Government is a branch of culture

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Scott Alexander proposes that we think of culture as a branch of government.

Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn’t acceptable . . .The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.

Sounding like one of Alexander’s “real libertarians,” one of my commenters complains about,

. . . A tiny subset of the population, media-ready and always on, always practicing PR, permanently in performance mode, not expressing themselves except in precisely those expressions that can be guaranteed to win the approval of the bigots and authoritarians who appointed themselves the police of society. Enforcers of conformity. Stamping out creativity. Stomping on self-expression.

I think it is best to take Scott Alexander’s view and turn it around: government is a branch of culture. I suggest defining culture as socially communicated practices and beliefs. We may think of government as the subset of practices and beliefs that are defined formally and enforced coercively.

Take property rights. We can think of them as culturally defined, even in the absence of government. But property rights take on more significance when the government establishes and enforces them. De Soto in The Mystery of Capital argues that without formal property rights an economy cannot develop properly.

Just as an economy has both a formal sector and an informal sector, culture has both a formal and an informal sector. The formal sector is where norms are enforced by government.

As a metaphor, think of footpaths. The paths where people walk are culture. Those paths that are not paved are the informal sector. Those paths that are paved are the formal sector.

Alexander argues that the proper libertarian position is to oppose enforcement of social norms, either formally or informally. But you cannot have a society without social norms, and you cannot have meaningful social norms without enforcement.

I think that a more viable libertarian position is that where social norms are contested, contests should be resolved peacefully. You don’t want the Protestants and Catholics burning heretics and fighting civil wars. But if Protestants want to engage in nonviolent attempts to set standards of behavior for Protestants and to convert Catholics to those standards, then that is ok.

A hard case for libertarians is when Google fires James Damore on religious grounds. Whose religious freedom should concern us most, Google’s or Damore’s? And once we choose sides, do we want the formal cultural institution, namely government, to enforce our point of view?

Libertarians often seek black-and-white answers, but I don’t think they are always easy to find.

Martin Gurri watch

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1. Suzanne Fields writes,

The information balance of power has changed, writes Martin Gurri in a new book, “The Revolt of the Public,” which dissects with originality and depth the impact of the Internet on the political culture. “A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience,” he writes of the great age when the daily newspaper was the king of the mountain and television news was dispensed on a reassuring hierarchical model, from the top down.

2. Gurri himself writes,

Populist is an elite term. It seems to imply that certain opinions are popular when they shouldn’t be. Populists of a nationalistic strain have won elections, handily and repeatedly, in Hungary and Poland. In Italy, two very different populist parties, cats and dogs together, share in running the most popular government in Europe, with 68 percent approval ratings. (By comparison, Macron’s approval numbers have plummeted as low as 23 percent.) Elites ascribe these victories to demagoguery: populists win elections by misleading the public. The reverse of this proposition is more nearly correct. Populist parties and politicians are riding, sometimes uneasily, on the wild kinetic energies surging from a mutinous public.

The post is about France. The Yellow Vests sound like they leaped right out of the pages of The Revolt of the Public.

Klassic: a meditation on innovation

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This essay is from 2001. More recently, a lot of people have complained about a slowdown in economic progress. Back then, I wrote,

I think that the adoption and filtering bottlenecks will start to have a visible effect on the rate of technological progress within ten years. Perhaps we will look back in ten years and say that the deceleration of change had already begun at the time that I wrote my essays.

What I mean by the adoption and filtering bottlenecks is that human limitations are an important factor. If we are confused and confounded by new technology, then innovation will have to slow down to allow us to catch up.

Which political axis will emerge?

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Stephen Davies writes,

The question now is not so much that of social conservatism versus social liberalism. Instead the key issue is that of identity, and in particular the tension between globalism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand and nationalism and ethnic or cultural particularism on the other. This is often described as a polarity between “openness” and “closedness”

I call this the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis. Note that he applies it to several other countries in addition to the U.S.

Davies imagines a two-by-two matrix, with market-friendly and market-hostile being the other source of division. If you are cosmopolitan and market-friendly, then Davies labels you as “cosmopolitan liberal.” Sounds to me like a libertarian. If you are nationalist and market-friendly, you are a “free-market conservative.” That describes some people who comment frequently on this blog. If you are market-hostile and cosmopolitan, you are “radical left.” If you are market-hostile and nationalist, you are a “national collectivist.”

With that set-up, Davies writes,

Social democratic parties everywhere are in trouble because they have two quite different kinds of voter that are very difficult to combine into a voting coalition.[*] Center right parties face increasing challenges because they are losing voters to both national collectivists and emerging groups of liberal cosmopolitans

. . .we will soon see the emergence of a stable division. In most countries this will be between national collectivists and liberal cosmopolitans, but in some cases it will be between national collectivists and radical leftists.

*Which two? I can’t guess what he means here.

I don’t see liberal cosmopolitanism gaining as much traction as Davies envisions. I think of Macron as the most prominent leader of that persuasion, and we can see how that’s going. In the U.S., I cannot think of a single major party figure who combines the Bobo outlook with a market-friendly ideology.

I don’t think that the Republicans will be strongly market-friendly or market-hostile. The Democrats might get completely captured by the radical left, but otherwise my guess is that they will turn out to be somewhere between where they were under President Clinton and where they were under President Obama. With either party, I expect economic policy to be less about ideology and more about paying off key constituencies.

If I had to guess, in the next 6 years or so in the United States, political contests will focus on demographic identity. The Republicans will stick to a base of non-college-educated white men. The Democrats will stick to a base of college-educated white women.

In primaries, candidates will compete with one another to exploit and deepen the divisions between these two groups. In general elections, Republicans will try to convince other voters that the party of college-educated white women is a threat to everyone else, while Democrats will try to convince other voters that the party of non-college-educated white men is a threat to everyone else. The Democrats seem to do better at that game, but things could change.

Voices of moderation

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1. Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute writes,

To win in 2020, Democrats should resist the urge to turn the House into the new headquarters of the anti-Trump resistance or to initiate battles over legislative priorities favored by party liberals that have no hope of passage.

My own sense is that we will not see much moderation in the Trump era. Neither Mr. Trump’s non-college-educated male supporters nor his college-educated female antagonists are likely to respond to an appeal to moderation.

2. Brink Lindsey and Niskanen Center co-authors write,

A moderate is one who is grateful for both liberalism and conservatism, and hopes for — and tries through their own work to move toward — the best version of each, in part in service to improvement in the other.

Their manifesto runs to 18 pages, including footnotes, and it is not consistent in tone. Notwithstanding the sentence quoted above, there is quite a bit of straw-manning in the earlier sections, including using epithets like “market fundamentalism” and “democratic fundamentalism.”

David Brooks read the Niskanen manifesto and gave it the sort of review that Lincoln Steffens once gave to the Soviets. Brooks writes,

I felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them. I began to feel at home.

The way it looks to me, the Niskanen Center occupies a sort of John McCain place in the media firmament. That is, the NYT will give it points for moderation whenever it breaks with conservatives. For example, it’s fine for the Niskanen Center to attack climate denialists.

But suppose the Niskanen Center came out with a plan for a sustainable long-term budget and attacked those who are in denial about the projected deficits in our entitlement programs. If that wins plaudits from the NYT, then I might begin to feel at home.

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How religion tames politics

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Andrew Sullivan writes,

if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.

Conor Barnes writes,

Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”

I recommend reading both essays in their entirety.

I think of major religions as having teachings in two realms. One realm is the self, and the other realm is the world at large.

In the realm of the self, the teaching is typically that as a human being you have weaknesses, flaws, and some inclinations that are evil. You are taught to acknowledge this and to strive to improve. These sorts of teachings make you somewhat hesitant and uncertain about claiming to know how others must live.

In the realm of the world at large, the teaching is that there is wickedness and injustice that we must try to correct. These sorts of teachings incline you to think that you know how others must live.

So there is tension between the teachings in the two realms. The teachings in the realm of the world at large incline you to be intolerant and authoritarian. The teachings in the realm of the self incline you to be humble. People have to find the right balance, so that they care about the world at large without becoming despotic in their inclinations.

But what if you have no religious affiliation, and instead you get meaning in your life primarily from your political beliefs? Political movements do not come with teachings in the realm of the self. Their entire focus is on the flaws that are in the realm of the world at large. There is nothing to hold you back from a righteous certainty that can justify violence and totalitarianism.

Two Reviews of Nancy MacLean

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Both probably gated for you.

1. Writing in a WSJ compendium of what people read in 2018, Patricia O’Toole writes,

The acute inflammation of the American body politic prompted close readings of Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money” and Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains.”

2. Writing a long review in the Journal of Economic Literature, Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Alain Marciano write,

MacLean does not provide convincing proofs to sustain the accusations she makes. Determined as she is to portray one man as the mastermind of her story, MacLean tries to make everything fit into that implausible assumption, no matter the cost. This gives an account marred by imprecisions, mistakes, distortions, unproven assumptions about the motives behind each character’s actions, and sometimes a surprising lack of rigor. Sadly enough, it is only by misrepresenting her main characters that MacLean can construct the story she insists on telling and that, in the end, proves unconvincing.

If would bet that Ms. O’Toole, a professional historian, will stay safely within her bubble. It is unlikely that she will ever see the review in the JEL; on the off chance that she does read the review, my guess is that she will find some excuse to dismiss it.

Virginia Postrel on culture

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She writes,

In both markets and culture, the blue-collar values of loyalty, solidarity, security, and physical production, have largely given way to the creative-class values of creativity, self-expression, risk-taking, and brains. It’s the revenge of the nerds. The winners are symbolic analysts. The losers are guys good with their hands. For those who adhere to the old values, the shift can be infuriating. Many people suddenly feel not merely economically insecure but culturally disrespected.

Near the end, she poses some questions.

What can a liberal analysis tell us about cultural change? Do institutions of experimentation and feedback work to correct errors in cultural systems as they do in economics? Are there significant differences that might affect outcomes? Are the time scales similar or different? Are there institutions that might limit the collateral damage—a worthwhile question in the case of economic dynamism as well?

Culture is too important to be left to the sociologists.

Kling on the financial crisis of 2008

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For the Concise Encylopedia of Economics. An excerpt:

There can be no single, definitive narrative of the crisis. This entry can cover only a small subset of the issues raised by the episode.

Metaphorically, we may think of the crisis as a fire. It started in the housing market, spread to the sub-prime mortgage market, then engulfed the entire mortgage securities market and, finally, swept through the inter-bank lending market and the market for asset-backed commercial paper.

It is now a decade since I wrote Not What They Had in Mind, which in my opinion still holds up.

In the encyclopedia entry, space was limited, and I had to limit my coverage. I decided that I had essentially no room to cover the many narratives of the crisis that differ from my own.

Paul Romer on management

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From the conversation with Tyler Cowen.

the typical situation of an IT team or a research unit in a place like the bank is that there’s this almost unlimited set of requests you get, of which you can process only a subset. So you need some transparency about how is it you’re selecting the things you actually work on, given the many things people want.

This really resonated with me. One of the differences between a sub-Dunbar and super-Dunbar organization is that you need a formal process to prioritize projects. When I started at Freddie Mac, they didn’t have this, and the result was a hodge-podge of systems developed on different platforms using different data models. It was only around 1989 or 1990 that a woman in the IT division put together a rational process for explicitly setting project priorities. I was one of the people on that project, and I learned a lot from it.

You’d think that it has to be obvious that top management has to determine the priorities of staff. But in fact without a formal process, it’s like the senior executives can push buttons but nothing happens. Top priorities go unaddressed while employees lower down work on putting out fires or doing things that they find personally satisfying.

And on a different topic, but also resonating with me, Romer says,

I think there’s a slightly different culture in the Midwest compared to the East Coast, and there’s enough of a difference so that when you go from one to the other, you have maybe a little bit of a sense of being an outsider. Maybe those things have filtered into my work.

I felt like an outsider from my first week at Swarthmore College. I remember running into another freshman, from Chicago, and immediately feeling that he and I had a lot in common. He and i talked for several hours. Also, I wrote a lot of long letters to friends from high school, trying to explain my sense of dislocation. After a few weeks, I adjusted to where I could function among the East Coasters. But in a sense I remained an outsider.

Back then, by the way, the cultural differences were not heavily political, as they are today. I think that we Midwesterners were tougher in some sense. We were better at relating to ordinary people than the students who had spent their whole lives isolated in wealthy suburbs and prep schools.