My review of Patrick Deneen

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The book is Why Liberalism Failed. I wrote this:

This being 2018, Deneen also points to the electoral successes of Donald Trump and the Brexit plebiscite as signs that the liberal order has lost its appeal with the general public. But these less-than-overwhelming victories did not clearly rest on the above failures of liberalism that are Deneen’s concerns. The featured cause in the Trump and Brexit campaigns was control over immigration. The issues of government agency over-reach, economic inequality, liberal arts education, and climate change played little or no role in either.

Although the book makes many good points, overall I didn’t think that the dots were well connected.

Two views of California

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Peter Leyden wrote,

So how has California’s big, bold progressive political approach worked for the state? It turns out — awesome. The California economy is booming, doing better than the rest of the United States by many standard economic measures. Since Brown started leading as governor, California has added 2.3 million jobs, which leads the nation (from 2012 to 2016, California accounted for 17 percent of job growth in the United States, and a quarter of the growth in GDP.) From 2011 to 2014 coming off the Great Recession, California’s economic growth rate was 4.1 percent. In 2016, California’s rate was still 2.9 percent compared to rival Texas’s paltry growth rate of 0.4.

Michael Shellenberger writes (pointer from Tyler Cowen),

Where 56 percent of Californians could afford a middle-class home in 2012, in the third quarter of 2017, just 28 percent could.

…Progressive leaders who daily denounce Republicans as racist have blithely presided over a significant decline in the academic performance of black and Latino eighth graders relative to their counterparts in other states. Today, less than 40 percent of non-white and non-Asian students meet state educational standards.

There is more at both links. Did you two visit the same state?

Student debt and inequality

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From a reader:

Is the massive student debt impairing US social mobility? If someone takes out large student debt to get a sociology or history degree and then gets a job that makes it difficult to pay off the debt, doesn’t this make it hard to climb the social ladder? On the other hand if your parents fund your schooling, you’re more able stay in the upper middle class or climb higher.

You can inherit from your parents: genes; social norms (coming from them and also from the peers with which they surround you); wealth. School funding is a fairly significant component of inherited wealth nowadays, but it is not all of it. Moreover, I suspect that the other two types of inheritance matter more.

But suppose you do not have wealthy parents. Is going to college your ticket to upward mobility? My guess is that for some it is, but for many it is not. And for those who take on a lot of student debt, the net effect may be adverse.

For several years, I have believed that the higher education system impairs economic mobility. It certainly serves to segregate affluent young adults from non-affluent young adults.

A paragraph to ponder

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from Tage Rai:

Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

He is a colleague of Alan Fiske, a very interesting anthropologist.

David Brooks sours on Bobos

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he writes,

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

These days, I find myself thinking more and more about issues of morality and character. In particular, I think that trying to emphasize social opinions rather than personal character does not work well.

A book recommendation

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John Carreyrou’s book on Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes. The title is Bad Blood. Recommended by Patrick Collision.

These days, I find myself pondering issues of morality and ethics a lot. We are all flawed. How do some of us manage to avoid going downhill and becoming really bad?

This book raises many questions. How could so many people have been fooled? It seems like a lot of the people she fooled were male. We’re they vulnerable because she was a woman?

Thoughts on Jordan Peterson to ponder

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from Bernard Schiff

What was off-putting was his tendency to be categorical about his positions, reminiscent of his lectures where he presented personal theories as absolute truths. I rarely challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that were hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful than I, and had a much quicker mind. Also, again evocative of what I saw in the classroom, he sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas and would not, or could not, constrain himself and self-monitor what he was saying.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I should note that my wife has a strong, automatic distrust of any charismatic person. She senses danger in that.

But otherwise the piece does not deliver such a heavy blow to Peterson, at least as I read it.

Thoughts on a wage subsidy

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Scott Sumner writes,

let’s suppose that in my town, eliminating the minimum wage laws would cause the equilibrium wage for entry level jobs to fall to $9/hour. (I think it would he higher, but I’ll use this example.) The government could then chip in enough wage subsidy to boost the equilibrium wage to say $14/hour, which is about $28,000/year for a full time worker.

1. Note that the wage subsidy has to go to more than just minimum-wage workers. Otherwise, the marginal tax rate on workers earning just above the minimum is too high. You can only phase out the subsidy slowly, or not at all. I am sure Scott was thinking that, but he didn’t say it.

2. But why go to the trouble of implementing a wage subsidy? We already have a wage penalty, namely the payroll tax. Just cut the darn thing. You only need to implement a subsidy if cutting the payroll tax to zero still doesn’t get the equilibrium wage up to your desired minimum.

Pagedale in the news

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Reason‘s Scott Shackford reports,

A small St. Louis suburb has agreed to stop trying bankroll its government with a vicious regime of petty fines so excessive that the town has cited more than a third of its population.

The town is Pagedale. When I look at it on the map, I see it is where I lived from about age 3 to about age 10. I had remembered my home town as Olivette, but now I see that Olivette is a nearby community, sort of in between Pagedale and Clayton. A few random memories:

1. St. Louis County has many tiny jurisdictions, and they have always had to rely on fines for revenue. My first and only speeding ticket came from one of those places, where the speed trap was the main money-maker.

2. When I lived there, Pagedale was not racially integrated. But its social class range was wide, mostly lower middle class but including some professionals and even a few wealthy businessmen. One of the businessmen owned a small electronics factory where I worked a couple of summers in college. Another owned a drive-in movie theater that showed porn, which got him arrested more than once. He and his wife also had a vacation home and a boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, and I got to go water skiing with them once. I guarantee you that today no one living in Pagedale has a vacation home and boat. A couple of years ago I saw house advertised for well under $50K. It was on the same street where the theater owners used to live, and it was the same type of house as theirs.

3. When the Fair Housing Law was passed, real estate agents told residents to sell ASAP, before the Negroes (the 1960s term) started to move in and property values went down. This prophecy (aka “blockbusting”) became self-fulfilling. Probably at least 80 percent of homeowners did sell, and Pagedale quickly became a black neighborhood. We had been renters, not homeowners, and we happened to be away on my father’s sabbatical while the blockbusting took place. When we returned, my mom’s best friend insisted that we move to the jurisdiction with the best reputation for schools, which was the suburb of Clayton. So Pagedale faded out of my life, although I still go back there every time I visit St. Louis.

The problem of self-knowledge

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Steven Ayan writes,

Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, who specializes in human self-perception and decision making, calls the mistaken belief in privileged access the “introspection illusion.” The way we view ourselves is distorted, but we do not realize it. As a result, our self-image has surprisingly little to do with our actions.

Read the whole article. It sounds like something out of Simler and Hanson.