Category Archives: Blog and Comment policy and philosophy

Move completely to Substack?

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I’m considering doing that. The way my hosting provider works and the way WordPress works, it’s easier to send out email notifications and to tweet out my material on substack than it is on the blog. And I find it more work to maintain both the blog and the substack series.

If I do move to substack, I will stop the once-a-day posting habit and instead go with consolidated posts, probably a couple of days a week. My sense is that this would fit in more with the substack culture than small daily blog posts. Although I won’t adopt all forms of substack culture. I won’t turn into a frequent user of the exclamation point!

I will try to foster a good commenting environment on my substack pieces. I will keep the writing free and only charge for the in-person seminar (or whatever follows that in terms of in-person).

Reactions welcome.

Essay backup: Paradox of Profits, Part 1

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I’ve decided to back up essays I wrote for Medium here. My thoughts:

1. Medium is very poorly curated, and so what little worthwhile content that is on the site is invisible.

2. As a commenter pointed out a while ago, the Medium site could fail, which might cause my essays there to disappear. My guess is that Medium will survive at least through the 2020 election, but why take chances?

3. Scott Alexander has proven that long essays can work as blog posts.

Note that these essays are not well formatted. That is because I just did a copy-paste from medium and took the results. When I write new essays, as opposed to backups, I will just post them here and the format will be reasonable.

So here we go: Continue reading →

Re-starting Twitter Echo

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I have decided to re-start the practice of echoing my blog posts to Twitter. I still don’t participate in Twitter in any other fashion. If you direct a tweet at me, I probably will see it, but I will not respond.

Two reasons for re-starting.

1. I have been thinking lately that going off Twitter did not provide me with much benefit, other than letting me feel that I was making a statement.

2. I like that Jack Dorsey wants to refuse to take political ads on Twitter. I realize that this is a complicated issue. But I am hoping that, even though Dorsey does not intend it this way, that people see this as an indicator that social media and politics are a toxic mix.

I have to say that I don’t know how he is going to enforce it. If somebody pays for an ad campaign to de-fund Planned Parenthood, that might be construed as a political ad campaign. But if so, then wouldn’t a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood also be a political ad campaign?

So I understand that Facebook’s approach, of not censoring political ads, is easier to implement. But I hope that someday political discourse migrates to other forums that encourage reasonableness rather than posturing, snark, and anger.

Random interesting comments

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1.

One group of people who make good canaries are rich celebrities who were once more or less normal people but who can (1) suddenly get away with a lot of bad behaviors because the people around them give them a pass, (2) their wealth allows them to have access to and afford to buy all kinds of vice-enabling goods and services.

And so, for example, when it comes to propensity to overdose from drugs, we have Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, Michael Jackson, Prince, Lenny Bruce, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bruce Lee, Sid Vicious, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, Dee Ramone, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joan Rivers, Tom Petty (and his bass guitarist, Howie Epstein, also Beetles manager Brian Epstein, and do I need to mention Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth-enabled unleashed-by-norms behaviors … )

And this list goes on and on and on. And as soon as similar drugs become widely available, cheap, and popular, well, as the canaries showed up, “opioids crisis” and “deaths of despair”.

2.

I see there being two basic consumption baskets (this is an oversimplication of course): a “basic needs” basket (food, energy, clothing, etc) and a “aspirational” basket (healthcare, education, nice real estate). I think most people would take todays “basic needs” but the 1970s “aspirational” basket.

3.

It turns out that most people dislike politics, and when you talk to those people about “Republicans” and “Democrats” in survey questions, they don’t think about the average person who happens to vote for those candidates or have conservative or liberal opinions in general. They are thinking of those disagreeable ideologues and the loudmouth blowhards in their lives whose self-identification centers around their political beliefs and affiliations and who are obsessed with politics and indefatigably relentless in talking about it

4.

Ed Glaeser: “In 1983, the 75th percentile 25- to 34-year-old had $45,000 in home value. Thirty years later, that same group had only $21,000 of net housing wealth. Among 65- to 74-year-olds, by contrast, the 75th percentile household’s net housing wealth rose from $150,000 to $225,000 over that period—and the 95th percentile’s climbed from $427,000 to $700,000. Housing is the main store of wealth for most Americans, and regulations have clearly helped redistribute wealth from young home-buyers to old home-sellers.”

I think it’s fair to put the emphasis on illiberal policies and not the finitude of land.

Leaving Twitter

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If you want to keep up with this blog, you will have to read it or subscribe to it. I will no longer echo the posts to Twitter–assuming that I understand correctly the procedure for stopping the echo.

There are no incidents that cause me to do this. I will keep my account, but I won’t do anything with it. As it is, I never wrote a tweet. I never replied to any tweets. The only thing I ever did on Twitter was echo my blog posts to it.

This is something I have thought about doing for a long time, but I was lazy about it. For me personally, I perceive a trade-off between getting whatever additional following Twitter allows me vs. participating in a project that goes against everything I stand for in intellectual life. Twitter is about rapid reactions to fleeting stories, and I instead believe in trying to “think slow” in Daniel Kahneman’s terminology. Shutting off the echo to Twitter is a small statement of principle.

While I’m at it, let me update my personal “terms of service” on Facebook. I will never react to a political post there. I will not comment on, like, or share such a post. I ignore friend requests from people I do not know personally. I make liberal use of the “unfollow” option. If your posts don’t “spark joy” (a Marie Kondo phrase about de-cluttering), then expect to be unfollowed. Pretty much anything sparks more joy than political posts. I have more tolerance for cat videos.

I don’t tweet with discretion

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This is a public service announcement. Some people on Twitter expect me to engage with them on that service. That is not going to happen. I only tweet automatically, through blog posts. The blog posts on this site are echoed to Twitter in a way that only the blogging software understands. I have never issued a discretionary tweet, nor do I plan to in the future.

Twitter’s rapid-fire format is contrary to what I consider to be a process conducive to reasonable thinking. Instead, I am a big believer in slow-reaction commentary.

Most posts, including this one, are composed days in advance of when they are scheduled to appear. That slows me down in two ways.

1. It keeps me from being able to jump in right away to comment on today’s news. In fact, the Topic Du Jour often passes by before I can comment on it. That is a good thing. I save most of my thoughts for issues with more enduring significance.

2. When I do compose a post, I have time to reconsider it before it appears. Sometimes, new information on the topic comes in. Sometimes, I have second thoughts. I probably edit close to half of my posts, occasionally deleting one altogether, before they appear. As it is, I probably regret about 1 out of every 20 posts that appears. If I took away the time lag, it would be closer to 10 out of 20 that I wish I could take back.

design update

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Let me know what you think of the new design. The only substantive change so far is that I have added a way to subscribe to posts by email. Thanks to the reader who suggested this.

One of these days, I might get my entire web site into the 21st century.

UPDATE: I went back to the old design, until I can figure out how to configure a new one. I tried editing the .css file by hand, and it did nothing to change the font-size on blockquotes, which was large and annoying.

The Best Post-Election Piece So Far

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From Joshua Mitchell.

“Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.”

…When you start thinking in terms of management by global elites at the trans-state level and homeless selves at the substate level that seek, but never really find, comfort in their “identities,” the consequences are significant: Slow growth rates (propped up by debt-financing) and isolated citizens who lose interest in building a world together. Then of course, there’s the rampant crony-capitalism that arises when, in the name of eliminating “global risk” and providing various forms of “security,” the collusion between ever-growing state bureaucracies and behemoth global corporations creates a permanent class of winners and losers.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Read Mitchell’s whole piece, as well as the earlier essay to which he links. I find his thoughts congenial, because I agree that the election pitted cosmopolitan vs. anti-cosmopolitan.

However, this is far from the last word. In fact, I would say that the longer you take to react to news, the better off you are. In general, I like to schedule my posts several days in advance. (This one is being drafted 3 days before it is scheduled to appear.) That gives me time to revise or delete a post before it appears. You may have noticed that when stock futures plummeted the night of the election, Paul Krugman predicted that the plunge would be permanent. I bet he wishes he had scheduled that post for a few days later, in which case he could have deleted it before it became public. In fact, I rarely have to revise or delete, because scheduling a post in advance forces me to be less reactive and to think ahead.

A lot of social media lacks the “schedule in advance” feature. I don’t think Twitter has it (I only use Twitter automatically, to announce blog posts, so I do not know how Twitter actually works.) Facebook does not have it. Software for posting comments does not have it. (If you like to comment on this blog, feel free to hold back for a few days. Old comments on old posts show up for me to read just as well as fresh comments on fresh posts.)

Thus, for the most part, social media leads people to be reactive and trigger-happy, as opposed to reflective and sober. It is something that one has to be aware of and push back against.

The Case for Manners

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Henry Hazlitt wrote,

Too often moral codes, especially those still largely attached to religious roots, are ascetic and grim. Codes of manners, on the other hand, usually require us to be at least outwardly cheerful, agreeable, gracious, convivial—in short, a contagious source of cheer to others.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

I think that codes of manners also can be used to convey respect for others. You are telling people, including strangers, that you conduct yourself with them in mind.

I believe that restraint in the use of four-letter words used to serve this purpose, and it could once again serve this purpose. This puts me at odds with my fellow Baby Boomers and those who came after.

Ideology and Keynesian Economics

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Scott Sumner posts on the controversy, which was recently re-ignited by what I thought was a reasonable post by Russ Roberts. My thoughts.

1. There is a correlation between belief in Keynesian economics and preference for a larger government. Economists who advocate for higher government spending to fight recessions also tend to argue at other times either to increase or not reduce every non-military component of government spending.

2. Nonetheless, those economists who believe in Keynesian economics and generally support higher government spending usually will insist that they are not ideological. In their view, they are merely scientists, who are free from confirmation bias.

3. Any online discussion that employs the term “Keynesian economics,” “macroeconomic facts,” or “Paul Krugman” will, with probability one, be un-constructive and uncharitable.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Internet is making us stupid politically. On the Internet, there is an impulse to react immediately to political comments, which means engaging your emotions rather than any self-critical reasoning. There is an impulse to be uncharitable to those with whom you disagree. Some of my responses:

1. I try to schedule blog posts at least a day in advance. My goal is to react less to the “threat” posed by political disagreement.

2. I look for opportunities to challenge the views of other libertarians, although not as often as Tyler does.

3. Recently, I made a determination to avoid commenting on political issues on Facebook. In fact, I would love an app that filters out all political posts on Facebook. I prefer even the pointless cute animal posts. But I mostly just like pictures and personal status updates of friends’ weddings, travel, anniversaries, etc. At some point I may have to sort through and unfriend the folks who only post on politics.