Handle vs. Mason

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Handle writes,

I think it’s more likely that tribal emotions, behaviors, and tactics may be a consequence of perceptions regarding how high the stakes are in a political contest and anxieties regarding trends in relative power and status. That is to say, not something that can be defused by normative recommitments, but only by lowering what’s at stake, which could only be accomplished by some reliable guarantee of security for the status quo and giving up on one’s agenda for political reform in exchange for comity and peace.

He wrote that before I posted on Lilliana Mason’s book. I see her as arguing that political feelings are heated because of group-psychology factors. She cites a number of empirical studies to show that differences in policy issues do not loom so large in accounting for increased polarization. I see Handle as taking the opposite point of view. He thinks that the policy differences loom large, so that appealing to social psychology is a cop-out.

Conservatives in name only

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According to a study by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, which I have not read, many Americans who identify as conservative actually hold liberal policy positions. From the book’s Amazon page:

Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans’ attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.

Pointer from Lillian Mason’s book, Uncivil Agreement, that I recently raved about.

One can interpret this sort of study in either a liberal-favoring way or a conservative-favoring way. The liberal-favoring way would be to say that conservatism is a form of “false consciousness.” People have been manipulated into identifying as conservatives, even though what they really want are liberal policies.

The other interpretation is that, as someone (help me out, I am forgetting who) once said, people are conservative about what they know best. They want government to get involved in issues that they know least about.

Anarchocapitalism would break down

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A commenter writes,

Law enforcement, like soldiering, doesn’t work well on a contract basis because it relies on a fundamentally different approach to morality than capitalism does. Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival is worth reading on this point, but the basic idea is that a guardian who can be bribed is no guardian at all. Guardian morality rigorously and ostentatiously spurns trading because it is necessary to signal to one’s allies that you will be dependable even in the face of severe temptation (which combat is full of).

I take this as saying that police, security guards, and soldiers need a binding force that replaces or supplements monetary incentives. Otherwise, there is a risk that the guard will change sides in the middle of a conflict, going over to the highest bidder.

Truly experimental firms

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by John List, on corporate social responsibility.

My initial inclination is: firm does a good thing; worker reciprocates to firm by working harder; and the world is a better place. Everyone’s better off. But what this suggests is that there’s something deeper on the psychological side, that it’s not just triggering this reciprocity from workers. C.S.R. is also triggering something deeper, which the researchers in this area call moral licensing.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read the whole transcript, to see the research method. He actually starts firms and hires workers in order to do controlled experiments.

Scott Alexander on the IDW

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He writes,

Silencing is when even though a movement has lots of supporters, none of them will admit to it publicly under their real name. Even though a movement is widely discussed, its ideas never penetrate to anywhere they might actually have power. Even though it has charismatic leaders, they have to resort to low-prestige decentralized people-power to get their message across, while their opponents preach against them from the airwaves and pulpits and universities.

As usual with his posts, I recommend reading the whole long thing. My thoughts:

1. Commenters on this blog and elsewhere have said that Scott Alexander should be counted as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

2. “Scott Alexander” is not his real name, which suggests that the issue of what one would “publicly admit under their real name” is salient to him.

I would recommend trying to move away from “silenced” as a binary concept. The word itself invites a binary connotation–you are either silenced or you or not. But it may help instead to think of a continuum.

Instead, I would talk about something more like a filter ratio. For any given proposition, what percentage of time is it filtered out because of social pressure?

To take an actual example, consier the proposition that the variance of genetic mathematical ability is higher in males than females. I believe that proposition. But it seems that Larry Summers lost his job as President of Harvard because he affirmed that proposition. Since many people are aware of that story, I can imagine that not everyone would be willing to affirm this proposition publicly.

For any proposition, let the numerator be the total number of times a proposition that is relevant to a discussion is NOT affirmed by someone who believes it. Let the denominator be the total number of times that the proposition would have been affirmed in the absence of social pressure. The ratio of the numerator to denominator is the filter ratio.

When the filter ratio is zero, there is no silencing going on. When the ratio is 1, there is total suppression. “Silencing” is somewhere in between. If you want to stick to a binary view of the world, then you can say that any time the ratio is greater than 0, there is silencing. But I think a world of absolutely no filters is unrealistic. What we can reasonably argue about is how strong the filters should be for various propositions.

For example, back in the 1960s, if you had asked me, I would have been on the side of those trying to get rid of the filter that suppressed people’s use of four-letter words. But I have since come around to the view that suppressing cursing was a good thing, and getting rid of the filter was a mistake. People gave each other more respect when they acknowledged speech boundaries with one another.

In general, I see the IDW as battling the left over the issue of filters on topics related to race and gender. The left wants to implement certain filters, and the IDW sees these filters causing problems. In theory, we could get beyond name-calling and argue about what makes the filters good and what makes them bad. But the discussion rarely takes place at that level. Instead, it tends to become personal.

Interesting take on wealth distribution

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From Matthew Stewart.

Let’s suppose that you start off right in the middle of the American wealth distribution. How high would you have to jump to make it into the 9.9 percent? In financial terms, the measurement is easy and the trend is unmistakable. In 1963, you would have needed to multiply your wealth six times. By 2016, you would have needed to leap twice as high—increasing your wealth 12-fold—to scrape into our group. If you boldly aspired to reach the middle of our group rather than its lower edge, you’d have needed to multiply your wealth by a factor of 25. On this measure, the 2010s look much like the 1920s.

He arrives at the “9.9 percent” by taking the top 10 percent and lopping off the top 0.1 percent. I think most economists would like to see an age breakdown. That is, take the 9.9 percent from among, say those aged 45-55.

Stewart talks about heritable wealth, and he rightly looks at elite colleges and universities as part of the process. Journalists who write about inequality generally do a lousy job, but I think this piece actually gets things more right than wrong.

What I’m Reading

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Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. It will certainly make my list of best books for 2018. My review on Amazon says,

Uncivil Agreement addresses the topic of polarization from the perspective of political psychology. The author advances the view that social identity is more important than opinions on issues as a driver of political behavior in general and polarization in particular.

The book is timely because it can help to explain the high levels of political anger that we see around us. The book is convincing in part because it makes intuitive sense (at least to me) but mostly because of the author’s clever and careful empirical research. Even a skeptic should find her studies persuasive.

We might naturally assume that our political selves are shaped by our interests and our views of policy. The alternative that Mason proposes is that our political selves are shaped by our sense of where we fit in socially.

From this alternative perspective, the increase in polarization arises from the fact that people are becoming more certain of where they belong in the social sphere. Our social class structure has become more segregated. Fewer people cross the bridges between status groups defined by location, education level, wealth, race, religiosity, etc.

As the social structure solidifies, political antagonism increases. People who are locked into their identity as Democrats only care about seeing Democrats win and Republicans lose. Republicans, too, have come to care more about winning than about issues. I would note that Democrats loved Barack Obama’s victories, even though at the state level the party hollowed out while he was President. By the same token, Republicans love Donald Trump’s victory, even though it seems to be devastating the party’s future.

Another trend is an increase in what Mason calls “blind” activism. That is, political activism driven by anger and enthusiasm, rather than by reason and practical considerations.

I think that the publisher is wrong to position this as a purely academic book or textbook. It should be of value to the many people who have a general interest in the nature of political behavior. I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found that I had to squint to read the graphs. But it was still very much worth it.

Finally, I cannot resist saying that if you like this book, you may also like my own more amateurish effort, The Three Languages of Politics. Although my book is very different in style from Uncivil Agreement, I think that the two books share some of the same underlying psychological outlook.

I think that there are libertarian implications that the author does not mention. If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.

Note: Handle has a comment on an earlier post that goes against Mason in some important respects. I will discuss this next week.

More IDW commentary

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1. Matt Continetti writes,

Reading Bari Weiss’s recent article on the “intellectual dark web,” one cannot help being struck by the diversity of opinion and partisan allegiance among the renegade thinkers challenging political correctness and its stigmatization of arguments that violate its axioms of group identity, racial strife, and transgenderism. A stultifying intellectual atmosphere, in which the subjective emotional responses of designated victim groups take precedent over style, argument, and empirical evidence, makes for unexpected alliances. Who would have thought that Kanye West would become, in the space of a few Tweets, the most famous and recognized champion of individual free thought in the world today? Who could have anticipated that New Atheist Sam Harris would find himself in a united front with Jordan Peterson, who instructs his millions of acolytes in the continued relevance of biblical story?

He compares the IDW to the Coalition for Cultural Freedom, a mid-20th-century reaction against the rigidity of Communist ideology and the threat of Nazism. Read the whole essay.

2. Andrew Sullivan sees the IDW coming up against the trend toward tribalism.

Instead of a willingness to disagree and tolerate, there is an impulse to loathe and expel. And this is especially true with people we associate with our own side. Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious. And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake.

Again, read the whole thing. I was tempted to excerpt a lot of it.

3. David Fuller writes,

As Eric Weinstein, Bret’s brother, and another member of the unofficial ‘intellectual dark web’ said — “bad faith changes everything”. It’s possible to have any kind of discussion with people you disagree with so long as they are approaching it in good faith — as soon as they are not, they’re just looking to boost their position, look good in front of others or advance their career within their tribe — as Peterson alleged Cathy Newman was — then true exchange of ideas is impossible.

Fuller argues that an NYT piece on Jordan Peterson exemplifies bad faith. Unfortunately, I think that is a good way to describe the NYT and the Washington Post these days. It goes beyond mere journalistic bias. They are not even making a good-faith effort to be honest.

Another example of bad faith would be Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan. Perhaps what makes the IDW important is the way that bad faith has crept into key institutions and seemingly taken over.

Reading Jonathan Rauch

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The book is called The Happiness Curve. It fits Tyler Cowen’s old definition of self-recommending, in that it is an interesting topic (the influence of stage of life on happiness) by an interesting author (Rauch). Note that Tyler himself recommends the book.

Rauch looks at the paradox that in your forties you may doing well objectively but feel unhappy. And after age 50 you tend to feel happier, even if you are not doing so well. My hypothesis is that one’s comparative references change. At age 40, it is easy to look at people of a similar age or younger who seem to be achieving more than you are. As you get older, you start to notice people your age who are physically deteriorating or whose lives are troubled in some way, and so it is easier to feel good about what you have. Rauch does not suggest a single cause, but this change in comparative references does seem to play a role.

As long-time readers know, I think that one should take a very skeptical view of happiness research. I think that some subjective measures are necessary, but I prefer measures that are more specific: how is your health? your job? etc. I think that happiness surveys are much harder to do well and can easily produce deceptive results.

I would rather read a book like this from someone who is as skeptical as I am. For example, Rauch looks at studies that instead of showing a sharp mid-life crisis show a gradual decline in life satisfaction followed by a gradual rise. But I found myself thinking: Suppose that everyone had a sharp mid-life crisis that took place at somewhat different ages, with the average age of crisis at, say, 45. If you looked at aggregate data, the crises would be smoothed away, and you would see a curve.

My personal perspective is that stage of life may have affected me a bit in the way Rauch describes. I remember in my mid-forties putting a list on the wall of my office of things I thought I should have been happy about. I called it my “serenity list.” In hindsight, had I been really serene, I would not have needed such a list. I have no need for one now. The Happiness Curve would have predicted this.

But overall, I believe that my outlook tends to fluctuate at higher frequencies. I think of myself as having a personal Minsky cycle. In the “hedge” phase, my energy level is low. I don’t have much emotion, and what little I have I distrust. I waste a lot of time. I don’t start any risky projects or come up with creative ideas. In the “speculative” phase, my energy level is high. I romanticize the world, and I listen to my emotions. I use my time fully, I am creative, and I am willing to take risks. In the “Ponzi” phase, my creativity takes a more dangerous turn. My connection to reality weakens, and some of my thoughts become very dark. On a couple of occasions I had difficulty recognizing and pulling out of this phase, and some bad experiences resulted.

It is plausible that I am bipolar, but even if that were the case I do not seek treatment. Sort of like people who don’t want to move to San Diego because they would miss the seasons.

Friends have told me that it was hard for them to know the difference between my “speculative” phase and my “Ponzi” phase. In fact, hardly anybody knows which of the three phases I am in at any one time. If you guess, you are likely to be wrong.

Patrick Collison on corporate culture

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Asked about what sorts of feedback mechanisms he tries to put in place, He says,

I really think it’s too early to answer that, in the sense that I can tell you what I think today and the changes we’ve made over the last year and things like that. Stripe has been a thousand-person organization … or has been a more-than-500-person organization for just over a year. We’re beginners at this! Three years ago, Stripe was under 100 people

Again, pointer from Tyler Cowen.

It sounds as though Stripe has only recently gone from being sub-Dunbar (fewer than 150 people) to super-Dunbar (more than 150). That is a really challenging transition. In a sub-Dunbar organization, informal communication channels work best. In a super-Dunbar organization, much more structure is required. As a result, it feels as though the organization is becoming stale and bureaucratic.

I joined Freddie Mac late in 1986, not long after the company moved definitively into the super-Dunbar range. Some people who operated effectively in the sub-Dunbar phase became dysfunctional in the super-Dunbar phase, and even those who were still effective often were less happy. I think even the CEO felt less comfortable with the larger organization.