Category Archives: books and book reviews

Falling back on consequentialism

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In a review of a book by Dan Moller, I write,

In appealing to our moral intuition against committing armed robbery, has Moller found a philosophical trump card that libertarians can play against their opponents? I am doubtful. In fact, in the game of intellectual bridge, I would suggest that moral intuition is the wrong suit for libertarians to bid.

I find the consequentialist case for libertarianism more solid than the moral intuitionist case. And in the review I point out that Moller has to fall back on consequentialist arguments.

Why we tend to be negative and paranoid

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Michael Shermer writes,

Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman were the ones who originally coined the term negativity bias to describe this asymmetry. “Negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events,”

. . .We tend to focus on the constellation of threats as signifying some systematic program aimed at doing us harm. This is a manifestation of what I call “agenticity”—our tendency to infuse patterns (especially patterns of threat or harm) with meaning intention and agency. And so we imagine that disconnected misfortunes are commonly directed by intentional agents, sometimes operating invisibly. Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, governments, religious officials and big corporations all have played this role in conspiracist lore (and, in the case of the latter three entries, real life, too, it must be conceded). Taken together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of conspiratorial cognition.

There are many other paragraphs in the essay that I wanted to excerpt.

We automatically search for patterns and for stories–preferably involving supposedly culpable individuals–to explain those patterns. Recall that Ed Leamer’s macroeconomic textbook is titled Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories. Blaming the Fed is the simplest conspiracy-theory type explanation, which I try to resist.

Blaming every weather event on climate change would be another example.

On deaths of despair

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Philip N. Cohen writes (pdf download),

This paper uses complete death certificate data from the Mortality Multiple Cause Files with American Community Survey data to examine age-specific mortality rates for married and non-married people from 2007 to 2017. The overall rise in White mortality is limited almost exclusively to those who are not married, for men and women. . . .Analysis by education level shows death rates have risen most for Whites with the lowest education, but have also increased for those with high school or some college.

This is an important finding. I was sent an advance galley of Deaths of Despair, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, due out in March. I wonder if they will want to revisit the causal narrative that they tell, which strongly emphasizes economic factors, based on the link between (low) education and high mortality rates. Cohen writes,

If White mortality increases are concentrated among people with low levels of education, for whom marriage has become rarer, it’s possible the increased White mortality among single people could reflect the greater share of that group with low education. However, Figure 3 suggests this is not the whole story. . .it appears the overall White marriage mortality ratio is driven both by increasing death rates for everyone at the lowest levels of education, and by increasing marriage disparities at higher levels of education.

Best of times, worst of times

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A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at the University of Indiana to students and some faculty in a graduate program in public policy. As usual, the best part was the Q&A, and one of the more challenging questions was why this feels like a bad time in terms of the political climate even though it seems to be a good time in terms of economic indicators. Some possible answers:

1. People evaluate the economic results of the political system by asking “What have you done for me lately?” with an emphasis on “me” and “lately.” So Americans don’t feel better because hundreds of millions of people in India and China are climbing out of poverty. And we don’t say that we are really grateful to be living in a world with antibiotics, indoor plumbing, air travel, and the Internet.

2. Yuval Levin would say that we have gained affluence but become unmoored. That is, people derive meaning from their participation in institutions, including marriage, religion, membership in professions, and work in organizations. Institutions give us roles, responsibilities, obligations, and guides to behavior. But nowadays, rather than treating institutions as a set of customs and obligations that we ought to follow, we either exit from institutions or treat them as platforms for promoting our individual “brands.” (Note that this is a very terse and incomplete description of Levin’s thesis in A Time to Build. I continue to strongly recommend the whole book when it becomes available.)

Martin Gurri (and Yuval Levin) watch

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The NYT reports,

In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

This is one of the explanations for the declining success rate of mass protests, which is the topic of the article. Martin Gurri would say that today’s public is ready to say what it is against but unable to articulate what it is for.

Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build (alas, not available until next year), says that social media accentuate the decline of formative institutions and the rise of performative behavior. Think of the demonstrations of yesteryear as organized by people who knew what they wanted. Think of today’s demonstrations as drawing people who want to be seen demonstrating. Note that the Hong Kong protest does not have to be old school to have my sympathies.

Bari Weiss and Yuval Levin on building

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Coincidentally, I picked up at about the same time their latest books.

Bari Weiss’ is How to Fight Anti-Semitism. On p. 167, she writes,

I suddenly saw all of the debates and hand-wringing inside the Jewish community about the latest boycott of Israeli hummus at the local food co-op, or the right response to Israeli Apartheid Week, or the proper approach to the appearance of a swastika on campus. . .as not just a waste of our precious time but a betrayal of what we were meant to do and be. I began to realize that building was better than begging, affirming better than adjuring. Not just better strategically, but better for Jew emotionally and intellectually and spiritually.

She cites this essay by Ze’ev Maghen, which I recommend.

Levin’s is A Time to Build, and it will not come out until next January. He sent me an advance copy. In a Martin Gurri world (my terminology), he argues that we need to work to build up institutions. p. 41:

Our challenge is less to calm the forces that are pelting our society than to reinforce the structures that hold it together. That calls for a spirit of building and rebuilding, more than of tearing down. It calls for approaching broken institutions with a disposition to repair so as to make them better versions of themselves.

Out of context, that probably sounds bland. Hardly a passage that would entice you. But the book is actually a must-read, with a lot for you to sink your teeth into. If I count it as 2019, it will make my list of best books of the year.

Skilled workers + democracy = good government?

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My latest essay is on a book by Torben Iversen and David Soskice that makes such a case.

With both labor and capital committed to specific locations in order to take advantage of skill clusters, there is a significant share of the population that has an interest in electing a government effective at providing public goods. In A.O. Hirschman’s terms, these citizens cannot exit their jurisdictions. They therefore have an incentive to use “voice” in a democratic system. They make up a constituency that will demand education and other public goods and that will reward politicians who enact economic policies that foster competition and growth.

I find this too much of a Pollyanna story, and so my conclusion raises doubts.