,

Arnold Kling notes that Progressives generally see the world as divided between oppressors and the oppressed. (I would add a third group, the Guardians or the political class). Some social groups are oppressors, others their victims, the oppressed. The job of the Guardians is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” or more generally, help the oppressed in their endless struggle against their oppressors. In this view of the world, speech may just be a weapon used in several ways by the oppressors to subjugate the oppressed. It directly attacks the dignity of the oppressed. Oppressors cast doubt on the harms to the dignity of the oppressed. The speech of the oppressor justifies a society marked by oppression. He demands recognition of a universal self that excludes the lived experiences of the oppressed. In this world with these harms, censorship is not really an abuse of power. It is an obligation of the Guardians, a necessary task for the good ruler. It is this view of politics – oppressed versus oppressor – that transforms identity into censorship.

I think that the only response to this is to reject identity politics. The only version of equality that I can support is equality under the law. Any other attempt to manufacture equality is seems likely to undermine equality under the law. I am not saying that equality under the law can be achieved in some perfect, ideal sense. But let’s stick with that as the goal. Treat people as individuals, not as members of oppressor or oppressed classes.

Tyler Cowen interviews Russ Roberts

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You’ve probably already checked it out. I’ll toss in a few comments.

COWEN: If government spending had to be increased by, say, 20 percent, what would you spend the money on?

My first thought would have been “helicopter drop.” As I see it, government corrupts everything it spends on, so just drop the money from a helicopter (the Universal Basic Income comes close to that).

But on the UBI itself, Roberts says

what really make our hearts sing: pride, dignity, respect. They’re cliches, but they’re not in our model. So we say, “Well, yeah, they’re working in the background.” Or “We’re just holding them constant.” Or “They’re not important for the question I’m looking at.” Then we get to something like universal basic income, where we say, “Okay, we’re worried — because of, say, autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence — that people aren’t going to be able to find work, but that’s okay. We’ll just give them a check.”

Who would say, “Oh, that’s a good idea. That’s a good substitute for a feeling of pride and agency and responsibility and dignity that a job well done provides”? We’d say, “Well, that’s absurd.” Yet, people on the left and the right have adopted the economist’s view that says there’s a function that translates stuff into well-being. I think that’s just grotesque. Where we’re talking about things I’ve changed on, that’d be a big one.

Here is Russ being profound:

I would say that’s true of marriage and religion. Any one day, you might sometimes think it’s a hard deal. Most days, it’s good or great, and then, more importantly, over a longer period of time, it’s deeply satisfying. I think in today’s world, those two institutions are struggling because for whatever reason, people are more interested in today.

I would say that I found high school teaching like that. On any one day, I might hate it. But over a longer period of time, it was satisfying.

The whole interview was fun to read through.

Where did the Social Justice movement emerge from?

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I offer a speculative answer.

a rapid influx of women and minorities, starting in the late 1960s, left women and minorities wondering whether they fit in. This motivated people on campus to focus on issues of race and gender. Attitudes have been in flux ever since. At the moment, they seem far from the equilibrium that I would hope to see reached.

I hope that any reactions to this essay are based on reading it carefully.

Cultural evolution vs. memetic evolution

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Scott Alexander writes,

Cultural evolution may be moving along as lazily as always, but memetic evolution gets faster and faster. Clickbait news sites increase the intensity of selection to tropical-rainforest-like levels. What survives turns out to be conspiracy-laden nationalism and conspiracy-laden socialism. The rise of Trump was really bad, and I don’t think it could have happened just ten or twenty years ago. Some sort of culturally-evolved immune system (“basic decency”) would have prevented it. Now the power of convincing-sounding ideas to spread through and energize the populace has overwhelmed what that kind of immunity can deal with.

Think of gender roles. For many generations, they evolved very slowly. The pace of change in the twentieth century, which seemed rapid at the time, seems glacial by today’s standards. Back then, women steadily increased their participation in the work force. Over a period of decades, sexual taboos came to be relaxed, notably concerning divorce and pre-marital sex. Next came gay liberation, which took place roughly from 1970 to 2000.

But in the last five years, the memetic evolution has sped up enormously. It seems like we’ve had a new cool gender-identity flavor every month, and even “ordinary” gays are feeling as threatened as old-fashioned straights.

We have no idea whether these trendy gender fluidity memes represent progress. I certainly have my doubts. But it feels to me as if our culture is a passenger in a car with no brakes.

I agree that a Trump presidency would not have been possible a dozen years ago. To the Claremont folks, his victory is our way of trying to stop the runaway car. But I think it is more plausibly explained by Martin Gurri’s idea of the revolt of the public, made possible by the new media environment. The car is still going ahead full speed, just without the support of the Secretary of Education–for now.

Until very recently, the party elites and the mainstream media were powerful enough to prevent an outsider rebel like Mr. Trump from gaining a major party nomination, if they wanted to do so. Goldwater and McGovern made it past the party establishments, but each of them claimed to be aligned with the establishment in a more pure form, which made the establishment unwilling to wholeheartedly resist. Another reason that the establishment put up weak resistance to their insurgencies was that in both cases they expected to lose the general election, anyway.

Mr. Trump’s approach to politics is more personal than ideological. The establishment resistance to him was more highly motivated than the establishment resistance to Goldwater or McGovern, but it was utterly ineffectual.

The Tabarrok rejoinder

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Alex Tabarrok writes,

The problem with Bryan’s critiques is that they miss what we are trying to explain which is why some prices have risen while others have fallen. Immigration would indeed lower health care prices but it would also lower the price of automobiles leaving the net difference unexplained. Bryan, the armchair economist, has a simple syllogism, regulation increases prices, education is regulated, therefore regulation explains higher education prices. The problem is that most industries are regulated.

Suppose that there are two sectors, apples and string quartets. We observe that over the past 30 years, the relative price of string quartets has risen.

Using basic supply and demand analysis, we know that this could be a combination of four things:

1. A favorable shift in the supply curve for apples.
2. A downward shift in the demand curve for apples.
3. An unfavorable shift in the supply curve for string quartets.
4. An upward shift in the demand curve for string quartets.

The “Baumol effect” story says that it’s almost entirely (1). The main claim that Tabarrok and Helland make in support of this view is that the change in relative prices has been steady, so we need a steadily-changing factor to explain it. Regulatory changes are more herky-jerky. Bryan Caplan objected to this, and Tabarrok comes back with some new arguments.

Here, for example, are two figures which did not make the book. The first shows car prices versus car repair prices. The second shows shoe and clothing prices versus shoe repair, tailors, dry cleaners and hair styling. In both cases, the goods price is way down and the service price is up. The Baumol effect offers a unifying account of trends such as this across many different industries. Other theories tend to be ad hoc, false, or unfalsifiable.

Oh, please. In 1950, imports of shoes and cars were low. In later decades, they shot up. But car repair and shoe repair don’t face import competition.

In fact, it could be that the main reason that the prices are relatively high in health care and education is that they do not face import competition. That also would explain why a lot of us don’t feel richer. If the favorable supply curve shift were all due to domestic productivity gains, our incomes would be a lot higher. But a lot of the favorable supply curve shift comes from foreign supply added to the market. That is not a Baumol effect, It is a traded goods/non-traded goods effect.

Regulate big tech?

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Peggy Noonan writes,

In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.

It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.

Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.

On this issue, I am in the libertarian camp. It is not just that government regulation will be incompetent. In the end, it will lead to concentration of power that is tighter and more dangerous than what we have now. The more power we cede to government over the Internet, the less open and free it is going to be.

Rooting for government to regulate tech is like rooting for Putin to kill off Russian oligarchs. The oligarchs may be no-goodniks, but Putin is not going to make Russia a better place by killing them.

I am also wary of the government taking the initiative to stop robocalls. It seems almost certain that any government solution is going to involve enhanced technology for tracking individuals on the Internet and for censorship. Eventually, it is going to be used for those purposes.

All I want are spam filters on my phone. Imagine an app that sent into voicemail a call from any phone number that is not in my contacts. How hard is that to do?

UPDATE: not hard at all, according to this article. On an iPhone, just deploy do not disturb, but with exceptions for you contacts.

Open Settings > Do Not Disturb.
Tap Allow Calls From.
You have several options, but one is All Contacts.

Thanks to a commenter on this post for the pointer.

Barbers, doctors, and Baumol

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In a comment on a post by Bryan Caplan, John Alcorn writes,

Might Helland/Tabarrok and Caplan (and Kling) reach agreement about what kind of evidence could in principle resolve the dispute about the relative weights of the several causes?

My first thought was to suggest looking at an occupation outside of health care and education where we know that the worker/output ratio is relatively fixed, and see what happened there. How about haircuts?

In fact, Tabarrok and Helland include a chart which shows barbers not showing the kind of income gains that doctors have enjoyed. It seems to me that the Baumol effect ought to work at least as much for haircuts as for doctor visits, so I see this as evidence that we need more than just the Baumol effect to explain these observations.

Questioning the Baumol-effect story

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Scott Alexander writes,

Factory workers are not getting paid more. That makes it hard for me to understand how rising wages for factory workers are forcing up salaries for violinists, teachers, and doctors.

. . .College really does seem to be getting less affordable. So do health care, primary education, and all the other areas affected by cost disease. Baumol effects shouldn’t be able to do this, unless I am really confused about them.

Suppose that the economy consists of apples and string quartets, and productivity doubles in apple picking. The Baumol-effect story is that we are now richer, and we can afford to spend more on both apples and string quartets. The increased spending on apples is more than offset by the higher productivity, so apple prices fall. But the productivity of violinists stays constant, so the increased spending on string quartets causes their prices to rise.

As I see it, Alexander is asking: if this is the scenario, then why does it seem as though the apple pickers have not gotten richer?

In a straightforward Baumol-effect story, when the productivity windfall hits the apple industry, some workers should be released from the apple-picking sector to work as violinists, so that we now have more string quartets as well as more apples. Everyone is richer.

Instead, Alexander’s data and anecdotes seem to indicate that we have had a big redistribution of income away from apple pickers and toward violinists. How do you get that? A combination of very inelastic demand for apples and little ability to shift from apple picking to string-quartet playing? That would seem necessary, but it may not be sufficient.

Note that in our national economic data, concepts like “real wages” may be calculated using price indexes that are constructed in a way that treats the demand for apples as totally inelastic, regardless of whether this is actually true. So perhaps the absence of real wage growth in the data is a mere statistical artifact, which opens up a different kettle of worms entirely.

So here is the issue: if Tabarrok and Helland are correct that the Baumol effect explains rising prices in health care and education, then it seems that we should have observed broad-based increases in real incomes. Instead, what we seem to have experienced is a significant redistribution of incomes toward the providers of services in health care and education. If so, then the Baumol-effect story may not suffice, and we need another explanation.

“Subsidize demand, restrict supply” comes to mind.

Tradition or momentary reason?

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This post is inspired by a lot of recent reading, too much to reference here. Some of it pertains to Sohrab Ahmari David French. But most of it pertains to Scott Alexander’s recent posts inspired by Joseph Henrich’s work. (Note that I also praised the Henrich book myself.)

In the latter post, Scott writes,

We are the heirs to a five-hundred-year-old tradition of questioning traditions and demanding rational justifications for things. Armed with this tradition, western civilization has conquered the world and landed on the moon. If there were ever any tradition that has received cultural evolution’s stamp of approval, it would be this one.

Sometimes, there is a conflict between the approach that you arrive at using your reasoning of the moment and the existing tradition. For example, Bryan Caplan argues that a reasoning libertarian should oppose immigration restrictions.

Under such circumstances, which should prevail: your momentary reason or tradition?

Conservatives argue for paying considerable respect to tradition. Your individual, momentary reason is not sufficient to overwhelm generations of experience. Henrich’s anthropology supports that (although Henrich does not define himself as a conservative). Always going with momentary reason would mean depriving ourselves of cultural intelligence.

But obviously, if you always go with tradition, you never evolve in a better direction. So you want some experimentation.

The Whig history is that our current society reflects retention of successful experiments. The dour conservative point of view is that it has all been downhill since. . .the radical Social Justice turn of the last five years. . .or the 1960s. . .or Rousseau. . .or John Locke. Take your pick.

A few hundred years ago, a lot of cultural transmission depended on the elderly. Old people knew more than young people, so it was hard for young people to question tradition.

Today, old people don’t know how to use smart phones as well as young people do. So why should young people think old people aren’t equally antiquated on issues of race relations, gender, or free speech?

I wish that old people and traditions had somewhat higher status than they do with young progressives, and I wish that momentary reason had somewhat lower status.

UPDATE: After I wrote this post but before it was scheduled to appear, Scott Alexander elaborated further. I will have another post on this tomorrow soon.