Category Archives: books and book reviews

On Garett Jones’ latest book

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I review 10 % Less Democracy.

At a time of populist ascendance, his theme is bracingly countercultural.

I suggested that the editors that we might want to allude to the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as making the book particularly timely, but they demurred.

In the end, I find providing checks on the voters to be the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Once you get lots of Fear Of Others’ Liberty, the FOOLs are all rooting for the exercise of government authority. I doesn’t matter whether you label it “the will of the people,” “technocratic independence,” or “state capacity,” the bottle is still filled with poison.

On Peter Zeihan’s latest book

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It is called Disunited Nations. From the introduction:

What’s been different in recent decades is that geography has been suspended somewhat, enabling deep global economic interconnections. We’ve come to see those connections as a great strength; they are turning into weakness before our very eyes.

Of course, those words were written even before the media discovered the term “coronavirus.” UPDATE: Today, Zeihan posted his take on the coronavirus, and it is exactly what a reader of his book would expect.

Much later in the book, Zeihan writes,

On the farm, we marry young, we work young, and die young. In the city, we marry old, work old, and die old.

In explaining the decline in family size, he argues that industrialization/urbanization is the main cause. Adults who run family businesses, especially farms, usually value children. So a more rural society will have more children. Furthermore, cities are very crowded. Because living space is expensive, an urban society will have fewer children.

One virtue of this explanation for declining family size is that it applies to countries that did not go through the American sexual revolution but still have experienced declining family size as they urbanized. Also, it occurs to me that perhaps the Baby Boom can be attributed in part to the way that suburbs relieved the crowding of cities.

It makes me wonder more generally about the social effects of a shift from family businesses to corporations. What sort of cultural changes result from that? Have other countries succeeded in protecting family businesses, and if so, has this helped maintain birth rates? I suspect that the answer is “no.”

On Ross Douthat’s latest book

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I have finished my first pass through The Decadent Society. I had a hard time following the last quarter of the book, so I may have to re-read it. These are my current impressions:

On the plus side:

1. Many of his sentences and phrases sparkle, e.g. “roving tent-revivalism of TED talks” (p. 10)

2. Many of the data points that he cites are fascinating, e.g. that economic growth accounted for 92 percent of the increase in share prices from 1952 to 1988, but subsequently economic growth accounted for just 24 percent of the increase in share prices. Much of the remainder comes from “a reallocation of rents to shareholders,” according to a paper by Daniel L. Greenwald and others.

Note that I had to search for the paper in Google Scholar, as Decadent Society includes no footnotes or endnotes. Fortunately, Douthat mentioned the title of the paper (he does not mention the authors); elsewhere, he cites literature without giving a clue about where to find it.

On the minus side, I found myself troubled by questions that Douthat bypasses. One question I have is whether technology is moving too rapidly or too slowly.

Are self-driving cars not prevalent because (a) the technology is not up to expectations or (b) the culture is too resistant? I would argue that it is the latter. If we had the spirit that we had 120 years ago, self-driving cars would be on every road. If 120 years ago the culture had been what it is today, we would still be mostly using horses. Too many of us are middle-aged and old, and hence novelty-averse; and too many of the middle-aged and old do not have prospects for grandchildren, and that makes people lose interest in the future.

Folks like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen would say that technology is moving too slowly, and we are missing out on economic progress that otherwise might be obtained. On the other side, one could argue that technology is moving too quickly relative to our culture’s ability to adapt, and that is why we are seeing so much wealth inequality, populist discontent, and political derangement. Douthat wants to include both the too-rapid and too-slow theses under “decadence.”

Another instance where I wanted deeper thinking is when Douthat tries to draw out implications from a UN projection that Africa’s population will reach four and a half billion by the turn of the next century. He sees this leading to a large migration from Africa to an otherwise depopulating Europe. But first I would like to see the numbers compared–Douthat sees hundreds of millions of Africans migrating, but is the declining birth rate in Europe sufficient to provide space for hundreds of millions?

Also, I wonder how Africa manages to get to four billion without running into Malthusian constraints. Right now, they certainly don’t have the productive capacity to do it. And it’s not as if the developed world is going to be able to spare the output to support billions of Africans, when our dependency ratios will already be straining the ability of working people to support pensioners. I have difficulty believing a demographic projection that seems to require billions of people living in cities with no food.

On Mary Eberstadt’s latest book

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In a review of Primal Screams, I wrote,

When a tribe is formed out of families, members feel secure in their status. One’s identity is established as a father, mother, sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent.

In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another. Eberstadt suggests that under such circumstances:

… some people, deprived of recognition in the traditional ways, will regress to a state in which their demand for recognition becomes ever more insistent and childlike. This brings us to one of the most revealing features of identity politics: its infantilized expression and vernacular.

Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment. I can imagine Eberstadt reading the David Brooks essay to which I referred last week and coming out with her own primal scream.

Russ Roberts and Yuval Levin

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They discuss Levin’s A Time to Build in a podcast. Levin says,

I think when reporters complain about Donald Trump–as they rightly do, in a lot of ways–they should think about whether what Trump is doing relative to what the Presidency is supposed to be isn’t very similar to what a lot of political reporters are doing relative to what journalism is supposed to be. They are engaging in a kind of indulgent performative version of the real thing that makes the real thing much harder to do.

There is a lot of interesting material here. I recommend the whole podcast.

Thoughts on social epistemology

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Quentin Skinner wrote,

The golden rule is that, however bizarre the beliefs we are studying may seem to be, we must begin by trying to make the agents who accepted them appear as rational as possible.

Skinner’s golden rule of interpretive charity is cited by Jeffrey Friedman in Power Without Knowledge, a book that I am still not recommending.

I could phrase Skinner’s golden rule as, “Explain the beliefs of others the way that you would explain your own beliefs.” Because introspection leads me to find that my own beliefs are not based on a moral or mental defect, then I should not attribute your differing beliefs to a mental or moral defect.

So how to deal with disagreement? For example, I believe it is ok to eat meat, but other people disagree. I believe that what the Fed can control does not have much effect on the economy, but other people disagree.

My explanation for disagreement that is golden-rule compatible is that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We probably start out by trusting our parents. We proceed to trust teachers. At some point, we develop a set of friends and peers that we trust. We develop trust in certain authors. We may trust celebrities, including business and political celebrities. Often, we distinguish domains–I trust my doctor’s opinion on upper respiratory infections, but not on health care reform.

From people we trust, we learn both what to think and how to think. When I don’t want to go to the trouble of working something out for myself, I let other people tell me what to think. I let my dentist tell me that I have a cavity and what I should have him do about it. But when I want to work out something for myself, I am using what I learned from other people about how to think.

Some implications of this hypothesis:

1. You and I have different beliefs in large part because over the course of our lives we have encountered different people who influenced what and how we think. Somewhere along the way, some thoughts were seeded into your brain that lead you to hold a point of view that I am convinced is wrong.

2, When you express a point of view that differs from mine, unless you change my mind, my trust in you is going to fall. If you contradict a view that I hold strongly, then my trust in you will fall really far. I think that this may explain the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning.” When you show me a study that supports my beliefs, I do not have to worry about whether I trust the methods used in the study. But when you show me a study that contradicts my beliefs, I have to either change my mind or find something wrong with the study. So I look more closely at the methods, probing for flaws. If I do find flaws, my trust in the study’s authors falls by a lot.

3, To change someone’s mind, you have to earn their trust. It seems that we rarely do this, and in fact we rarely try to do this.

4. What sorts of people earn our trust? In my case, I believe that my father set the tone with his First Iron Law of Social Science, “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” All of my life, I have been inclined to trust people who look at multiple sides of an issue and who are able to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. But many others seem to prefer to trust those who display high confidence. Like Harry Truman, many people long for the the one-handed economist.

Did you two visit the same future?

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Ross Douthat writes,

the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

Today is the publication date for Douthat’s The Decadent Society. So by the time you read this, I should have read some the book.

Also sharing Douthat’s viewpoint is the blogger It’s Only Chemo. Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who we know is of a similar persuasion.

Earlier in the month, there appeared The Future is Faster than you Think by Peter S. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which takes the opposite position. They talk about what has almost arrived with excitement, not with irony. They sound to me like venture capitalists who believe every pitch they’ve ever heard.

I fall somewhere in between, but I lean more toward Diamandis and Kotler.

The essay on the null hypothesis and Charles Murray

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I am posting it below, because so many readers complained about Thinkspot. It is true that Thinkspot is not in a satisfying state as is. Please comment only the essay. I will put up a separate post on the issues with Thinkspot.

1.   If the shared environment explains little of the variance in cognitive repertoires, and
2.   If the only environmental factors that can be affected by outside interventions are part of the shared environment,
3.   Then outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on cognitive repertoires.
–Charles Murray, Human Diversity, Chapter 13.

As an example of an outside intervention, consider reading to pre-school children.   Researchers have observed that pre-school children who have been read to a great deal by their parents subsequently perform better in school than students who have not been read to as much.
 
But this relationship is not necessarily causal.   It could be that the better school performance is due to inherited characteristics that are correlated with how much reading the parents do to their pre-school children.   In order to establish causality, one would have to conduct an experiment in which children are randomly selected into a control group that receives little reading and a treatment group that receives a lot of reading.   
 
If such an experiment were conducted, my prediction is that the effects on the treatment group would be.
 
–small to begin with.
–fade out completely within a few years, meaning that by, say, fourth grade, the treatment group and the control group show no difference.
–to the extent that the effects were non-zero and did not fade out, the results would fail to replicate in a subsequent experiment.
 
I call this prediction The Null Hypothesis, borrowing the statistical term for “no effect of the treatment.”   My reading of the literature on educational treatments is that the null hypothesis essentially always holds.   When a treatment is rigorously tested, using experimental methods, its effects are small, fade-out is complete, and/or the results fail to replicate.
 
Why does the null hypothesis hold for educational treatments (and, incidentally, for other policy treatments, such as the effect of job training programs on subsequent employment or the effect of health insurance on health outcomes)?  Consider four factors that affect human outcomes:.
 
1.   Overall cultural environment.
2.   Genetic inheritance.
3.   Gestational variation.
4.   Specific environmental interventions.
 
I believe that I have presented these in order of importance.  
 
The overall cultural environment, or “milieu” as Murray calls it, clearly matters.   If you could transport one of your children to a different historical period or to a totally different society, then you can be sure that the child’s outcomes will be affected. The Flynn Effect, in which average IQ changes across generations, is indicative of the importance of the cultural environment.   I think it only makes sense to talk about variations of the other three factors within a given environment, such as the affluent countries in the 21st century.
 
The significance of genetic inheritance is what Murray highlights.     The evidence from twin studies is persuasive in that regard.
 
Murray does not discuss gestational variation, but Kevin Mitchell’s Innate highlights its importance.   Mitchell argues that some of the variation between identical twins in cognitive repertoires is due to mutations and other accidents that occur as the fetal brain forms.  
 
In twin studies that account for variation as the sum of genetic variation and variation in the “shared environment,” the innate gestational variation tends to be misleadingly attributed to the “shared environment” component.   I believe that this leads people to be more optimistic about the potential for specific interventions than is warranted.
 
In my view, once we have accounted for the differences created by the overall cultural environment, genetic inheritance, and gestational variation, there is very little room for specific interventions to make a difference.   In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris pointed to evidence that parental behavior makes little difference in children’s outcomes.   If the people who are most heavily involved in raising children make little difference, then what is the likelihood that, say, a particular elementary school teacher or a specific schooling method will make a difference?
 
I know that there are studies that purport to find exceptions to the Null Hypothesis.   Such studies receive wide acclaim.   But these tend to be one-off results that do not replicate.
 
I plan to write subsequently on points where my view differs from Murray’s.   But on the Null Hypothesis, my views are coherent with his.  

Essay on Charles Murray and the Null Hypothesis

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I put it up on Thinkspot, which is sort of like Medium, but without all the lefty drivel. Of course, Thinkspot could easily go under. The essay relates the Null Hypothesis to Charles Murray’s new book.

To gain access to Thinkspot, you have to first go here: https://www.ts.today/ and sign up as a beta user. Let me know how that process goes.

All I know about Thinkspot is that Jordan Peterson was involved in starting it. The revenue model for now appears to be not to charge readers but to charge writers a “pay what you will” amount, initially suggested at $48 a year.

Andrew Sullivan on Klein and Caldwell

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Sullivan writes,

Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.

He is referring to Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. He compares and contrasts it with Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Although both books might seem to be in my wheelhouse, I am not planning to read either one. Instead, I am inclined to rely on what others say about them.

Sullivan’s peroration:

I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

What strikes me is that for all of the talk about how race affects less-educated white voters, actual race relations seem most tense on college campuses. That is where change appears to require a miracle.

But suppose that black college students were to join the backlash against the social justice movement. Imagine a number of them saying, “We don’t need this patronizing condescension. It isn’t helping. We’re strong enough to do without it. From now on, treat us as individuals.”

I’m not predicting that black students will do that, nor am I saying that they should. But if black students were to join the backlash, that would strike a severe blow to the social justice movement.