Monthly Archives: July 2018

Christian exceptionalism

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Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich write,

the institutions built around kinship and marriage vary greatly across societies (21–23) and that much of this variation developed as societies scaled up in size and complexity, especially after the origins of food production 12,000 years ago (22, 24–29). In forging the tightly-knit communities needed to defend agricultural fields and pastures, cultural evolution gradually wove together social norms governing marriage, post-marital residence and ingroup identity (descent), leading to a diversity of kin-based institutions, including the organizational forms known as clans, lineages and kindreds (21, 27, 30). The second insight, based on work in psychology, is that people’s motivations, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles and other aspects of cognition are heavily influenced by the social norms, social networks, technologies and linguistic worlds they encounter while growing up (31–38). In particular, with intensive kin-based institutions, people’s psychological processes adapt to the collectivistic demands and the dense social networks that they interweave (39–43). Intensive kinship norms reward greater conformity, obedience, holistic/relational awareness and in-group loyalty but discourage individualism, independence and analytical thinking (41, 44). Since the sociality of intensive kinship is based on people’s interpersonal embeddedness, adapting to these institutions tends to reduce people’s inclinations towards impartiality, universal (non-relational) moral principles and impersonal trust, fairness and cooperation. Finally, based on historical evidence, the third insight suggests that the branch of Western Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, ‘the Western Church’ or simply ‘the Church’—systematically undermined the intensive kin-based institutions of Europe during the Middle Ages (45–52). The Church’s marriage policies and prohibitions, which we will call the Marriage and Family Program (MFP), meant that by 1500 CE, and likely centuries earlier in some regions, Europe lacked strong kin-based institutions, and was instead dominated by relatively weak, independent and isolated nuclear or stem families (49–51, 53–56). This made people exposed to Western Christendom rather unlike nearly all other populations.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who tells us how politically incorrect the paper is by saying that he expected (but did not find) a Steve Sailer citation. This paper should be catnip for the IDW.

Possibly related, but not as controversial: I did a podcast with Russ Roberts recently (it may or not already be up) on the theme that human beings are social. I argue for the importance of culture, based in part on my reading of Henrich. Compared with animals, for humans the ratio of culturally learned behavior to innate behavior is extremely high. This is important, in my view.

Almost certainly related: The Origins of English Individualism, by Alan MacFarlane.

Variation in occupational satisfaction

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Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl write in an abstract,

The physical toll of work is smaller now than in 1950, with workers shifting away from occupations in which people report experiencing tiredness and pain. The emotional consequences of the changing occupation distribution vary substantially across demographic groups. Work has become happier and more meaningful for women, but more stressful and less meaningful for men. These changes appear to be concentrated at lower education levels.

I have said that this is worth studying.

A question about monetary systems

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From a reader:

When in real-world, human-designed systems, is fiat money an example of theoretically easy to fix and cryptocurrencies an example of theoretically hard to break?

The reader is referring to my notion of “easy to fix” vs. “hard to break” as a way to think about financial regulation. Permitting, and even encouraging, concentration of financial markets and then regulating the resulting giant firms as carefully as possible is an attempt to make the key firms hard to break. But when one of those firms does fail, the results are catastrophic. Instead, encouraging a wide variety of financial firms, with no single firm vitally important to the system, is an attempt to allow the failure of a single firm to be easy to fix, as other firms take over the failed firm’s functions. Another way to make the system easy to fix is to encourage a low ratio of debt to equity, since equity degrades smoothly while debt default is more of a shock.

In the case of money, I would think that the “easy to fix” approach would be to allow for competing currencies. If one currency gets corrupted, then people can switch to using another one. Having a single government currency is the hard-to-break approach, since the government can insist that its currency is legal tender, using it to pay for goods and services and accepting it as payment of taxes. Of course, when a government currency “breaks” due to hyperinflation, it breaks catastrophically.

I am still a skeptic about crypto-currencies, for the following reasons.

1. They seem to operate like chain letters, as I have written.

2. The most important “use case” for crypto-currencies appears to be for illegal transactions. This means that many of the people who employ crypto-currencies do not feel bound by mainstream social norms. That is not a good crowd to run with.

Can the academy be saved? part 2

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Tyler Cowen thinks that at least part of higher education should be redesigned from scratch.

especially those tiers below the top elite universities. Completion rates are astonishingly low, and also not very transparent (maybe about 40 percent?). I would ensure that every single student receives a reasonable amount of one-on-one tutoring and/or mentoring in his or her first two years. In return, along budgetary lines, I would sacrifice whatever else needs to go, in order to assure that end.

I am not sure I would exempt the elite schools. Just because they have better graduation rates does not mean that the benefits exceed the costs. Depends on how you measure, especially “compared to what.” You can’t just take two people and say this one went to Harvard and that one didn’t and compare their earnings. You have to figure out what would have happened had both taken the same educational path. My reading of the relevant literature is that it supports the Null Hypothesis.

I think that the idea of close personal mentoring is the model that existed hundreds of years ago. It might still be the best model.

Can the academy be saved? part one

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Can it be restored as a home of free speech and free inquiry? The Open Mind conference, put on by Heterodox Academy, says yes. At the very least, I would recommend watching the video of the wrap-up session with Jonathan Haidt and Deb Mashek.

I think that the very name “heterodox” is a give-away that their prospects or success may be slim.

I have liked Wendy Kaminer for many years, ever since I read I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. She recently had an op-ed on the ideological turn of the ACLU. In her panel remarks at the conference, she indicates that she is worried that she is part of a generation of liberals who is aging out of the system, to be replaced by a generation that has grown up to expect and embrace speech codes. I fear that on campus, demographics is destiny. The diversity uber alles crowd is going to drive out the truth-seeking uber alles crowd. The HxA’ers may not realize it, but they could just turn out to be a tenured version of the IDW.

Null hypothesis watch

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Several readers spotted a story on the results of a Bill Gates initiative to improve teaching. The null hypothesis won.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/29/bill-gates-spent-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-to-improve-teaching-new-report-says-it-was-a-bust/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e24c304f9896

Thoughts on tribalism

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from Jonah Goldberg.

one reason I think a global sense of ethical or tribal solidarity is very difficult to achieve is that one of the key ingredients of tribal solidarity is opposition to an “other.” Global religions still define themselves — in practical terms — as opposed to some other religious view or group. Johnson’s point about cosmopolitanism is a good one, but it overlooks the fact that many of the cosmopolitans, or “globalists,” very much act like a tribe pitted against what they consider to be the populist rubes beneath them. As Ross Douthat notes, the cosmopolitans are a tribe, too.

He is not the first person to make these points. Nor will he be the last. The essay and the several of the links are worth your time.

Further (final?) thoughts on Pollan

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Concerning his recent book, How to Change Your Mind, which touts the value and potential of psychedelics.

As I wrote earlier, I am not convinced that taking a trip inside your head is a useful way to expand your mind. Think of our culture as something like a vast archaeological mound. When they are excavating a site where humans have lived for thousands of years, you know how at the top layer they find the artifacts of the most recent inhabitants, and below that are those of inhabitants from a couple hundred years before, and so on, all the way down?

Well, all of humanity has this enormous mound. It’s unfathomably big, and getting bigger all the time (think of all the YouTube videos that are being posted while you’re reading this.)

There are so many ways to explore the mound. You could be like Tyler, and travel the world, reading books, walking through various cities and villages, sampling the street food. Or you could develop deep knowledge about a sport or a craft.

With all those ways to delve into the mound and explore it, I can’t get excited about using a drug that takes some of your sensory experiences and memories and plays them back to you in “shuffle” mode.

As for searching for meaning, I have a joke. There are people who struggle with the existential problems of finding purpose and meaning in their lives. We can label them “seekers.” There are other people for whom such problems are not salient. We can label them “grandparents.”

The grandparents that I know seem to have found peace of mind. There is something very calming about having descendants that you can look forward to watching and maybe guiding a bit as they find their way in the world.

There seems to be a trend toward greater social anxiety and more people expressing political hostility. There could be many reasons for this, but I wonder if part of it is a decline in the proportion of people who are counting on grandchildren.