Senator Sasse talks his book

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Ben Sasse writes,

The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. Even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections, at least our cable news tribes offer the common experience of getting to hate people together.

His book is Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal.

It seems to me that this is the year when the observation went mainstream that political behavior is tribal. We’re all political psychologists now.

My view of why the problem is severe at the moment is that the incentive in the media is to raise the stakes. Who do you think gets more clicks, a pundit who writes as if the other side’s position regarding today’s pseudo-news is dangerously evil, or a pundit who writes as if both sides have some merit or who plays down the significance of the most-talked-about current event altogether? That won’t change until (unless?) we in the general public can build up an immunity to the inflammatory political viruses.

Senator Sasse may be on the right track. It would be helpful if we could elevate the status of people who at a local level do real work to solve real problems. And we ought to lower the status of people who express and amplify outrage on the national issue du jour.

How should elites replicate?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away;

At first, I had a hard time figuring out what he meant. So here was my thought process:

In context, Cowen seems to be defending non-merit based means by which an elite replicates. That is, to be a replicating elite, you have to give unfair advantages and disadvantages to people trying to join the elite. As another example, he writes,

I was struck by a recent paper showing that “almost 80 percent of the faculty at a top 10 economics department did their Ph.D. in a top 10 department.”

It is possible that this shows the ability of top departments to select the most promising students, so that if you don’t get into a top 10 department you are probably a clod. I am sure that is what the departments themselves believe, and if it’s true, then the paper is uninteresting. On the other hand, it could be that hiring at top departments is a game of “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” played by thesis advisers. If that is the case, then what you have is selection for orthodoxy.

I think both mechanisms are at work. The lesser departments tend to get a fair amount of clods to work with. And the better departments give an unfair disadvantage to heterodox thinkers.

So I think that what Cowen means by an elite “replicating” is something like this:

An elite replicates if the selection process for new members ensures that they tend to respect and enhance the status of incumbent members. That is, I would replace the word “replication” with “holding onto status acquired when you became a member.”

The potential problem is that the goal of protecting the status of existing members may cause too much diversion away from true merit. I believe that this is what has happened in many academic disciplines. Cowen may disagree.

Next, you can ask what would happen if whites became a minority at Harvard. Would current white Harvard alumni (the relevant incumbents) lose status if newly-admitted Harvard students were heavily Asian? One way to read Cowen is that Harvard is acting as if it believes this to be the case.

International estimates of human capital

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There is a 2017 report by the World Economic Forum.

The top three nations are scoring a cut above the remainder of other leading countries in this year’s Index, with Norway (1) and Finland (2) almost drawing level and slightly ahead of Switzerland (3). All three countries are unique in the Index in having passed the threshold of developing more than 75% of their human capital against the theoretical ideal.

Suggested by a commenter, who notes

43% of Finnish high school graduates go to vocational training programs rather than university and Finland spends 30 percent less per student than the US.

Also, most American universities are not highly rated.

Scott Alexander on the thought process

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He writes,

When I’ve had a lot of coffee, I have more interesting thoughts than usual. New ideas and clever wordplay come easily to me. I don’t think it makes sense to say that coffee makes me smarter. . .More likely I always have some of those thoughts. . .but the relevant angel considers them too weird to be worth scooping out and bringing into the world. This is probably for the best; manic people report “racing thoughts”, a state where the angels build a giant conveyor belt . . . to consciousness and give you every single possible thought no matter how irrelevant. It doesn’t sound fun at all.

The model is one in which there are all sorts of thoughts bidding for your attention, and the thoughts that get through can vary depending on how your hormones are operating. I am reminded of my personal Minsky cycle. I sense that I am creative during the speculative phase, but on occasion I have been overwhelmed by “racing thoughts” as it shifted to the Ponzi phase.

Paul Volcker talks his book

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He writes,

No price index can capture, down to a tenth or a quarter of a percent, the real change in consumer prices. The variety of goods and services, the shifts in demand, the subtle changes in pricing and quality are too complex to calculate precisely from month to month or year to year.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. The book is co-authhored by Christine Harper, which sort of reminds me of those “as told to” sports autobiographies.

Anyway, Volcker is arguing against trying to use monetary policy to try to fine-tune the inflation rate.

I think of people as acting on the basis of habit. The expect prices tomorrow to be about where they are today. This really helps in making the countless calculations about what to buy, which job to take, which business to start, expand, or fold, etc. To get people to believe differently and to change their way of calculating takes a lot of effort. When Mr. Volcker became Fed chairman, the U.S. government had managed this trick, creating a regime where everyone felt that they had to factor general inflation into their decisions. Getting back to a low-inflation regime was not an easy process.

Another habit people have is treating government bonds as net wealth. That is, when the government borrows $100 from X to give money to Y, Y thinks he is better off by $100 and X thinks he now has a $100 bond. Neither X nor Y puts the obligation to re-pay that $100 on his personal balance sheet.

But that habit changes when something makes the X’s start to wonder whether the government is really going to pay them back, or if it is only going to pay them back in inflation-ruined currency. Then things start to get ugly.

The point is that models of simple, continuous, linear behavior do not apply to fiscal and monetary policy. Instead, there are phase changes. We shift from a regime of predictably stable overall prices to high inflation. There is not much in between those two regimes. We shift from a regime where government debt is treated as risk-free from one in which it is treated as highly risky. There is not much in between those two regimes, either.

Personality, culture, and violence

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Tage Rai wrote,

Across all cases, perpetrators are using violence to create, conduct, sustain, enhance, transform, honour, protect, redress, repair, end, and mourn valued relationships.

Individuals and cultures certainly vary in the ways they do this and the contexts in which they think violence is an acceptable means of making things right, but the goal is the same. The purpose of violence is to sustain a moral order.

I’ve linked to this essay before. More recently, Charles Chu reminded me of it.

I speculate that personality and culture interact when it comes to violence. Culture signals when violence will be approved. Some violent practices have been greatly reduced over the last few hundred years, because they now meet with widespread disapproval.

But I believe that individuals differ in their attraction to violence. If you are inclined to violence, you are likely to seek out situations in which violence meets with widespread approval; or you may come up with ways to justify violence even when most people in your society would not condone it.

I suspect that there is a vicious cycle. A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence. They will engage in violent acts, which the leaders of the movement or cause will feel a need to justify. The more that they rationalize violence, the more their movement will attract violent supporters. And so on,

Some Gurri nuggets

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From Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, to be released on Nov. 13, with a forward by me.

In business, as in nature, most new trials fail. This is true of every sphere of human activity. Most new government policies fail to meet their intended goals, for example. Most educational reforms fail. Most scientific hypotheses fail. The trial part of trial an error entails mostly error, unless the set of trials is large and competitive enough to produce a possible success, and the system is smart and agile enough tp recognize success and reward it.

Authority has always fostered an illusion of inevitability. For obvious reasons: if an expiration date were stamped on the Federal government, defection from its mandates would begin today.

our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

If [Paul] Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues, and democratic politicians, to get elected, must promise to deliver impossibilities. If, in truth, they have displayed excessive partisanship, it may be because team play between political organizations–the tally of wins and losses–retains a reality to which they desperately cling. . .

The nihilist benefits prodigiously from the system he would like to smash. He’s not marginalized–not a street person, not a foresaken soul, not a persecuted minority. . .a radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick.

p. 206, 215, 253, 256, and 285-287, respectively. All are even more interesting when spelled out in context.

Book Recommendation

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Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is now available for pre-order. The release date is a few weeks away.

I raved about the first edition of the book. But this edition is bigger and much better. I contributed a brief forward to this edition, but that is not what makes it better. About 20 percent of the book is an entirely new final chapter that interprets recent events.

Because I wrote the forward, I receive an advanced copy. On page 87, he writes,

The fall of the mediators, all other things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

This tightly-packed sentence makes a key point. “The fall of the mediators” means in this case the dispersion of power over information as we move from the broadcast era to the Internet era. Governments could mold the narrative with broadcast media. Governments could convey the impression that their authority was legitimate and respected. With the Internet, too much information leaks out about the failings of governments. Thus, they are unable to “rule by persuasion” and are increasingly reduced to relying on sheer force. As a provocative example, Gurri believes that the Chinese government now is more dependent on force than it would be without the Internet.

The book is a masterpiece, in my opinion.

Commenters push back on immigration

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First,

As a property owner, your share of public goods is not yours to dispense as you please, permanently and in perpetuity to their birthright-citizen posterity, to non-citizens.

As a property owner, you pay property taxes and income taxes on the rent that you charge. Your illegal immigrant tenant pays gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and (perhaps) payroll taxes. It is not clear that the immigrant is less morally entitled than anyone else to whatever public goods that immigrant receives.

Second,

If a student illegally admitted himself to Harvard, enrolled in classes, followed all the normal rules, completed assignments, took tests, and paid his tuition like expected, would it be immoral to kick him out? Is it immoral for Harvard to block the student from getting legal admission by rejecting his application?

In fact, you don’t even have to pay tuition to tresspass on classes, and my guess is that if you submit a test it will be graded. But you won’t get the Harvard degree without coming in through the front door via the admissions process. Bryan Caplan uses this example to show that the value of college must be mostly signaling; if it were the education itself that had value, then we would see more people would obtain the education by trespassing.

As for Harvard blocking the student from getting admission, that is because Harvard sees its slots as a scarce resource. In theory, these could be rationed entirely on the basis of price, with slots going to the highest bidders. In practice, Harvard rations these slots through the admissions process. It is free to do so.

Illegal immigrants who occupy housing are using scarce land resources. But those resources are being rationed on the basis of price.

Arguing against allowing illegal immigrants means arguing in favor of some non-price rationing of land resources. Moreover, you are not giving the landlord the right to choose whether and how to ration by non-price criteria. Instead, you are having the government set the criteria.

I am not trying to refute the case for enforcing immigration laws. I am just trying to say that the analogy between kicking out an immigrant and throwing someone off of your personal private property is not really appropriate.