Category Archives: books and book reviews

Books on the future of labor

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I made a list, including

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, 1995. In this science fiction novel, Stephenson depicts a world in which nanotechnology, as described in Eric Drexler’s monograph “Engines of Creation,” has matured. As a result, no one lives in hardship. Any standard product can be made cheaply by a “matter compiler,” what we would now think of as a 3D printer with superlative capabilities. Machines have substituted for labor to the point where a lower class, called “thetes,” enjoys a coarse consumer lifestyle without having to work. An upper class, called “Vickies,” has skills that complement the machines, and this elite indulges in a taste for old-fashioned hand-crafted goods.

21st-century classic books?

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EconJournalWatch asked contributors to name works published so far in this century that will still be valuable to read in 2050. I don’t think I could possibly agree with most of the selections. I contributed my own, including this one:

Ray Kurzweil, 2005, The Singularity Is Near. If Kurzweil’s extrapolations are correct, then the reader in 2050 will be a transhuman cyborg, who probably will find the rest of this list trivial. If instead the human race remains much as it is in 2020, then the reader should be curious to figure out “what went wrong.”

Miscellaneous: political posturing; WEIRD families; Turchin on turbulence

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I wanted to note these links for future reference.

1. A classic election-year post of mine from 2008 that a Twitter user chose to highlight recently. An excerpt:

no politician will figure out a way to bring the bottom half of America’s children up to the level where they can benefit from a college education.

2. Alex Mackiel’s unsatisfyingly brief review of the WEIRD Henrich book. And an essay by Robert Henderson that is interesting to read in light of Henrich’s view of the importance of Christian family values in seeding the emergence of liberal society. Henderson writes,

American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods. What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.)

3. Jack A. Goldstone and Peter Turchin claim to have predicted the current political turbulence.

The WEIRD Henrich book

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Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World is now out. Here is one review. I am about half way through, and I am likely to rate the book as highly as The Secret of Our Success, with little overlap between the two.

His main claim is that using statistical analysis, he and his colleagues have shown that: (a) where the Christian church has its deepest roots, people are less strongly embedded in kin-based clans, with cousin marriage being a strong component of the clan society; and (b) where clan structures have broken down, individualism and what we might call the psychology of the liberal enlightenment are more likely to have emerged.

I wrote about some of his research here.

I will want to go back and re-read MacFarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism (cited by Henrich but seemingly not much discussed, and Mark Weiner’s Rule of the Clan, also cited but seemingly not discussed. I reviewed Weiner here.

Five books on macroeconomics

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In response to a list of five conventional macroeconomics textbooks, I compiled my own list of books to read on macroeconomics. They won’t necessarily cover what’s on the exam in a typical course, but they will help you become learned on the topic.

An excerpt from my short essay:

The late Charles Kindleberger was an economic historian, and I believe a historian’s perspective is crucial for looking at macroeconomics. After all, there are no repeatable experiments in macroeconomics, only historical episodes. Kindleberger looks at the most dramatic episodes in history, using the framework of financial instability developed by Hyman Minsky. Kindleberger is a better expositor than Minsky. Also, Kindleberger emphasizes the phenomenon of “displacement,” in which a sudden change in world conditions, brought about by a major new discovery or the outcome of a war, triggers a dangerous mania. My own thinking about macroeconomics is a combination of Kindleberger-Minsky and Fischer Black (below).

Thoughts on cancel culture

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1. Tyler Cowen writes,

So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.

In fact, the increase in bias at the NYT and WAPO may be more than offset by increased attention paid to podcasters like Bret Weinstein or Ben Shapiro. The intent to introduce “anti-racism” curriculum into schools may be more than offset by the way that the virus is creating a situation that lowers the status of school teachers among parents.

2. John McWhorter writes,

people left-of-center [are] wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the “circular firing squad” of the left: It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

Here is where I think Pluckrose and Lindsay have the explanation, in Cynical Theories. The liberal philosophy that these older left-of-center academics share is incommensurate with what I would call the “folk” postmodernism of the younger leftists.

3. I think that there is at least a 30 percent chance that cancel culture has already peaked. The mobs, whether on Twitter, on campus, or in the streets, are engaged in bullying and making dominance moves, which create fear but also resentment. Academic administrators and progressive mayors are Neville Chamberlains, and I sense that an increasing number of people want to see a more Churchillian approach.

A few more thoughts on Cynical Theories

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Following up on this post.

1. Various academics are rushing to judge PL harshly because they “get ____ wrong,” where ____ is some set of philosophers. Yet I would say that as a model to explain and predict the rhetoric and behavior of the social justice movement, PL works well. Consider these out-of-sample events:

–the attacks on statues. PL had written,

The drives to decolonize everything from hair to English literature curricula, to tear down paintings and smash statues. . .

–the Smithsonian whiteness chart.

–the new book In Defense of Looting.

How do we reconcile the explanatory power of the model with the view that they get ____ wrong?

a) Perhaps PL did not get ____ so wrong after all.

b) Perhaps although PL get ____ wrong, subsequent academic developments in what PL call “applied post-Modernism” and “reified post-Modernism” followed that same path.

c) Perhaps PL also get the subsequent academic history wrong, but the ideas that filtered down to college administrators, public school curriculum writers, and others in high-leverage positions (including the people responsible for the three events noted above) followed the path that PL describe.

2. Another line of criticism is to suggest other factors that might account for the rise of Social Justice ideology among these bureaucrats. There is Jonathan Haidt’s psychoanalysis. Haidt’s view of social media’s psychological effects might suggest that the bureaucrats are responding to what young constituents want. The role of the demand side is also stressed by commenter John Alcorn. But I don’t think that the explanation for the appearance of Social Justice curricula in public schools is that the children and parents are clamoring for it. And I suspect that even at colleges there is much more energy on the supply side than on the demand side.

I am also receptive to the view that the Social Justice movement helps satisfy a human need for religious belonging.
But attempts at psychoanalysis do not provide us with cognitive empathy. That is, we need to take people’s ideas as ideas, and to try to explore how those ideas might make sense to the people who hold them.

I think that PL succeed in offering a perspective on Social Justice that helps us achieve cognitive empathy. If PL’s critics can come up with a perspective that provides even better cognitive empathy, more power to them.

3. I am talking about cognitive empathy with the movers and shakers in the movement, not with the most esteemed academics. I think that any time you want to connect a popular movement to a philosophical idea, you have to deal with the fact that hardly anyone reads philosophers. How many of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge had read John Locke? How many of Lenin’s Bolsheviks had read Karl Marx? In a sense, the ideas that matter are the ones in the heads of ordinary people that never get written down.

In the case of Social Justice, the ideas in the heads of college administrators, public school curriculum writers, corporate HR departments and so on probably do get expressed in written form. Perhaps sometimes they cite academic works. It might be fruitful to collect some of this material and analyze it. Not having done so, my guess is that such material would tend to conform to PL’s characterization (or caricature) of post-Modernism as it has evolved.

I doubt that the Social Justice adherents in influential positions could describe the twists and turns in post-Modernism of the last several decades. They themselves could not tell you the links, if any, between the policies that they promulgate and the philosophy of Derrida or Foucault. But that does not negate the PL project.

You might say that the Social Justice adherents are to academic philosophy what Milton Friedman’s billiard player is to physics. They are acting “as if” they had followed the intellectual path described by PL, and that is why the model in their book is so useful.

The gist of Cynical Theories

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I think that there is a natural tendency for professional philosophers to look at the book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay from the standpoint of how well it captures a philosophical position that the reviewer has studied extensively. That is not how I evaluate the book. I want the book to help me understand what you might call the “folk beliefs” that non-philosophers distilled from the academics.

By analogy, suppose somebody were to attempt a history of Keynesian economics with a goal of understanding how Keynesian economic policy came to be conducted. It is not so important to get “what Keynes really meant” (in fact, that is an endlessly debatable topic) or to provide a definitive account of the various Keynesian models that appeared in academic journals. Instead, what is important is to explain how the “folk Keynesianism” of journalists and political leaders developed and evolved.

I take the view that it is unlikely that the arcane academics have much direct cultural influence. So arguing with Pluckrose and Lindsay (PL) about their analysis of the arcane academics is beside the point.

The people who are in a position to directly influence the culture are those who hold high-leverage positions in our society. They include college administrators who write policies and implement training programs, public school curriculum writers, corporate human resource departments, journalists, and career officials in government. I believe that one can be confident that PL are accurately characterizing the “folk ideology” of these influential bureaucrats. That “folk ideology” seems plausibly derived from some of the academic philosophy that PL discuss, even if there is room to quibble with the treatment of academic philosophy in PL–and there is always room to quibble with someone’s treatment of any school of philosophy.

For me, Cynical Theories does not stand or fall on the quality of it scholarly interpretations of Foucault, Derrida, or subsequent philosophers. It stands or falls on its ability to explain and predict the rhetoric, modes of argument, and behavior of the bureaucrats who employ what PL refer to as Theory with a capital T.

Here is what I see as the gist of PL’s claims:

1. Liberalism and Theory are incommensurate. Liberalism presumes that we should pursue truth objectively, using logical deductions and empirical observations. From the liberal perspective, some of the propositions held by Theorists, concerning sex for example, are false and even ridiculous. Theory presumes that truths are contingent on identity, so that a white male may hold to a different “truth” than a black female. From the Theory perspective, liberal concepts of logic and empiricism are primarily tools used to perpetuate the privileged in a power structure. They are not necessary or sufficient for the pursuit of truth.

2. Theory developed in three phases. I think of these as razing a village, designing a new housing development, and building a new housing development.

3. The first phase was post-modernism. According to PL, post-modernism developed two principles, a knowledge principle of radical skepticism that objective knowledge or truth is attainable, because knowledge is culturally constructed; and a political principle that society can be viewed in terms of power and hierarchies, and these culturally construct knowledge.

4. The second phase PL call “applied post-modernism.” This looked into specific topics, including colonialism, race, and gender, and looked at how the language and cultural practices in these areas could be interpreted as reflecting and protecting power structures.

5. The third phase PL call “reified post-modernism.” That means taking the ideas into the real world and trying to do something about the power structures. That is what all of the bureaucrats are doing. But one irony that the book emphasizes is that the first phase declared that there was no certainty in knowledge, but the final phase treats the analysis of power based on identity groups as if it were absolute Truth. In terms of my metaphor, when the original village was razed, it was with the view that nothing could stand up. But the new housing development discards that extreme skepticism (although it still does not think that the old village has any legitimacy).

Let me reiterate my first point. The rhetorical defenses of Theory are impregnable to the attempts by liberalism to appeal to what it considers to be reason. To put it starkly, the Theorists refuse to be reasoned with. They would say that someone like me is merely trying to uphold privilege, either consciously or otherwise.

Liberalism seeks to deal with dissent by listening to it, debating it, and co-opting it. But Theory does not have those mechanisms. Silencing dissent is its modus operandi, one might even say its mission. Regular readers know that I describe it as the religion that persecutes heretics. Left-leaning liberals have a hard time processing the threat that this represents. They would much rather focus on the threat that they perceive comes from Donald Trump.