The Winner of the Charles Murray Thread

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Is it Andrew Sullivan?.

And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual — a secular exorcism, if you will — that reaches a frenzied, disturbing catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone engaged. Then they recite a common liturgy in unison from sheets of paper. Here’s how they begin: “This is not respectful discourse, or a debate about free speech. These are not ideas that can be fairly debated, it is not ‘representative’ of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas.” They never specify which of Murray’s ideas they are referring to. Nor do they explain why a lecture on a recent book about social inequality cannot be a “respectful discourse.” The speaker is open to questions and there is a faculty member onstage to engage him afterward. She came prepared with tough questions forwarded from specialists in the field. And yet: “We … cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech.” They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.

Or is Sullivan’s apocalyptic rhetoric just another example of the sort of outrage politics that is dominating the media these days?

The State of State Schooling

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Andy Smarick writes,

Today, almost 60 state-level government programs enable students to attend private schools, and approximately three million students enroll in about 7,000 charter schools in more than 40 states.16 In 17 cities, at least 30 percent of public school students are now enrolled in charters. The continuous growth of these programs and participating students shows no signs of abating; for instance, national enrollment in charter schools has grown by about 10 percent annually for the past decade, and student participation in private school choice programs doubled between 2011 and 2016.

As a historical matter, in the existing paradigm’s early days, especially in rural areas, some districts had only one school. So initially the district-based approach was not especially associated with technocratic thinking, a powerful central office, residence-based student assignment, and so on. But over the course of the 20th century, as America’s student population expanded and migrated and as the benefits of economies of scale became attractive, districts grew in size. Today, the average district has seven schools, but even that masks the hundreds of districts (including county-based districts in the South and urban districts nationwide) that have grown gargantuan—some with hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students.

This is an interesting point. I think that a big weakness of the modern version of state-run schools is its centralization and bureaucracy. The Department of Education, especially under Democrats, reinforces the way in which power is taken away from parents, classroom teachers, and school principals.

In many private industries, firms have discovered that they cannot dictate to consumers. They have to empower employees to serve consumers. Back when school districts were small, they had to operate that way. Now they do not, and Smarick sees the trend toward choice expanding as a result.

Martin Gurri on President Trump and His Opponents

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He writes,

The fact that established institutions have felt compelled to berate a newly-elected president, and benefited materially from it, shows how deeply the way of the web has penetrated the real world. Aggression garners online attention. Persistent and outrageous aggression will build a following. Every incentive pulls you toward the promotion of outrageous antagonists as worthy objects of aggression. The ideal is perpetual combat with the most extreme opponents, aggression on aggression, outrage against outrage. To a casual glance, this will resemble the behavior of two scorpions in a bottle. A closer look will reveal a finely-tuned symbiotic relationship, in which both players benefit so long as they continue to move ever farther out, to opposite extremes.

When cultivating outrage becomes the dominate strategy, expect to encounter the outrageous.

Charles Murray at Middlebury

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The coverage in the Washington Post and in the New York Times was meager, with no follow-up op-eds.

The Times story, to its credit, says in the lead paragraph that it was “an encounter that turned violent and left one faculty member injured.” The Post story, which was buried deep in the paper (or maybe only appeared on line?) waits until the 6th paragraph to say that it “felt like it was edging frighteningly close to violence.”

On the other hand, the Times very early in the story quotes the Southern Poverty Law Center accusing the Murray of being a “white nationalist.” That is an irresponsible allegation coming from an unreliable source.

My thoughts:

1. In the view of conservatives, this is a very important story. I am pretty sure that a staff of reporters and editors that was more ideologically balanced would have given the story more prominence.

2. In terms of the three-axes model, this story feeds the worst fears of conservatives, which is that in the struggle between civilization and barbarism, progressives are on the wrong side.

3. Megan McArdle writes,

when it comes to physical violence, however noble the cause, that’s assault, not speech, and the perpetrators should be arrested.

The problem is that college administrators do not think in those terms. If you think that a college is capable of punishing violent demonstrators, you will be disappointed. For the most part, college administrators believe in hand-wringing and therapy, as opposed to punishment.

If I were in charge at a college, I would have real police at the event, and I would announce that protestors would be given five minutes to peacefully yell whatever they want. Following that, disturbing the peace will be dealt with by the authorities.

But that approach is about as alien to today’s college administrator as a visitor from Mars.

4. This incident will greatly reduce the likelihood of conservative speakers being invited to college campuses. Administrations do now want to risk being embarrassed by radical protests, and the best way to avoid that risk is to avoid having prominent conservative speakers. I may not be quite so prominent, and I only get one or two invitations a year, but my guess is that I have received my last invitation.

5. College politics can provide a prelude to national politics. Gender identity was a big issue on campus before it flared up on the national scene. The anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party today looks a lot like the anti-Israel movement that emerged on college campuses several years ago. If conservatives are treated as unacceptable and violence against them becomes the norm on colleges, then there is a risk that this will spread well beyond the campus.

6. Late in 2015, I started to write a novel in which a left-wing movement became increasingly violent. I shelved it, because I did not have experience writing fiction (not even short stories), and I was making things too complex for a rookie writer. Also, only one person to whom I showed a draft gave me any encouragement. Still, many of the sorts of left-fascist rationalizations and behaviors that I was going to speculate on in the novel have become more manifest in the past year.

7. All that said, there is a non-zero chance that the Murray incident was isolated, and that it has no larger significance. I hope it turns out that way.

Yuval Levin on Paulos and Cowen

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He writes,

Stagnation moved by insecurity seems a little more like the predicament we are in than stagnation moved by complacency (which Cowen defines as “a growing sense of satisfaction with the status quo”). The former, more negative, kind of stagnation is what both books are really about, it seems to me. Poulos focuses on the underlying sense of insecurity, which runs much deeper than our economistic ways of thinking about politics usually suggest. Cowen focuses on the resulting paralysis, which is a huge problem for a society that is barely capable of understanding itself in any terms other than the terms of change. And both argue that the way forward is to recognize that insecurity is our natural condition and that this is by no means all bad. In this sense, the two books help to clarify each other.

I will look into the Poulos book, but I do not assign a high probability to my finishing it.

John Cochrane on Economic Methods

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Commenting on Russ’ essay, he writes,

Economics and economic history also teach us humility: No economist in 1900 could have figured out what farmers, horse-shoers, ice deliverers, street-sweepers, and so forth would do when those jobs disappeared. The people involved did. Knowledge of our own ignorance is useful. Contemplating the railroad in 1830, no economist could have anticipated the whole new industries and patterns of economic activity that it would bring — that cows would be shipped from Kansas to Chicago, and give rise to its fabled meat-packing industry. So, in a dynamic economy, all the horse-drivers, stagecoach manufacturers, canal boat drivers, canal diggers, and so forth put out of work by the railroad, and their children, were not, in the end, immiserized.

Russ Roberts on Economic Methods

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He writes,

fundamentals like income or even changes in income over time are somewhat measurable with some precision, [but] we are notoriously unreliable at the things the world really cares about and asks of our profession: why did income for this or that group go up by this or that amount? What will happen if this or that policy changes? Should the subsidy to college education be increased or decreased and if so, by how much? These much-demanded answers for precision and an understanding of the complex forces that shape the world around us are precisely the questions we are not very good at answering.

It is a long essay, difficult to excerpt. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I am writing an even longer essay along similar lines. Currently, the hope is to have it come out this summer.

In physics, you have what is known as “effective theory.” That is, you have a theory, like Newton’s laws, which works very well for certain problems. Moreover, physicists can tell you where it works and where it does not work.

The problem in economics is that we have speculative interpretations which we try to pretend are effective theories. For reasons that Russ Roberts goes into, we cannot get rid of conflicting speculative interpretations.

Dan Sperber on Culture

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He says,

The classical view of what culture is, very simply, that which is transmitted in a population by non-genetic means: by communication, imitation, and all forms of interaction. In the human case, imitation is an important factor which has been overplayed. Humans imitate better than any other animal, (except maybe parrots, but parrots have a narrow range of things that they imitate).

Later,

to explain the success of bits of culture, of practices, of rituals, of techniques, of ideologies, and so on, the question was not how do they benefit the population in which they evolve; the question was how do they benefit their own propagation? Dawkins was saying that much better than I could have done at the time.

He argues against the System 1, System 2 framework of Kahneman.

[Humans] exploit reasons in our cognitive work. This is not a second system; it’s just an ordinary cognitive capacity among others, which has important implications for interaction because that’s what drove its very evolution. It’s an ability to understand others, to justify ourselves in the eyes of others, to convince them of our ideas, to accept and to evaluate the justifications and arguments that others give and be convinced by them or not.

…the basic functions of reason are social. They have to do with the fact that we interact with each other’s bodies and with each other’s minds. And to interact with other’s minds is to be able to represent a representation that others have, and to have them represent our representations, and also to act on the representation of others and, in some cases, to let others act on our own representations.

How to Think About Obamacare and its Replacement

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Think of it as robbing Peter to pay Paul. Paul gets a subsidy for health insurance. Peter pays by being charged higher premiums for his own insurance and by funding Medicaid with taxes or by lending to the government.

According to the Democrats and their friends in the media, if you stop paying Paul, then you are “taking away his health care,” and that is unacceptable. If the Republicans concede that, as they appear to be doing, then they are left with tinkering around the edges by shifting around the Peter burdens (probably by using more borrowing) and by cutting the subsidies for future Pauls.

The thing about health care is that it is so expensive nowadays that robbing Peter to pay Paul involves really big bucks. So if Obamacare has moved the Overton Window to the point where robbing Peter to pay Paul is entrenched policy, then the government now owns a much bigger chunk of the economy.