Haidt and Lukianoff talk their book

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You can watch yesterday’s AEI event.

1. Apparently the book is selling well. That is probably a good sign.

2. Is Haidt now a full-blown conservative? It sort of seems that way. Near the end, I thought I heard him talking about the fragility of our society in a way that suggested the civilization vs. barbarism axis. But maybe I think he has become conservative because I believe he ought to be conservative, given what he has observed. But my theory is that he’s afraid to come out of the closet, and that keeps him from admitting it, even to himself.

3. I used my question, at one hour and seventeen minutes in, to try to get them to admit that the right is not as closed-minded as the left. Haidt tried to parry that by saying that conservatives are starting to talk about themselves as victims, which means that they are joining victimhood culture. Moderator Jonathan Rauch brought up Sen. Lindsay Graham’s speech at the end of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing as an example of that. To me, the most powerful line of Graham’s was “Boy, you guys want power. God, I hope you never get it.” That does not sound like victimhood to me.

Conservatives on campus and in the media are subject to antagonism and double standards. That is simply a fact. Left-wing students have gotten speakers disinvited. Right-wing students have not. Left-wing students have demanded protection from having to listen to opposing views. Right-wing students have not. Conservative professors, and even centrist professors, have to be very careful about expressing their beliefs. Meanwhile, there are departments and administrative offices that are garrisons for radical leftists. On the panel, Prof. Allison Stanger, who says that she, too, is no conservative, made an impassioned defense of free speech and intellectual rigor. But does she or anyone else hold the Gender Studies Department or the Office of Inclusion to the same standards she expects of her students?

4. Afterward, I thought of an even more obnoxious question. Haidt talked about the high rates of anxiety and increased rates of suicide among young people. I wanted to ask whether other trends are more favorable. The obnoxious way to put it would have been:

You know what p-hacking is. It’s when you search through a hundred relationships to find one or two that have “significant” p-values. Maybe there is something that we could call danger-hacking. We look through generational trends to find the ones that suggest danger. You brought up teenage anxiety and suicide rates. But other indicators look better. Homicide is down. Teenage pregnancy is down. I’ll bet that the most recent yearbooks of certain DC-area prep schools are not as bacchanalian as the ones from 35 years ago. Shouldn’t we stop danger-hacking and take a more holistic view of Gen Z or I-Gen, which might suggest that they are actually in pretty good shape?

Paul Romer vs. Perry Bacon, Jr.

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The latter wrote,

with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week and new allegations coming out against Kavanaugh on Sunday, it’s worth noting that the biggest divide is not between men and women on these issues, but between Democrats and Republicans.

Romer writes,

The best one can say about this comparison is that it is careless. Its measure of the partisan divide suffers from an obvious upward bias relative to the measure of the gender gap because it excludes the responses of independents. Leaving out these centrists will automatically increase the difference between the two groups that remain. The effect is big because there are lots of independents. For this particular poll and in round numbers, 600 of the 1500 respondents do not provide a party affiliation.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I clicked through to the Huffpost poll, taken several days prior the hearing, which asked whether the allegation against Kavanaugh is credible.

Men answered it 28-34, with the 28 percent saying yes, and 34 percent saying no. The rest did not want to commit to an opinion.
With women, it was 25-23.

Among Democrats, it was 53-8.
Among Republicans, it was 4-60.
Among independents, it was 19-25.

But this isn’t the poll result that Romer uses to make his point. Instead he uses a question that asks generically about the importance of protecting the accused’s rights or the victim’s rights.

Among Democrats, it was 11-76
Among Republicans, it was 20-54.
Among independents, it was 14-53

This is a much smaller partisan gap to begin with. In every group, the majority stresses the victim’s rights.

To me, the poll result about the credibility of the accusation is the one that stands out. It just screams “motivated reasoning.” I’m sorry to have to disagree with Romer, but if you focus on that poll result, there can be no escaping the conclusion that partisanship is the main driver.

Andrew Sullivan joins the IDW

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He writes,

My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yet know quite what the balance is.

Read the whole thing.

I think about this issue by using a computer metaphor, with the layers of hardware, operating system and application software. The hardware is our physical bodies. The operating system is our cognitive systems, as shaped by evolution and our individual genetics. The applications come from culture, by which I mean the norms, behaviors, and technology that we absorb from others.

If you think of cognitive ability or how the sexes relate, all three layers matter. But people on the extreme left argue as if the hardware and operating system don’t matter, and people on the extreme right argue as if the hardware and the operating system are all that matter. As Sullivan puts it,

Leftists tend to believe that all inequality is created; liberals tend to believe we can constantly improve the world in every generation, forever perfecting our societies. Rightists believe that human nature is utterly unchanging; conservatives tend to see the world as less plastic than liberals, and attempts to remake it wholesale dangerous and often counterproductive. I think of myself as moderately conservative. It’s both undeniable to me that much human progress has occurred, especially on race, gender, and sexual orientation; and yet I’m suspicious of the idea that our core nature can be remade or denied. I completely respect the role of liberals in countering this. It’s their role. I think the genius of the West lies in having all these strands in our politics competing with one another.

Again, read the whole thing. Sullivan makes a complaint, which I share, that on these issues the left tries to demonize and shut down conservatives. The more vehemently the left asserts its moral superiority, the more I doubt that moral superiority.

Mr. Sullivan, welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web.

Gene Epstein on Joseph Stiglitz

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He writes,

Other Stiglitz critics see stubbornness as a key flaw. “There are many things wrong with Stiglitz as a policy economist,” says economist​ Jagdish Bhagwati, also a University Professor at Columbia. “One is that he doesn’t learn from his mistakes. A New York Times story once quoted me as saying his ‘Initiative for Policy Dialogue’ should more accurately be called ‘Initiative for Policy Monologue.’ ” An even harsher judgment comes from another Columbia colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity: “Joe’s career tragically demonstrates that if one combines legitimate credentials as a clever and creative theorist with extreme left-wing bias and a colossal ignorance of history, one can accomplish a great deal of harm in the world.”

The article includes all of the the major examples where Stiglitz went wrong that I know of, except that it omits discussing Occupy Wall Street. Stiglitz wanted to position himself as some sort of chief economist for that movement.

It is easy to look for similarities between Stiglitz and Krugman. But I see their personalities as different, in fact nearly opposite. One senses that beneath Krugman’s relentless attacks on others he has deep needs for reassurance. In contrast, Stiglitz comes across as having no inner self-doubts. In that sense, he reminds me of David Halberstam’s description of Walt Rostow as feeling unthreatened by Vietnam War critics, because Rostow was so confident that we were winning.

Relative to Krugman, Stiglitz was more prolific and important as an economic researcher. I admire a lot of Stiglitz’s work. With Krugman, there is his early work on economies of scale and trade, but not much else. He gets a lot of support for his liquidity-trap stuff, but not from me.

One may hope that, years from now, Stiglitz’s role as a public intellectual will be forgotten. But with Krugman, that is by far the most significant aspect of his career.

GMU or IDW?

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Bryan Caplan lists ten cultural characteristics of his intellectual subculture. For example,

Appealing to your identity is a reason to discount what you say, not a reason to pay extra attention.

A few remarks;

1. If you took the ten characteristics out of context, they might describe the Intellectual Dark Web. But he says he is referring to GMU econ bloggers.

2. Although it refers to a “culture” of GMU econ bloggers in general, the links in his list pretty much all go to previous Bryan Caplan posts. Most bloggers are self-referential, but for Bryan it’s an art form.

3. His last item is “strategically appease mainstream thinkers,” which seems out of synch with the rest. The link goes to a post where he justifies paying taxes, and for me that post fails to provide clarification. Mainstream thought for the most part does not come with a threat of imprisonment behind it. For now, at least.

4. Just as a reminder, I am not on the faculty of GMU. I am nominally affiliated (no office, no salary) with Mercatus, which is at GMU. Once every couple of years or so I try to have lunch with some of the GMU econ bloggers.

Note: after I wrote this post but before it appeared, Tyler Cowen wrote a post in favor of taking identity into account. But I think Tyler missed the important difference between taking identity into account and having someone appeal to their identity. I agree with Bryan that the latter is a negative signal. Opening with “Speaking as a ____” is a bullying tactic.

How hospitals play hardball

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In the WSJ, Anne Wilde Mathews writes,

Dominant hospital systems use an array of secret contract terms to protect their turf and block efforts to curb health-care costs. As part of these deals, hospitals can demand insurers include them in every plan and discourage use of less-expensive rivals. Other terms allow hospitals to mask prices from consumers, limit audits of claims, add extra fees and block efforts to exclude health-care providers based on quality or cost.

Pointer from John Cochrane, who adds,

Medicine is missing the discipline of competition.

But I still wonder where the money goes in these hospitals. The bottom line? Waste? Paying for fixed costs? I suspect that it’s the latter. If so, then reducing hospital charges for some services is only going to cause them to raise prices for other services.

I am not against trying to increase competition in order to try to stimulate greater efficiency. But I am not sure that those of us on the outside really understand the cost drivers in medical care, especially in hospitals.

Bruce Schneier on blockchain

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He writes,

I am very much a blockchain skeptic. Basically, most of the benefits are illusory and the risks are considerable. It doesn’t replace the need for governance. It doesn’t decentralize nearly as much as it promises to. And, near as I can tell, none of its applications truly need its security properties.

This is a brief paragraph in the context of an Ask Me Anything. He promises a longer essay forthcoming.

Francis Fukuyama talks his book

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In Quillette, he writes,

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

That seems to be the thesis of his new book, Identity.

In the podcast of Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein, I recall them saying that the future in the U.S. might see a contest between a “social justice” party and its opposition. They mock the opposition (“who could be against social justice?”). But that is exactly the problem. When one side believes that it has complete moral superiority, then this deprives the other side of dignity. Win or lose, moral arrogance is a very divisive political force.

I have not decided whether to read Fukuyama’s book. Based on what I have seen so far, I do not see any new insights.

Kai-fu Lee talks his book

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In an essay in the WSJ adapted from a book due out today, Lee writes,

While a human mortgage officer will look at only a few relatively crude measures when deciding whether to grant you a loan (your credit score, income and age), an AI algorithm will learn from thousands of lesser variables (what web browser you use, how often you buy groceries, etc.). Taken alone, the predictive power of each of these is minuscule, but added together, they yield a far more accurate prediction than the most discerning people are capable of.

I am willing to bet against that.

1. A credit score already makes use of a lot of information that human underwriters did not use to look at. Credit scoring was “big data” before that term existed.

2. To use those “lesser variables” in the United States, you have to prove that they don’t harm access to credit of minorities.

3. The marginal value of additional information about the borrower is not very high. In a home price boom, “bad” borrowers will repay their loans; in a bust, some “good” borrowers will default.

I am starting to believe that artificial intelligence, when it consists of making predictions using “big data,” is overrated by many pundits. As with Lee’s mortgage underwriting example, it does not help if AI solves the wrong problem. To take another example, figuring out which ads to serve on content sites that shouldn’t be ad-supported in the first place is solving the wrong problem.

My Kavanaugh take

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Eliot Cohen writes,

Of the many forms of cruelty, that directed against those who are weak or powerless is one of the worst. Of itself, it undermines whatever legitimacy a person can claim by virtue of intellectual or professional distinction. Societies and governments will have elites—that is simply inescapable, except perhaps in an ancient city state, and probably not even then. But in a free society, for those elites to exercise their power—their very real power, as those subject to it well know—they have to do so with restraint and good judgment.

He is referring in part to Ed Whelan, who made an accusation, which he later retracted, against what he called a “Kavanaugh look-alike.”

1. I really strongly endorse the first sentence of the quoted paragraph. My philosophy is “punch up, not down.” There is a columnist who writes often for Medium. Every column boils down to “America is bad. Capitalism is bad. American capitalism is bad.” If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. The Medium editors plug him relentlessly. Probably 8 out of 10 emails I get from Medium highlight one of his columns, and that annoys me.. But I let it go. I would much prefer to go after two Nobel Prize winners.

2. I have another strongly-held view, which is that I should avoid commenting on whatever news story is most prominent at the moment. There are many reasons for that: don’t feed the trolls; write for the long term, not the short term; write where you can add value; etc.

3. But I admit that the Kavanaugh story grabs me somehow. So here goes.

[paragraphs deleted]

On second thought, no. Everybody’s nerves are too raw. I am back to my principle of letting the hot news story of the day pass.